And 1854 was late in the game. By then every promising site in California had been scoured, every hill tramped by tens of thousands of newcomers, every bed of gravel sifted and scanned. After all that, miners had unearthed the greatest find of all. In the early days, especially in the golden years of 1848 and 1849 before the world spilled in, it seemed that all you had to do to make a fortune was open your eyes.
In November, 1848, a father and son working on the Middle Fork of the American River scraped up $3,000 worth of gold from the riverbed in four days. Their only tools were a hoe and spade. In February, 1849, a new arrival sent a letter from Sutter’s Fort, near the site of the first finds. “Men here,” he wrote, “are nearly crazy with the riches forced suddenly into their pockets.”
Sometimes you could make your pile without even setting foot outdoors. Men told tales of barbers who shaved their customers’ scruffy beards and then, at day’s end, swept up $8 or $10 worth of gold dust from the whiskers on the floor.
With money lying thick on the ground, prices soared. No one minded. Horses went for $200 or $300 apiece, ten times as much as the previous year, but miners would ride from one camp to another and simply set their horses free when they arrived. “It was easier to dig out the price of another,” one man wrote, “than to hunt up the one astray.”
One dazzled Australian, brand-new to the goldfields and bursting with excitement, ran up to every unfamiliar face and sang out his story. “By me soul, but this is a great country!” he told one startled stranger, in 1849. “Here a man can dig up as much goold in a day as he ever saw in all his life. Hav’n’t I got already more than I know what to do with, an’ I’ve only been here a week.… O’ Monday I dug nineteen dollars, an’ o’ Tuesday twenty-three, an’ o’ Friday two hundred an’ eighty-two dollars in one lump as big as yer fist.… Was there ever sich a country in the world!”
In this fabulous new land, a man might find gold without even the most rudimentary knowledge of mining or geology. A newcomer named William Downie, a complete novice, made one of the biggest finds of all. Downie had heard tales of California’s gold in a boardinghouse in Buffalo, in 1848, and raced west. He found “gold all along the banks” of the North Fork of the Yuba River. When news of his bonanza leaked out, three thousand miners descended on what had been an empty, anonymous patch of country.
At one tiny bit of ground near what was quickly dubbed Downieville—the claim was scarcely larger than a picnic blanket—four men set to work. Each day, for eleven stunning days in a row, they dug up a fortune worth more than $1,000. Three miners named a nearby claim Tin Cup Diggings; the name honored a pledge they’d made to one another not to knock off work for the day until each of them had filled a cup to the brim with gold.
In the golden age this was a game the rawest amateur could play. One of Downie’s companions took a break from mining to fish, caught a fourteen-pound beauty, and threw it into a pot of water to cook. The men ate their fill and then looked into the battered pot. Gold dust gleamed in the cooking water.
By the spring of 1849, rumors of gold had reached every corner of the United States, from its most tumultuous cities to its sleepiest villages. “The gold excitement spread like wildfire,” recalled a farmwife named Luzena Stanley Wilson, who lived in a log cabin nestled deep in the Missouri prairie, in the northwest corner of the state. Wilson knew firsthand about fires racing out of control. She knew, too, what life in Missouri likely held in store for her.
The decision to leave that life behind and head for California might faze others. Not Wilson, whose temperament was about four parts briskness and nerve to one part doubt and introspection. “As we had almost nothing to lose, and we might gain a fortune, we early caught the fever.”
Luzena Wilson, who was thirty, had been married for five years. Her husband, Mason, wanted to set off at once, and alone, because that would be fastest and safest. Luzena would not be left behind. “I thought where he could go I could, and where I went I could take my two little toddling babies.”
Off went the whole family.
In Washington, D.C., an architectural draftsman and amateur artist named J. Goldsborough Bruff rounded up a company of two dozen young men eager to make their fortune in the land of gold. Bruff, at forty-four a decade or more older than most of his companions, placed himself at the head of what they’d dubbed the Washington City and California Mining Association, and sat down to design suitably grand uniforms.
Outgoing and eager for more adventure than could be found at a drafting table, Bruff was a handsome man of middling height with shoulder-length black hair. He carried himself with the erect bearing of the soldier he had almost been (he had attended West Point but had been kicked out; family legend said he had been caught dueling). After his stint at military school, Bruff had gone to sea. He spent three years largely on long hops between South America and Europe, first as a cabin boy and then a sailor, and developed a taste for roaming.
He had settled into a quiet life, or so he thought. Then, in 1849, Bruff found himself assigned to duplicate maps of the American West that had originally been drawn by John C. Frémont, “the Pathfinder” himself. Dark-eyed, handsome, reckless, the young explorer was one of the great authorities on the West and one of the most famous men in America. (Frémont was hugely controversial. Lincoln called him “the damndest scoundrel that ever lived, but in the infinite mercy of Providence… also the damndest fool.”)
In an era when much of the West was as mysterious as Atlantis, no dreamer could have resisted the spell of Frémont’s drawings of scarcely known rivers and mountain ranges. Vibrating like a tuning fork, Bruff immediately set about rounding up friends, and ordering tents, and inquiring after mules, and pricing supplies.
Bruff had energy to spare and an all-embracing curiosity, but he was a man who appreciated proper form. Promises were sacred, friendships permanent, oaths solemn. With this earnestness came a taste for the dramatic. Even in the humblest circumstances, Bruff carried himself as if accompanied by a faint fanfare of trumpets. It was not enough to give his word that he would repay a loan; he would, he declared, “embrace the earliest opportunity to liquidate the pecuniary obligation” he had incurred.
By the time he and his men marched west out of the nation’s capital, on April 2, 1849, the Washington City and California Mining Association had grown to number some sixty men. “We go as a body of energetic gentlemen,” Bruff announced, “to enrich ourselves, if possible, by every honorable means.”
Alonzo Delano meant not only to enrich himself but to heal himself as well. Forty-two years old and a prosperous merchant, Delano seemed an unlikely conquistador. He had spent decades peddling flour, silk, whiskey, and whatever else came to hand in a succession of small towns in Ohio and Indiana. He had finally settled down, in an upstate Illinois town called Ottawa. The tall, slender man had quickly become a local favorite; he had a friendly greeting for everyone and he always had time for a little joke, even if it was only to make fun of his own long, pointy nose. (“A jolly good fellow if ever there was one,” one acquaintance recalled, “and, by Jove, he did have a big nose.”) With a wife and two children, a thriving business, and a prominent role in town affairs, Delano seemed secure.
But in 1848 life conspired to knock him off his perch. First, he contracted a lung illness that threatened to kill him. His doctor recommended a change of climate as the only hope. Even at this early date, balmy California had a reputation as a kind of open-air health spa. One well-known guidebook recounted the story of a California man who had reached the age of 250—so healthy was California’s climate—and finally decided he’d had enough. In order to end his life at last, he had no choice but to leave California. He did, and he died. But as soon as his family brought the body back to California for burial, the corpse revived and leapt to its feet, once again bursting with health and vigor.
No one took such tall tales literally, but on the principle that where there’s smoke there’s fire, they did not altogether discount
them either. The sunny West was surely an improvement on the damp and fever-ridden East. Delano mulled his doctor’s advice. And “then, about this time, the astonishing accounts of the vast deposits of gold in California reached us, and besides the fever of the body, I was suddenly seized with the fever of mind for gold.” Delano set out to cure both fevers at once. Leaving family and civilization behind, he took to the road, “a nomad denizen of the world.”
Mary Jane Megquier—she went by “Jennie”—had grown up on a farm in a small, isolated town in Maine. Even as a girl she had chafed against the confines of her narrow life. From early on she’d felt “no love for the good town of Turner,” she declared later, and despite her best efforts she never managed to change her mind. When church elders scolded her for attending a dance, in her teens, her distaste grew.
At age eighteen she married a doctor about a decade older than she was. Thomas Megquier—they pronounced the name Muhgweer—was a Bowdoin graduate and altogether a more conventional character than his young wife. Four years after their marriage, the Megquiers moved to the nearby town of Winthrop. It was, at least slightly, an improvement on Turner. But it proved no place to make a living, even for a doctor who had, as Thomas bitterly recalled, “labored in Winthrop twelve years… day and night” with little but bills and debts to show for it. In the meantime a friend who had moved to far-off Hawaii began sending letters that painted a tempting picture. The Sandwich Islands, as Hawaii was then known, needed doctors, and Thomas made up his mind to go. Then came word of the bonanza in California. Thomas changed his plans. He would start a new life not in Honolulu but in San Francisco. And, remarkably, Jennie could come, too, provided the Megquiers could find friends or family to take care of their three children.
Few women would have taken that leap. Any female in California was a dazzling rarity. In the gold rush era, Jennie Megquier, Luzena Wilson, and other women were outnumbered by men 30 to 1. (It would take another century, until the 1950 census, for the number of women in California to match the number of men.) In the diggings, as the goldfields came to be known, women were even scarcer than in town, and miners who encountered a “respectable” woman—not a prostitute—gaped in awe. In those all-male deserts, the merest token of femininity sufficed to knock men sideways. One prospector from New York described the commotion when someone happened to catch hold of a woman’s bonnet blowing in the breeze. The miners decided to throw a party in honor of the great discovery. At precisely the spot of the find, they drove a five-foot stake into the ground, set the precious hat atop it, and wrapped the stake in a blanket so that it bore some vague resemblance to a woman’s form. Then three hundred celebrants proceeded to dance and drink for two days.
But before the parties came the journey. For gold-seekers from states like Maine, where seafaring was a tradition, the overland route to California was not the obvious choice. Far better to find a ship that would round Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America, and then sail up the Pacific coast, or to travel by sea to Panama, cross overland to the Pacific side, and catch a second ship to San Francisco.
The Megquiers chose Panama, which was, in 1849, little more than a malarial jungle. (The Panama Canal lay half a century in the future.) No American woman, as far as anyone knew, had ever made the crossing.
Opinionated, impatient, hot-tempered, the grandly named Israel Shipman Pelton Lord lived perpetually at the boil.* Anything—drinking, gambling, young men sporting mustaches or beards—could move him to fury. He rattled off volleys of insults, pop-pop-popping his words like a string of firecrackers, until the rage cooled. “Asses, asses, all.” Such was Lord’s judgment on his fellow human beings, “and but that their hat crowns were shed long, long ago, their ears would thrust their hats off.”
But Lord, who was a doctor, had a compassionate side, too, and it burst forth as unpredictably as did his tantrums. Let a snowstorm hit and it would be Lord who staggered through the drifts to reach a far-off patient. Let an ox falter on the trail west—where such things happened times beyond counting—and it would be Lord who felt obliged to compose a memorial to the poor beast, in countless verses of maudlin doggerel.
They’ve left me here to starve and die,
Without a lock of hay.
And they’ve burned my yoke and bows and gone
to Californ-i-a.
Lord kept a travel diary in tiny, meticulous script, and he did his best to note down every river crossing, every hill and trail and plant and bird, he met along his way. He found room for nearly everything except any mention of the reasons he had left his family behind, in Warrenville, Illinois, and set out, at age forty-three, for California.
He did include, almost at the end of his journal, a brief, third-person description of “a Christian man who went to California for gold. He wanted $20,000 [in today’s money, $400,000], and he would give the Lord half.”
Was this devout, ambitious pilgrim Israel Lord himself?
Thousands of gold-seekers kept journals or wrote long letters to their families or their hometown newspapers, and hundreds of those journals have survived. But most of the emigrants’ diaries sound stiff and formal or strained and sentimental. We find ourselves faced with the minutes of an accountants’ annual meeting or a long poem in a high school yearbook. Some of this formality was intentional. In the 1840s the use of ornate, circumspect language was a convention, in skilled hands a kind of game. Especially admired was a mismatch between high tone and low subject. Rather than “we were seasick,” one emigrant wrote that “the mountainous billows of the Gulf commenced operating on the susceptible frames of the landsmen.”
Speech was a different matter. Nineteenth-century voices burst with life and energy. “There is sometimes in the American metaphors an energy which is very remarkable,” an English visitor noted in 1837, and he gleefully transcribed his favorite examples of overheard Americana. “I wish I had all hell boiled down to a pint,” he heard someone say, “just to pour down your throat.” Another high-spirited visitor, the English writer Harriet Martineau, collected her own favorite American phrases at about the same time. Undaunted by her deafness, Martineau poked her ear trumpet this way and that, jotting down tidbits. She eavesdropped on two men disputing an acquaintance’s intelligence. “He!” one man snorted. “He can’t see through a ladder.”
In diaries and private letters more often than in formal prose, that sound of actual life sometimes managed to squeeze through. “Oh if we could kiss,” a woman named Sara Pierce wrote to her husband, Hiram, in the goldfields, “but alas it will be a long time before we shall be permitted to embrace one another, but in my dreams you may depend I have fine times. In one of my night visions I thought you had come home but you can’t think what a time we had.”*
Skilled and unskilled writers alike set down their thoughts. In contrast with the leading figures in other American sagas—the fur trappers and mountain men who roamed the American west in the 1820s and ’30s, say, or the cowboys who drove cattle across the plains in the 1870s—most of the gold rushers came from a literate, letter-writing, journal-keeping segment of society. The trip to California was expensive, out of reach for those without savings or connections, and many who set out were more familiar with pen and ink than with pick and shovel. More important, the gold-seekers knew they had leapt headlong into history. Like Civil War soldiers a decade later, they assigned themselves the task of recording their impressions of what they sensed would be not only their great adventure but one of America’s great adventures.
But exhaustion and sickness tended to erode most writers’ vows to keep detailed records. On the trail, it was a rare man who could spend the day staggering under the desert sun, nourished only by a tainted hunk of beef jerky and a mug of warm, soapy water, and then sit down in the evening to record his thoughts. Even the most conscientious, like a young man from Indiana named Elijah Farnham, seldom managed to do more than jot down a few hasty sentences. At times, though rarely, the lack of adornment made for a kind of p
ower. “At 4 this morning,” Farnham wrote on May 15, 1849, “a man encamped with us died with the collery [cholera] he had a wife and children they went back.”
As weeks stretched to months, letters grew rare and diary entries spotty. Shipboard travelers, too, wrote often at first and then hardly at all, though not because they suffered from overwork. Oppressed by unchanging scenery and endless, empty days, they found themselves unable to summon the energy to take up a pen.
As a result, too many gold rush journals are lifeless recordings of miles covered, illnesses suffered, storms endured—gold spun into straw. Wilson, Bruff, Delano, Megquier, and Lord stand out as welcome exceptions. Somehow all five had mastered the natural, vigorous idiom that one poet would later celebrate as “plain American which cats and dogs can read!”
Yet even such lively eyewitnesses sometimes fell silent just when we would most want to have heard from them. Especially when they were making notes in a diary or writing to relatives, gold rush writers often took for granted what we would love to know. Was the writer skinny or fat, handsome or homely? Why are there no entries for July? When Jennie Megquier referred bitterly to her marriage and “the trials I have endured,” what did she have in mind? Why did Joseph Bruff’s wife refer to the two of them as “a rather unmated couple”?
Occasionally even those facts we do have are less trustworthy than they appear. Israel Lord’s California journal was attributed to “Isaac Lord” for many years, for instance, because that’s how he signed the last few pages of his diary, several times over, in large, sprawling letters. Or how someone signed it. The true story behind those bold signatures, it turns out, was that they were written decades after the gold rush and not by the author at all. Sometime in the late 1800s the writer’s young grandson, Isaac Lord, found the musty journal and used the blank pages at the end to practice signing his name. We can only guess how crusty, cantankerous Israel Lord would have carried on had he known that posterity nearly assigned his masterpiece to his grandson Ikey.
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