The Rush

by Edward Dolnick

  All was chaos, the ships’ decks a jumble of well-wishers who had shoved their way aboard for one last farewell, passengers struggling under their loads of boots, tents, life preservers, rifles, pistols, and knives, and crew members trying desperately to impose order. On the afternoon of February 5, 1849, hundreds of happy, keyed-up passengers on the Crescent City carried on a half-hour-long snowball fight. The most enthusiastic combatants climbed high into the rigging, the better to bombard their giddy, giggling rivals.

  Every scheme to reach the goldfields, no matter how absurd, found believers. An inventor named Rufus Porter offered tickets on his “AIR LINE TO CALIFORNIA,” an eight-hundred-foot-long, steam-powered, cigar-shaped “aerial locomotive.” Passengers would ride within a large compartment suspended beneath a hydrogen-filled balloon, flying “from New York to California in Three Days.” Two giant propellers would do all the work; passengers had only to sit back and sip their wine. The fare was $50, and parachutes were free. Two hundred people bought tickets.

  On the island of Nantucket, thirty miles off the coast of Massachusetts and a full continent’s breadth from the diggings, one-fourth of all those of voting age set out for California. In Chicago, one newspaper reported, it looked as if “nearly half the city was bound for the Gold Regions.” In New York, a young lawyer who stayed behind wrote that it seemed “as if the Atlantic Coast was to be depopulated.”

  A cartoon in the New York Atlas tried to capture the mood of thrilling chaos. Above the title “Ho! For California,” a gigantic crowd formed a stampede. Muscular toughs in work clothes, young swells in tailored coats, pudgy parsons, men of affairs in top hats, all shoved and elbowed their way along, as if California lay only a block or two ahead.

  Hayseeds and Harvard professors joined the exodus, and Cherokee Indians and Wyandots, and planters and lawyers and preachers. Young men whose lives had scarcely begun swarmed alongside old-timers whose best days were hazy memories. “From Maine to Texas,” wrote one nineteenth-century historian (who joined the rush himself), “there was one universal frenzy.” Northern abolitionists made uneasy company with Southerners who brought their slaves to do the digging for them. Free blacks who had parents or children still in chains joined the throngs, hoping to earn enough money to buy their families’ freedom. “I saw a colored man going to the land of gold prompted by the hope of redeeming his wife and seven children,” wrote an emigrant from Ohio. “Success to him.”

  Money could literally mean freedom, but it also meant self-respect. One Ohio gold-seeker wrote to his wife about his dreams, and the bitterness leaps from the page. He could bear any hardship, wrote David DeWolf, if only he could manage “to make enough to get us a home & so I can be independent of some of the Darned sonabitches that felt themselves above me because I was poor cuss them I say… Darn their stinking hides.” (DeWolf did prosper in California and returned home after two years with enough money to buy a large farm. He died fighting for the North in the Civil War, at the battle of Corinth, in 1862.)

  The historian Hubert Bancroft, who saw gold rush California with his own eyes, compiled a famous list meant to convey the variety of people swept up in the torrent. He started his tally with “the trader [who] closed his ledger to depart” and “the farmer yoked to endless mortgage payments.”* Then, as if caught up in the flood himself, Bancroft sped up. Here were “the briefless lawyer, the starving student, the quack, the idler, the harlot, the gambler, the hen-pecked husband, the disgraced; with many earnest, enterprising, honest men and devoted women.” Finally Bancroft paused to catch his breath. “These and others turned their faces westward, resolved to stake their all upon a cast.”

  Not everyone was as enthralled with the gold rush multitudes as Bancroft. Every aspect of the spectacle—the size of the churning crowds, the gold-seekers’ ambition, their unpreparedness, their willingness to leave their families—offended someone. The wealthy condemned the gold-seekers as troublemakers out to topple the social order. Ministers (those who stayed home) lambasted their congregations for putting riches ahead of family. High-minded Ralph Waldo Emerson focused on the gold-seekers’ crassness. “All of them,” he complained, “[shared] the very commonplace wish to find a short way to wealth.”

  So they did. Worse yet, they did not trouble to hide it. The emigrants belonged to a striving, commercial society; in America, as horrified visitors from abroad and homegrown idealists like Emerson had long noted, the one true value was getting ahead. The upstart Americans did not know their place, and some went so far as to reject the notion that they had a fixed place. (One feature of everyday life that made well-to-do Europeans cringe was the American custom of shaking hands; unlike bowing or taking off one’s hat to a superior, joining hands highlighted the presumptuous notion that one man was as good as another.)

  Americans delighted in their forwardness. They gleefully recited a poem written in 1840 that heaped praise on their homespun virtues:

  [An American] would kiss a Queen, till he raised a blister,

  With his arm round her neck, and his old felt hat on;

  Would address a king by the title of “Mister”

  And ask him the price of the throne he sat on.

  In the uncouth United States, one English writer remarked after a visit, “Any man’s son may become the equal of any other man’s son.” This was not praise. Now the news from California had drawn together hordes of young men whose fevered dreams were the stuff of English nightmares.

  The gold-seekers set off jauntily, like soldiers when war has first been declared. “There was scarcely one,” wrote a journalist who accompanied them, “who did not feel himself more or less a hero.” Few would sustain their high spirits as they clattered along in their slow-motion caravans or rolled across endless seas. But no matter how exhausted and mud-spattered they grew, or how queasy and restless, the emigrants consoled themselves with the thought that they were participants in a grand and sweeping epic. They made no mention of Homer or Achilles, but they took immense pride in styling themselves “argonauts,” counterparts of the brave adventurers who had set out with Jason to pursue the Golden Fleece. In their hearts, they knew that they did not cut figures as imposing as savvy Jason and mighty Hercules and the other men of the Argo. In place of kings and warriors stood farmers and teachers, clerks and shopkeepers, and dewy-cheeked dreamers of all stripes.

  “What an innocent, unsophisticated, inexperienced lot” the gold-seekers were, one of them recalled many years later. “Not one of them then could bake his own bread, turn a flapjack, re-seat his trousers, or wash his shirt. Not one of them had dug even a post-hole. All had a vague sort of impression that California was a nutshell of a country and that they would see each other there frequently and eventually all return home at or about the same time.”

  Virtually all the ideas and expectations that filled the travelers’ minds would soon prove irrelevant. But if they had guessed wrong about the shape of their adventure, they had got one big thing right. Farmers and merchants they might have been, but now they had left those roles behind. “Few could conquer with Pizarro or sail with Drake,” in the words of one historian, “but the California gold rush was the great adventure for the common man.”

  Guidebooks spelled out the food and gear the emigrants would need. Overland travelers would spend about five months on the road, with no dependable places to resupply along the way. One well-regarded volume—unlike many rival authors, Joel Palmer had actually made the journey he described—recommended two hundred pounds of flour per person, seventy-five pounds of bacon, twenty-five pounds of sugar, ten pounds of salt, ten pounds of rice, half a bushel of dried beans, and five pounds of coffee, among other items, and ropes, shovels, saws, and skillets, but “no useless trumpery.”

  This was bare-bones travel, or it should have been; it was vital to pare weight in order to spare the animals. Emigrants in earlier generations had traveled in roomy Conestoga wagons, but those were large and intended for shorter jaunts on better roads. Mule
s or oxen struggling across deserts and mountains would die in their traces—thus condemning their owners to death as well—if yoked to anything so big. Instead, the gold-seekers traveled in small, everyday, working wagons straight off the farm; they bore no more resemblance to “prairie schooners” than pickup trucks do to limousines. These were sturdy vehicles, but they had never been tested under conditions anything like those they would confront on the trail. Nor had their drivers.

  A typical wagon was roughly four feet wide and ten feet long, about the dimensions of a large closet. The bed of the wagon was essentially a wooden box with sides about two feet high. Many wagons had a false floor a foot or so above the bottom side of the box; the space beneath the floor provided out-of-the-way storage. A piece of canvas stretched over wooden spokes bent into an upside-down U served as walls and roof. Headroom was about five feet. Everything essential for life—tools, food, clothes—had to be crammed inside. Many of the emigrants found a place for a stash of whiskey. Ostensibly this was a precaution in case anyone needed an all-purpose medicine or a snakebite remedy, but at the end of a hard day many a gold-seeker dipped into the first-aid kit.

  Emigrants sometimes made room for a mirror or a chest of drawers, or a banjo or fiddle, or books. Dickens, Dumas, and Scott were favorites. Alonzo Delano packed a volume of Shakespeare, Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, and a book on geology. But what had been precious in Ohio or Illinois was often thrown away as junk or burned as firewood after a few hundred miles on the prairie.

  The quarters were cramped, but nearly everyone walked rather than rode in any case, to preserve the animals’ strength. There were exceptions. Small children sometimes rode, and so did pregnant women and the injured and the ill. But the wagons had no springs (or brakes); for a man feverish with dysentery or white-faced from the pain of ribs he’d broken while trying to ford a river, or a pregnant woman, the constant lurching and jolting was a torment.

  The diet on this endless journey was monotonous—a perpetual round of beans, bacon, biscuits, and coffee, as if the emigrants were sailors on a transoceanic voyage—but dullness was only one of its drawbacks. (Luzena Wilson threw most of her pots and skillets away after only a few days’ travel, to save weight, in forlorn recognition that “on bacon and flour one can ring but few changes.”) The emigrants ate almost no fruit or vegetables; they sipped peppermint oil to soothe their stomachs and forced down castor oil for what they called “intestinal inertia.” Scurvy was widespread, and the sight of men bent double by the pain a commonplace; at Fort Laramie, in Wyoming, in the winter of 1849, one-fifth of the soldiers were on crutches on account of the disease.

  Most emigrants funneled through Missouri, and for many of them, it was the sight of bustling, rowdy Saint Louis that first made clear just how grand an adventure they had embarked on. With a prime location at the junction of the Missouri River and the Mississippi, and a population of nearly eighty thousand, Saint Louis was one of the biggest cities in the nation and by far the biggest in the West. Thousands of gold-seekers buying supplies and jabbering in excitement added to the hubbub. So did the voices of guides and trappers pitching their services to companies of greenhorns wary of venturing out on their own. Seventeen-year-old Lucius Fairchild thrilled to the “noise and din” all around him. “Every street is crowded with busy men and teams all intent on his own business taking care of No. 1.” With his head spinning, Fairchild marveled that Saint Louis must be “the largest town of its size in the world.”

  Whoops of excitement could not quite drown out the moans of the sick and dying. The hordes of newcomers had reached Missouri at the worst possible time, with the cholera epidemic in full force. “Nothing to be seen but one funeral after another,” one Saint Louis man wrote in his diary. Local people took to signing their letters “Take care, and don’t take the cholera.”

  For the gold-seekers, this was far worse than a bad omen at the outset of what they intended to be a glorious adventure. Unbeknownst to them, cholera was a disease of crowds and contaminated water. Both would be defining features of their marathon journey. The emigrants trembled at the thought of Indian raiders hunting them down, but it would be microscopic, never-yet-imagined bacilli that truly represented danger on the route west.

  Israel Lord’s journey began with a short jaunt, by steamboat, from his home in northern Illinois to Saint Joseph, Missouri. Lord was crabby and suspicious from the start, but then he usually was. “The towns on the river,” he wrote, “are miserable, dull, ill-built, unpainted, wretched looking affairs.” Saint Joseph struck him as a bit less shabby than the others, though most of its buildings were “not very well done.” For Lord this counted almost as a rave.

  Worse than the towns were his fellow gold-seekers. Where was their self-respect? Who these days gave a thought to dignity? These greenhorns had no knowledge of the West, no skills, no experience. All they had were brand-new outfits and, dangling from their waists like ornaments on a Christmas tree, as many weapons as they could find a home for.

  “Imagine to yourself a biped five feet four inches high,” Lord sputtered, “with big whiskers, red mustachios, steeple-crowned hat, buckskin coat done up with hedge-hog quills, belt, pistols, hatchet, bullet pouch, bowie knife twenty inches long, red shirt, spurs on left heel eight inches long, with a burr as large as a small sunflower.” Like the members of every older generation (he was forty-four), Lord looked with bewilderment and scorn at the fashions of the young—their hair, especially. “The boys take considerable pains to make themselves ridiculous,” he complained. “The most disgusting feature is the hair on the upper lip.”

  Lord had history on his side. By the time of the gold rush American men had been clean-shaven for about a century. Beards had been so rare for so long that one Philadelphia woman noted in her diary on an April day in 1795 that she had seen “two bearded men.” (Soon after, she noted with scarcely more wonder that she had seen an elephant.) Every signer of the Declaration of Independence was clean-shaven, and so was every president until Lincoln. Even Uncle Sam was always portrayed without a beard.

  The ’49ers would help change that. A gold-miner “neither shaves nor shears,” one young man wrote proudly. “He has no use for either razors or scissors. The tonsorial art is, in his estimation, a most reprehensible and unmanly innovation.” The boys swanning around Saint Joe, proudly displaying their new-grown whiskers, would soon become the grizzled prospectors of a thousand drawings and daguerreotypes. Israel Lord would have been furious had he foreseen that they would help start a new fashion and that generations to come would think of these ludicrous, scruffy, unshaved men as emblems of freedom and masculinity.

  The mustachioed bipeds who so irked Israel Lord had no patience for tut-tutting killjoys. Like schoolboys waiting for a bell that would set them free, they milled about Saint Joe and the other border towns in a state of jacked-up eagerness and frustration. “As far as we could see,” Joseph Bruff wrote on May 7, 1849, “over a great extent of vallies & hills, the country was speckled with the white tents and wagon-covers of the emigrants.” Desperate as they were to get on their way, they found themselves literally waiting for the grass to grow. No grass for their animals meant no fuel for their journey. Making matters worse, spring came late to the prairie in 1849.

  So the gold-seekers did their best to kill time and anything else that happened in view. Any deer or rabbit that showed its head drew a fusillade of shots. When they weren’t firing their new weapons, the emigrants tilted their hats, shined their boots, and marched off to pose for photographs. These were early days for photography, though, and the gold-seekers’ rowdy good cheer seldom came through in their pictures. Subjects had to keep still for so long that everyone looked stiff and miserable, like prisoners girding themselves before a firing squad. Holding a smile for minutes on end was nearly impossible, too, though many people kept their lips clamped shut for the camera anyway, to hide missing or blackened teeth.

  Talking, in the form of endless speculation,
proved the greatest diversion for the would-be adventurers. At any lull in the conversation, someone was sure to jump in with yet another story of California’s riches. One favorite tale related the sad fate of a miner who had found a lump of gold that weighed 839 pounds. The nugget was too heavy to budge but too valuable to leave, and its discoverer had last been seen sitting astride his treasure and offering $27,000 to anyone who would bring him a plate of pork and beans.

  Many such yarns had originally been the creation of inspired newspapermen. Did you hear about the diamond that rolled down a hill in California and killed five men? It was so large that it took two ships to carry it off. (The Cleveland Plain Dealer had carried the story, deadpan, on March 5, 1849.) In California, the Boston Herald reported, nails and bolts were made of solid gold, and golden frying pans hung in every kitchen. Hunters shot buffalo with golden bullets, and lumberjacks felled solid-gold trees using saws with diamond teeth.

  Newspapers weren’t alone in providing misinformation. Emigrants waiting to get under way pushed into crowded auditoriums to hear experts give talks on how to melt gold into brick-shaped ingots. The process required heavy cast-iron molds—Lecture Fee Does Not Include Price of Molds—that would prove useless in the goldfields, if they had not been thrown out long before. In a pinch, one rueful buyer wrote later, they might have made “a capital weapon to kill a bear with.” Con men and fast-talking merchants peddled large, complicated assemblages of gears and sieves that promised to take the labor out of separating gold from gravel. For those who bought, the swindlers offered the perfect followup—iron safes to store their gold in.