Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  Almost the last place to learn of the gold discovery was the American East. Few spots on earth were farther from New York than San Francisco in 1848, in terms of the time required to travel from one to the other. Fifteen thousand miles by sea, around Cape Horn, or three thousand miles overland—several months either way. Not till the autumn of 1848 did word of the gold discovery arrive on the East Coast. Appearing amid the campaign to replace James Polk, who had declined to seek reelection, it initially drew less than the full attention of the nation’s leading newspapers. “We have received some late and interesting intelligence from California,” the New York Herald reported in a one-paragraph squib on the inside pages on September 15. “It relates to the important discovery of a very valuable gold mine. We have received a specimen of the gold.” But the paper declined to say more. “Owing to the crowded state of our columns, we are obliged to omit our correspondence.”

  Yet this was enough to titillate readers. Or perhaps James Gordon Bennett, the Herald’s editor, feared being scooped by his competitors. In any event, two days later he ran the letter. Bennett’s correspondent warned that his report would be hard to credit. “Were I a New Yorker, instead of a Californian, I would throw aside your paper and exclaim, Bennett had better fill his paper with, at least, probable tales and stories, and not such outrageous fictions of rivers flowing with gold.” Yet the reporter knew whereof he spoke. “This writer, among others, has visited the golden country, this Placer”—the Spanish name for the diggings—“in comparison to which the famous El Dorado is but a sand bank.” The gold almost leaped into the miners’ pockets. “There are cases of over a hundred dollars being obtained in a day from the work of one man.” (In the East at this time, a manual worker was lucky to make five hundred dollars in a year.) “It requires no skill. The workman takes any spot of ground or bank he fancies, sticks in his pick or shovel at random, fills his basin, makes for the water, and soon sees the glittering results of his labor.” There appeared to be no end to the gold-laden ore. “We are already aware of its being found over a space of one hundred miles in length, and but little of the Sacramento Valley has been explored.”

  Other papers picked up the story, each competing to outdo the others in eye-catching detail. The East soon thrummed with facts and surmises about America’s new golden West. In December, James Polk put the government’s seal of approval on the stories. “The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service who have visited the mineral district and derived the facts which they detail from personal observation,” the president declared.

  POLK’S ANNOUNCEMENT ADDED ARMIES TO THE RANKS OF those already rushing to California. In every state young men dissatisfied with their present circumstances considered joining the race to California, where an ordinary fellow could earn as much in a summer as he might make in a decade in the East. Only a small portion of those who weighed the venture actually went, but they totaled perhaps eighty thousand in 1849, besides those who traveled from other countries to California. The great majority of the argonauts, as they styled themselves, were men; most intended to fill their pockets with California gold and return whence they had come, now able to buy the farm, the shop, the house of which they had dreamed.

  Some traveled by sea, either by sailing ship around South America or, for the better-heeled, by the steamships that began plying the sea lanes from the East Coast to Panama and from Panama to San Francisco, with a land leg across the isthmus between. But the majority followed the lead of the emigrants to Oregon and traveled by horse, wagon and foot. The California Trail was simply the Oregon Trail to a fork west of Wyoming’s South Pass; from there it angled southwest across the northern parts of what would become Utah and Nevada before ascending the eastern scarp of the Sierra Nevada north of Lake Tahoe and descending the western slope to Sacramento.

  The forty-niners benefited from the travel experience of the earlier emigrants, but they brought problems of their own. The first was their haste. No one knew how much gold there was in California, but no one wanted to arrive after the easy pickings were gone, or after the government changed the free-for-all rules under which it could be gathered. Even more than Oregon-bound emigrants like Quinn Thornton and his wife, who fell for Jesse Applegate’s promise of a shortcut and nearly paid for it with their lives, the argonauts were susceptible to the temptation to try new routes that might save miles and time. Some did pay the ultimate price, dying of thirst or of disease brought on by exposure and fatigue. Death Valley earned its name when a party of forty-niners got lost. Only one of that group actually died there, but the rest had resigned themselves to the same fate before being rescued on the verge of expiration.

  The second new challenge was the snow of the Sierra Nevada. The mountain passes of the Sierra were much higher than those of the Cascades on the route to Oregon, and the snow could trap laggard travelers, as the Donner party discovered in 1846. George Donner had quieted his wife’s fears on separating from Quinn Thornton’s Oregon train near South Pass by saying that the Hastings cutoff would get them to California in no time. And as the Thorntons stumbled through the mountains of southern Oregon and cursed Jesse Applegate for nearly killing them, they might have wished they had gone with the Donners. Only later did they discover the awful truth.

  The Hastings route took the Donner party over the Wasatch Mountains and across the Great Salt Lake Desert. It was shorter in distance than the existing trail to California, but the ridges, boulders, arroyos and barrens it threw in the travelers’ way made it longer in time. Not until late October did they reach the eastern rampart of the Sierra Nevada. Snow fell sooner that year than usual, and more heavily. The travelers couldn’t usefully turn around, for their provisions were short and nothing behind them afforded a prospect of replenishment. They couldn’t go forward, for the drifts grew deeper by the day. They made camp to wait out the winter.

  As the snow continued to fall, and the provisions dwindled and vanished, the marooned travelers descended into the horrors of starvation. They ate their animals, including their dogs. They gnawed on shoes, belts and anything else of animal origin they could lay hands on. Some died, and the living ate the flesh of the dead. By the time relief arrived in the spring, the camp was strewn with human bones and dismembered corpses. Skulls had been smashed to get at the brains; torsos cut open for the livers and kidneys; femurs shattered to retrieve marrow. “A more revolting and appalling spectacle I never witnessed,” declared a member of a U.S. army squadron sent to help.

  The forty-niners all knew of the Donner party; they shuddered at the thought of a similar fate if they didn’t crest the Sierra in time. And so, even as they labored hot and thirsty down the Humboldt River to its mysterious sink into the earth, they scanned the towering western horizon for sign of the first snowfall. They had to hurry; they couldn’t rest. They had to get across before the snows came.

  MOST DID. THEY HAD AN ADVANTAGE OVER THE OREGON emigrants, who traveled with families, herds of livestock, furniture and all the impedimenta of farmsteads, not to mention women and children. Traveling lighter, they could move faster. But they were ten times as many as had gone to Oregon each season, and the strain they and their mounts and draft animals put on the trail—grinding ruts deep into the earth, ruining fords, cropping the grass to the roots—compounded their difficulties. All the same, the great majority reached California safely, if bone-weary and thinner than when they had set out.

  What they experienced in California was like nothing they or any other generation of Americans had ever been through. By the end of the summer of 1849, California had passed the threshold of the sixty thousand residents required for statehood, but it didn’t possess even a territorial government. A military governor based in Monterey, on the coast, exercised a notional authority over the region, but he lacked the troops to enforce his orders. Like the infamous border r
egion of East Texas in the late Mexican era, all of California was a no-man’s-land, beyond any laws worth paying attention to. Like the Oregon settlers before the Whitman massacre, the Californians had to invent their own government.

  They began in the gold fields. First on the American River but soon on other streams that drained the Sierra Nevada, gold hunters congregated wherever someone struck gold. The mining camps, as the communities were called, originated as tent villages but quickly added log cabins and other wood structures. Within a few months their populations could grow from nothing to ten thousand. To keep disputes over claims from turning too frequently violent, the camps crafted rules regarding the size of claims, how consistently claims had to be worked lest they lapse, to what degree operations on one claim could interfere with operations on neighboring claims, and so on. The camps chose committees that acted as de facto legislatures and courts.

  These ad hoc governments guarded the rights of some miners more zealously than those of others. As the best claims were taken, Americans in the gold fields began to question the right of non-Americans to extract gold. Mexicans, the most numerous of the foreigners at first, came in for early scrutiny. Americans told each other that the recent war had been fought, and American blood been shed, to make California American. To them it seemed wrong that Mexicans should share in the bounty. Mexican miners were often harassed, sometimes attacked, occasionally killed, and generally made to feel unwelcome.

  Chinese miners met similar treatment. Very few Americans had ever encountered Chinese people, and in an age when racism and ethnocentrism were considered venial sins, if sins at all, disdain for the Chinese was open and unapologetic. Chinese miners were often robbed or forced off their claims, and the perpetrators frequently went unpunished. Occasionally the Chinese banded together to defend themselves and their property. Sometimes they succeeded; sometimes their resistance made matters worse.

  “THE GOLD IS IN FINE BRIGHT SCALES AND IS VERY PURE,” William Sherman wrote after visiting the American River. Sherman was an officer in the U.S. army sent to California during the war with Mexico. He remained after the war as part of the military government, such as it was. The stories that came down to the army headquarters at Monterey from the gold diggings piqued his curiosity, and he traveled there to see what was going on.

  Sherman observed miners gathering gold in the most rudimentary fashion. A broad washpan was loaded with a slurry of dirt, sand and water. The pan was rocked back and forth so that the water spilled over the sides, carrying away the dirt and sand and leaving the heavier particles of gold. The gold was plucked out, and the process was repeated, again and again. In reasonably good diggings, miners could do well by this primitive method, earning perhaps ten or fifteen dollars a day. The hundred-dollar days described by the correspondent of the New York Herald were rare, although they did occur.

  Improvements were devised almost at once, as Sherman discovered. “The better plan is in a kind of inclined trough with cleats nailed across the bottom. A grate is placed over the highest part of this trough, upon which the gravel is thrown, afterwards the water. The gold passes into the trough, the gravel and stones are removed, and by a constant dashing of water and rocking the machine, the earthy matter is washed off, leaving the gold mixed with black sand in the bottom of the machine. These are separated by drying them in the sun and blowing off the sand, leaving the gold pure. You would be astonished at the ease with which the precious metal is obtained; any man by common industry can make $25 a day.”

  The sluice, which was what Sherman described, was complemented by other improvements. Vicente Pérez Rosales was a Chilean who had heard of California’s gold from a ship calling at Valparaíso; he and some friends formed a company and sailed north. They staked claims on a tributary of the American River and began panning for gold. Early results were disappointing. But then they observed a device the local miners were calling the “California cradle.” Pérez Rosales explained: “The cradle is a very simple and ingenious apparatus that has all the advantages of a scoop on a colossal scale, but is no larger than an actual cradle a yard and a half long by half a yard wide, placed so that the head rests on a base a fourth higher than the one at the foot. These bases are nothing more than wooden arcs that facilitate the rocking of the cradle. The upper end of the latter holds a rough sieve built of pieces of wood bored full of holes; the foot has no bottom. Along the floor of this singular device at intervals of four inches are nailed strips of wood a quarter of an inch square. These prevent the escape of the heavy particles mixed with the mud that runs down the inclined floor.”

  The sluice. This modest contraption was a first step up the ladder of mining technology.

  The cradle. This man’s partners have left him to work alone for the time being.

  Significantly, the operation of the cradle required teamwork, unlike panning, which was done alone. “One man feeds the gold-bearing earth into the sieve, another pours buckets of water over it, a third rocks the cradle, and finally still another takes out by hand the stones that are too large to pass through the strainer, examines them, and throws away such as do not contain gold,” Pérez Rosales wrote. “The water rinses the earth through the sieve, the mixture drops down and flows over the sloping bottom, and the gold and other more or less heavy bodies lodge in the cleats provided by the crosswise strips of wood. Every ten minutes the work is interrupted and the gold dust and nuggets mixed with iron that have been caught in these small angles are collected. This material is then placed in a hand trough for separation later, and the operation continues all day long.”

  Pérez Rosales and his Chilean partners became quite fond of the cradle. “In this device we lovingly rocked the infant gold and beheld it wax portentously,” he gushed. “Our daily harvest varied between ten and twenty-two ounces of gold.”

  Sluices and cradles both had the purpose of increasing the amount of gold-laden material the miners could process. Placer mining—pronounced with a short “a”—was the general term for separating gold from dirt and sand, typically by the use of water, and was a matter of percentages. Where the percentage of gold in a sample of sand and gravel was high, simple panning could make miners rich. Where the percentage was lower, the miners required methods that multiplied their panning powers.

  Over time the tendency was toward the more elaborate devices. As the miners examined the beds of rivers and creeks on the western slope of the Sierra, the rich deposits—the ones with a high percentage of gold—were claimed and worked first. Miners arriving later found slimmer pickings and required devices like sluice boxes and cradles to turn a profit.

  ALMOST NONE OF THE MINERS WERE GEOLOGISTS ON ARRIVAL in California, but most became amateur geologists before long. They inferred that the rushing streams had washed the gold down from the mountains, and that the greater density of gold than sand caused the former to cluster in the stream bottoms. As the miners scrambled over gravel bars and bluffs between streams, some noticed signs of old riverbeds, now dry. Perhaps those beds contained gold, they thought. Experiment demonstrated that the ancient beds did contain gold, and the miners pondered how to collect it. Some tried dry panning—panning without water—but the technique was inefficient. Some carried the materials of the ancient beds to existing streams, to use the water there for regular placer operations.

  Others contrived to carry the water of existing streams to the ancient beds. They constructed dams and troughs to reroute the existing streams. In time—and again, significantly, with collective effort and resources—they built major waterworks. The acme of this approach was the use of water deployed under pressure to uncover buried streambeds. Mighty water cannons, rigged to pipes from dammed reservoirs far upstream, reduced whole mountainsides to slurry that was then run through oversized sluices.

  A visitor to the gold fields described this hydraulic mining in action. “With a perpendicular column of water 120 feet high, in a strong hose, of which they work two, ten men who own the claim are enabled to run o
ff hundreds of tons of dirt daily,” the visitor wrote. “So great is the force employed that two men with the pipes, by directing streams of water against the base of the high bank, will cut it away to such an extent as to cause immense slides of earth, which often bring with them large trees and heavy boulders.… After these immense masses of earth are undermined and brought down by the streams forced from the pipes, those same streams are turned upon the tons of fallen earth, and it melts away before them, and is carried through the sluices with almost as much rapidity as if it were a bank of snow.” The law of percentages applied; at this rate of processing, even low-grade ores yielded handsome returns.

  NOR WAS HYDRAULIC MINING THE LAST WORD IN GOLD-GATHERING. The amateur geologists in the gold fields, with the help of a few professionals experienced elsewhere, figured out that the gold in the streambeds came from veins in the solid rock of the mountains. If they had been willing to wait another ten million years, that gold might have been washed down into existing and new streams. But they weren’t willing to wait. Gold fever burned in their own veins. So they went into the bedrock of the Sierra Nevada, boring into the earth to pry the gold free.

  An inquisitive newspaperman followed them. “We descended their shaft—but not before the workmen had offered and we had accepted the loan of an India-rubber suit of clothing—and on reaching the bottom of it we found a considerable stream of water running in the centre of the railway, constructed along the tunnel to the shaft,” the correspondent wrote. “This water was removed by a pump in one corner of the shaft, working by steam power, both day and night. On we went, trying to keep a sure footing on the rail track, inasmuch as watertight boots even then became a very necessary accompaniment to the India-rubber clothing. Drip, drip, fell the water, not singly, but in clusters of drops and small streams.”