Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  The correspondent went deeper. “On, on; down, down we go, until we hear the sound of muffled voices issuing from somewhere deep down amid the darkness, and uttering something very indistinct and hard to be understood; when again we cross over to and enter a side drift; where in the distance we see lights glimmering, in shadow and smoke, and hear the voices become more and more distinct, until my guide asks the question, ‘How does she look now, boys?’ ‘All right—better, sir.’”

  The correspondent asked whether they had reached the bottom. Not even close, his guide said, and took him as far again into the earth, to nearly three hundred feet below the surface. The correspondent asked why they dug so deep. “The deeper we get, the richer the quartz becomes,” his guide explained.

  Quartz mining, as the process was called after the rock that held the gold, represented another, and for now a final, step in the chain of consolidation in gold country. In 1848 gold mining had been something an individual could do profitably with minimal investment, just enough to buy a pan and some beans and bacon. By 1849 the pans were being supplanted by sluice boxes and cradles, which required money to fashion and teamwork to operate. Hydraulic mining was more expensive still, demanding pipe, nozzles and fittings that had to be manufactured in the East and imported. Quartz mining multiplied the required investment even more. Heavy, specialized machinery—digging devices of various sorts, hoists for miners and ore, pumps to drain water from the mineshafts, giant stamps to crush the ore, chemical equipment to separate the gold from the quartz—necessitated capital amounting to many thousands of dollars. Joint-stock companies could sometimes raise the money; more frequently, outside investors—many of whom never set foot in the gold fields or even California—held the controlling interest.

  The ironic result of all this was that in the 1850s America’s farthest frontier was also its least frontier-like, in any traditional sense. It was an industrial frontier, with corporate boards and banks calling the tune. It was urban, rather than rural: the miners congregated in the towns they called camps, and most other Californians crowded into San Francisco, Sacramento and a few other cities that grew up to service the gold fields. Compared with the rest of the country, few Californians were farmers; increasingly they formed a working class of wage-laborers in the mines and service workers in the cities. Their days were governed not by the rising and setting of the sun, which for the quartz miners never penetrated their underground workplaces, but by steam whistles attached to powerful machines. America’s Industrial Revolution unfolded over decades in most of the country; in the Far West it happened in just a few years.

  28

  CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

  SAN FRANCISCO, THE QUEEN CITY OF THE GOLD RUSH, WAS unique among American cities. Eastern cities had grown slowly. Boston was two centuries old before its population reached fifty thousand. San Francisco passed that milestone in less than two years. Eastern cities connoted stability and permanence. In Philadelphia, the headquarters of the second Bank of the United States was a monument of marble modeled on Greek temples and intended to last as long as they had. San Francisco was a caravansary, a stopping point on the path to the gold fields. Its structures were tents, flimsy wooden buildings thrown up in haste, even abandoned ships in the harbor, left crew-less when the men went over the rail in search for gold. Too hurried to dismantle the ships and reuse the timbers, enterprising hoteliers and restaurateurs simply built rickety walkways over the water to their new places of business. In time, sand from dunes behind the city was hauled in and piled around the vessels; an expanding shoreline beached them forever. In the twenty-first century, construction crews would occasionally unearth hulks from the days of the gold rush, buried and forgotten as the city continued to grow.

  Sarah Royce experienced San Francisco in its headlong phase. She was a rarity among the forty-niners: a woman. She had crossed the continent with her husband and their young daughter and begun to create a home in the gold country. She thought she had seen a lot on the journey west, but she never saw anything like the frenzy that characterized San Francisco. “In the immense crowds flocking hither from all parts of the world there were many of the worst classes, bent upon getting gold at all hazards, and if possible without work,” she remarked. “These were constantly lying in wait, as tempters of the weak. A still greater number came with gold-getting for their ruling motive yet intending to get it honestly, by labor or legitimate business. They did not intend, at first, to sacrifice their habits of morality, or their religious convictions. But many of them bore those habits and held those convictions too lightly; and as they came to feel the force of unwonted excitement and the pressure of unexpected temptation, they too often yielded, little by little, till they found themselves standing upon a very low plane, side by side with those whose society they once would have avoided. It was very common to hear people who had started on this downward moral grade, deprecating the very acts they were committing, or the practices they were countenancing; and concluding their weak lament by saying, ‘But here in California we have to do such things.’”

  Journalist Frank Soulé was more worldly than Sarah Royce, but even he was shocked at what passed for normal in San Francisco. “No place in the world contains any thing like the number of mere drinking-houses”—as contrasted to restaurants—“in proportion to the population, as San Francisco,” Soulé observed. “This, perhaps, is the worst feature of the city. The quantity of ardent spirits daily consumed is almost frightful. It is peddled out in every gambling-room, on the wharves, at almost every corner, and, in some streets, in almost every house. Many of the taverns are of the lowest possible description—filthy dens of vice and crime, disease and wretchedness. Drunken men and women, with bloated bodies and soiled garments, crowd them at night, making the hours hideous with their bacchanalian revels. Americans and Europeans, Mexicans and South-Americans, Chinese and even negroes, mingle and dissipate together, furnishing a large amount of business for the police department and the recorder’s court.”

  Gambling was a favorite sport of the San Franciscans, which was unsurprising in that the entire gold rush was, for its participants, a grand gamble. Bayard Taylor was a writer in the service of Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune. Greeley would become famous for the admonition, “Go West!” given to a young man asking career advice. For now he realized that the California gold rush was the biggest story of the age, and he sent Taylor to California to gather and recount it for the Tribune’s readers. Taylor tested the gambling scene in San Francisco. “Denison’s Exchange, the Parker House and Eldorado stand side by side; across the way are the Verandah and Aguila de Oro; higher up the plaza the St. Charles and Bella Union; while dozens of second-rate establishments are scattered through the less frequented streets,” Taylor reported. “The greatest crowd is about the Eldorado; we find it difficult to effect an entrance. There are about eight tables in the room, all of which are thronged; copper-hued Kanakas, Mexicans rolled in their sarapes and Peruvians thrust through their ponchos, stand shoulder to shoulder with the brown and bearded American miners. The stakes are generally small, though when the bettor gets into ‘a streak of luck,’ as it is called, they are allowed to double until all is lost or the bank breaks. Along the end of the room is a spacious bar, supplied with all kinds of bad liquors, and in a sort of gallery, suspended under the ceiling, a female violinist tasks her talent and strength of muscle to minister to the excitement of play.”

  Taylor’s observation that the gambling halls—or “hells,” as they were often called—didn’t discriminate among customers on racial or ethnic grounds reflected the fact that money trumped other considerations in the gaming trade. A Mexican’s gold was as good as that of anyone else. Yet Taylor noted a difference in the gambling styles of the different groups. He reported from the Aguila de Oro, where the game was monte—favored in California because the odds were fairer to the players and the game was less prone to cheating. “The dealer throws out his cards with a cool, nonchalant
air; indeed, the gradual increase of the hollow square of dollars at his left hand is not calculated to disturb his equanimity. The two Mexicans in front, muffled in their dirty serapes, put down their half-dollars and dollars and see them lost, without changing a muscle. Gambling is a born habit with them, and they would lose thousands with the same indifference.” Americans reacted differently. “Their good or ill luck is betrayed at once by involuntary exclamations and changes of countenance, unless the stake should be very large and absorbing, when their anxiety, though silent, may be read with no less certainty. They have no power to resist the fascination of the game. Now counting their winnings by thousands, now dependent on the kindness of a friend for a few dollars to commence anew, they pass hour after hour in these hot, unwholesome dens. There is no appearance of arms, but let one of the players, impatient with his losses and maddened by the poisonous fluids he has drank, threaten one of the profession, and there will be no scarcity of knives and revolvers.”

  THE PREVALENCE OF KNIVES AND REVOLVERS WOULD BECOME a serious problem in San Francisco. But in the first years the more pressing concern was fire. A series of fires repeatedly destroyed large parts of the city. The first broke out on Christmas Eve in 1849. It began near Portsmouth Square, the center of the city, and spread in all directions, consuming a million dollars’ worth of buildings and inventory before volunteer firefighters brought it under control by preemptively destroying buildings that lay in the fire’s path. Deprived of standing fuel, the flames lost strength and flickered out.

  A second fire occurred four months later. Most of the buildings consumed in the first fire had been replaced; many of the new buildings burned down. This time the firefighters were more reluctant; some demanded payment from the owners of threatened buildings before they would swing into action. And a curious phenomenon was observed after the flames had passed through a block. Even before the embers cooled, scavengers began sifting the ruins. San Francisco as yet lacked the institutions of a mature financial system, including banks and adequate paper currency. People walked around with gold in their pockets. Shops kept gold on hand. Hotels and restaurants collected gold from customers. And gold survives fire. The scavengers were looking for gold. One argonaut, newly arrived, hadn’t yet reached the gold fields. He found his first sample of the precious metal in San Francisco in the wake of the fire. He sent his wife a picture of Portsmouth Square, marked to show the buildings destroyed. He included a souvenir. “I put into this a little piece of gold that I picked up on the square,” he wrote. “The place I picked it up is marked by a cross thus X.”

  Again the city rebuilt; again it burned. The damage was greater than in the two previous fires combined. The city took an obvious lesson: that buildings made of wood were a fire hazard. When the property-owners rebuilt after the third fire, many employed brick and stone and iron, with iron for doors. The owners meanwhile pitched together to purchase firefighting equipment, reorganized fire companies, and trained with the engines and hoses to make ready for the next conflagration.

  Which duly came, in September 1850. The better construction and the fuller preparation paid off. This fourth fire was fairly quickly contained; property damage was held below a million dollars.

  San Franciscans began to think they had solved their fire problem. Then a fifth blaze erupted, and proved to be the worst of all. Heinrich Schliemann would become famous as the uncoverer of ancient Troy, but in 1850 he was an unknown German merchant looking for business in California’s boom town. He arrived by sea and got a room at the Union Hotel on Portsmouth Square. Weary from travel, he turned in early. “I may have slept a quarter of an hour, when I was awakened by loud cries in the street: ‘fire, fire,’ and by the awful sounds of the alarm-bell,” he remembered. “I sprang up in all haste and, looking out the window, I saw that a frame building only 20 or 30 paces from the Union Hotel was on fire. I dressed in all haste and ran out of the house, but scarcely had I reached the end of Clay Street when I saw already the hotel on fire from which I had just run out. Pushed on by a complete gale, the fire spread with an appalling rapidity, sweeping away in a few minutes whole streets of frame buildings. Neither the iron houses nor the brick houses (which were hitherto considered as quite fireproof) could resist the fury of the element: the latter crumbled together with incredible rapidity, whilst the former got red-hot, then white-hot and fell together like cardhouses. Particularly in the iron houses people considered themselves perfectly safe, and they remained in them to the last extremity. As soon as the walls of the iron houses got red-hot, the goods inside began to smoke. The inhabitants wanted to get out, but usually it was already too late, for the locks and hinges of the doors having extended or partly melted by the heat, the doors were no more to be opened.”

  Astonishingly, even this wasn’t the end. A month later a sixth fire broke out. It wasn’t as large as the fifth, but it was the most heartbreaking to those who had somehow survived the previous blazes only to see their homes and businesses consumed in this one. Fire insurance was almost unknown in San Francisco at this point, and few of the victims had family nearby to fall back on. They were ruined; they had to start over.

  RUIN AND STARTING OVER WOULD BECOME A MOTIF OF California, but in the meantime San Franciscans concluded that all these fires weren’t happening by accident. Especially after residents saw scavengers raking through the smoldering embers, many concluded, almost certainly correctly, that the fires had been deliberately set.

  Arson was but part of the city’s crime problem, which was probably the worst of any city in America at the time. Some of the crime was simply the consequence of crowding too many young men into too small a space. The miners worked hard, then often drank hard, then fought hard. The knowledge that anyone intending a drink in a saloon, a meal in a restaurant, or a night in a hotel had gold in his pockets tempted the larcenous to waylay the unwary. Robbery became murder upon the victim’s least resistance.

  San Francisco in ashes. Such scenes were all too frequent in the early years.

  San Francisco’s cosmopolitanism contributed to the problem. By 1850 communities of Mexicans, Chileans, Chinese, Italians, French and African Americans existed among and beside the larger community of white Americans. Criminals could prey on these minority communities with little fear of incurring the wrath of the whites, who—like everyone else in the city—would rather be making money than tending to civic safety.

  The most notorious criminals were organized into gangs. The Hounds consisted of veterans of the Mexican War who hadn’t gone home. Their leaders had learned the arts of robbery, extortion, arson and murder in the Five Points and Bowery slums of New York. They gathered in a large tent they called Tammany Hall and posed as keepers of the public order under the name they gave themselves: Regulators.

  Thomas Cary, an upstanding citizen, explained the dynamics of crime in San Francisco. “It will be asked why the more respectable part of the community did not exert themselves to put a stop to these proceedings,” he said. “The answer is simple. The influential citizens, the merchants, lawyers and others, lived around what had been known as Yerba Buena Cove, while the Mexicans and Chileans lived at the back of the town among the sand-hills. They, therefore, knew little of what was going on out of sight and out of hearing. Everyone was too much interested in his own affairs to trouble himself about the misfortunes of others, and besides this, the Spanish-Americans were looked upon at that time very much as the Chinese are at the present moment”—Cary was writing in the 1880s—“as interlopers who should properly have been sent back to their own country, and these ‘Hounds,’ or ‘Regulators’ as they now called themselves, professed to be the guardians of the community against the encroachments of all foreigners.”

  In time the Hounds overreached, threatening the property and interests of the respectables, who resolved to respond. Sam Brannan’s insight about mining the miners had made him the richest man in California, with property to protect. And he took offense at the lawless reputation that ha
d become attached to San Francisco, to which he had moved his headquarters. Such a reputation was bad for business. He called a meeting of other property owners and declared that the Hounds must be reined in. A vigilance committee was formed, with two hundred deputies. The leaders of the Hounds were rounded up. A court convened by the vigilance committee tried the Hounds, including Sam Roberts, the head man. Roberts was convicted of conspiracy, robbery, riot and assault with intent to kill; eight others were convicted on lesser counts. Roberts and another man were sentenced to ten years at hard labor, the others to shorter terms.

  At once arose a problem. There was no prison, and no one particularly wanted to pay to build and staff one. The vigilance committee didn’t think the convicted men deserved death sentences, and lesser corporal punishment like whipping and branding had fallen out of favor outside the South, where it was confined to slaves.

  So the committee contented itself with a stern warning to the convicted men and their fellow Hounds. They had better leave town. If they didn’t, and persisted in their criminal ways, they would face execution.

  THE WARNING WORKED; THE HOUNDS DISBANDED. BUT THE crime problem increased, as the demise of the Hounds gave room to an even more violent gang, the Sydney Ducks, sometimes called Sydney Coves. They were from Australia, and found California appealing. “The voyage from Sydney to San Francisco was neither a very tedious nor an expensive one; and great numbers of ticket-of-leave men and old convicts who had served their time early contrived to sail for California,” Frank Soulé explained. “There the field seemed so rich and safe for a resumption of their quondam pranks that they yielded to the temptation, and forthwith began to execute villainies that in magnitude and violent character far exceeded those for which they had been originally convicted. Callous in conscience, they feared nothing save the gallows. But that they had little reason to dread in merciful, gentle, careless California, where prosecutors and witnesses were few, or too busy to attend to the calls of justice; where jurors, not knowing the law, and eager to be at money-making again, were apt to take hasty charges from the bench as their sole rule of conduct; where judges, chosen by popular election, were either grossly ignorant of law, or too timid or careless, corrupt or incapable, to measure out the full punishment of crime; and where the laws themselves had not yet been methodically laid down, and the forms and procedure of legal tribunals digested into a plain, unerring system.”