The Rush

by Edward Dolnick

  Even stolid oxen proved nearly impossible for the novices to manage. On the day they set out on their journey to the goldfields, Samuel Rutherford Dundass and the rest of his party of Ohio greenhorns rose early, the better to make a fast start. “Owing chiefly to some difficulty in yoking” the oxen, first minutes and then hours slipped by. The animals ran into trees, collided with other teams, and set off determinedly in the wrong direction. In their delight at finding themselves in the hands of “total strangers to driving,” the oxen nearly flipped their wagons.

  Other newbies had an even harder time. A glamorous, much-envied outfit called the Pioneer Line would prove one of the great fiascos of the whole gold rush saga. The Pioneer Line was a for-profit venture that offered to take all the work and worry from the overland journey. For a bargain rate of $200 per traveler, the company would provide wagons, animals, and meals for a quick dash to the goldfields. The “gay and festive” passengers, the promotional literature declared, would have only to sit back and enjoy the scenery. A Pennsylvania man named Bernard Reid, a schoolteacher turned surveyor, was one of 125 gold-seekers who quickly plunked down his money.

  The entrepreneurs who had organized the Pioneer Line purchased three hundred mules, but only one had ever pulled a wagon. Breaking the mules turned out to be immensely difficult, Reid noted, since the mules “had not given their consent to the ceremony.” When the wagon master, named Mose, tackled one especially formidable mule with his bare hands, the startled animal burst into a gallop “with Mose’s body streaming through the air like a ship’s pennant in a high wind, and so they went, mule and man, round and round the ring, the spectators cheering wildly.”

  The Pioneer’s Mexican cowboys were experts with their lassos, but even they were outmatched by the mules. “A vaquero would single out a victim and throw his lasso. If it missed, it sent the whole herd galloping around the arena,” Reid observed. “If it caught, the galloping went on the same, or faster if possible,” except this time with the vaquero lashed to the runaway and doing his best to hold on. “Half a dozen circuses combined in one would have been tame in comparison,” Reid wrote happily.

  The circus ran late on the first day of what had been advertised as a sixty-day sprint to California. By the time the last Pioneer wagon in line set out, the first wagon had already pulled up to make camp for the night. This first night’s camp was one mile from the starting point.

  These misadventures would have delighted many stay-at-homes, who envied and mocked the gold-seekers in roughly equal measure. The genteel and hugely popular Godey’s Lady’s Book—the magazine’s editor was the author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”—spoke for many who could scarcely abide the ’49ers. Thousands were going to California, scolded Godey’s, “who have never dug a rood of garden in their lives, and never slept out of the home.”

  To spoof the gold rush greenhorns, Godey’s created a character named Jeremiah Saddlebags and made him the star of one of the first comic strips. A city dweller to his core, Jeremiah has not the least notion of what life on the road and in the mines will demand. He prepares for the journey by carefully selecting the white gloves and silk tie that best set off his appearance. (He spoils the effect somewhat by shaving his head, to thwart any Indians who might be after his scalp.) His palms are soft, his muscles puny.

  And, as if he were not already ludicrous enough to make Godey’s readers roll their eyes, Jeremiah was a “low-paid clerk.” So were a great many of his real-life counterparts on the road to California. Small wonder. In the mid-1800s, a clerk’s work was excruciatingly dull. The most soul-sucking cubicle job in today’s world hardly compares. Offices had no typewriters, no adding machines, and, worst of all, no carbon paper or copiers. What they had were clerks with quill pens. Men in the nineteenth century wore out their lives in paperwork, copying towers of wills and mortgages by hand in duplicate and triplicate. (In his great story “Bartleby, the Scrivener”—a scrivener was a human copying machine—Melville describes poor, forlorn Bartleby “copying by sunlight and by candlelight… silently, palely, mechanically.”)

  Any spirited person sentenced to such a fate would yearn to break free. The main virtue of “the servile trade of quill driving,” as one clerk described his job, was that most of the alternatives were just as bad. In Wisconsin, teenaged Lucius Fairchild could hardly bear to think that he was stuck behind the counter of his father’s store, “showing rags to the ladies of Madison.” Rural life was no better. In Mark Twain’s Hannibal and in countless towns like it, “the day was a dead and empty thing,” despite all the era’s talk of progress. The sun beat down, a fly buzzed against a window, the town drunk rolled over, life drowsed on.

  Even without the lure of gold, countless young men would have filled their days with dreams of adventure and a change of scenery. But there was gold, and it proved almost irresistible. No one has ever matched Mark Twain in capturing his peers’ desperation to get away. A few years too young to venture off to California himself, he watched, yearningly, as gold-seekers on their way west poured through Hannibal in 1849. More tantalizing still, eighty Hannibal residents joined the exodus and set off, too. For young Sam Clemens and thousands of young men like him, the notions of travel, and the West, and striking it rich set the head spinning.

  “I was young, and I envied my brother,” he wrote later, when Orion Clemens finagled a job as secretary to the governor of the newly created Nevada Territory. “He was going to travel! I never had been away from home, and that word ‘travel’ had a seductive charm for me. Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the Far West, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kind of adventures, and maybe get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero and he would see the gold mines and the silver mines, and maybe go about of an afternoon when his work was done, and pick up two or three pailfuls of shining slugs, and nuggets of gold and silver on the hillside. And by and by he would become very rich, and return home by sea, and be able to talk as calmly about San Francisco and the ocean, and ‘the isthmus’ as if it was nothing of any consequence to have seen those marvels face to face. What I suffered in contemplating his happiness, pen cannot describe.”

  Envied by nearly everyone and still half astonished at their own nerve, the emigrants could not help strutting a bit. And who could blame them? One day they had been drones trapped in an office or stuck on the farm, and the next they were free, independent men, roaming the wilderness, sleeping under the stars, and destined for fortune.

  So they told themselves, at any rate, and in hard times they bucked one another up with tales from the land of gold. But their visions of roaming free collided almost at once with the mundanities of traveling in a vast, sluggish procession. We think of the gold-rushers as lone adventurers—solitary prospectors crossing an empty continent in search of fortune—and they had entertained similar ideas themselves. Many of them did write early on, as Alonzo Delano had, about their solitude and loneliness. They quickly learned better.

  Since the grass set the schedule, everyone had started west at the same time, and even the vast prairies did not swallow up the multitudes. The topography, especially in the early stages, funneled all travelers into a narrow channel. “As we wended our way up the valley of the Platte,” a gold-seeker wrote, “one could look back for miles and miles on a line of wagons, the sinuous line with varicolored wagon covers resembling a great serpent crawling and wriggling up the valley.”

  The wagons crept along at a slower-than-walking pace, with seldom a chance to pass. (“Once in line you stayed in line all day,” one emigrant groused.) Drivers shouted at one another to get moving; whips cracked; interlopers who had stopped for a repair or a meal angled to cut back in line, and their rivals maneuvered to squeeze them out. Trains sometimes drove deep into the night, straining to see in the darkness, so desperate were they to get ahead
of the rivals who had hobbled their progress all day.

  On one occasion a group of emigrants found themselves stuck behind a company of some fifty wagons, “and we either had to stay poking behind them in the dust or hurry up and drive past them.” The impatient travelers passed the caravan, continued a good distance, and stopped to eat lunch. Wrong call. The slow group had continued plodding along. “While we were eating we saw them coming. All hands jumped for their teams, saying they had earned the road too dearly to let them pass again.” Road rage at two miles an hour, with two thousand miles to go.

  The spur was not simply the urge to be first in line, for bragging rights at day’s end. The farther back in line, the more the dirt and grit flung in your face. This dust was a great scourge and, incidentally, another sign of just how crowded the trail had grown. “Our train consisted only of six wagons, but we were never alone,” Luzena Wilson wrote. “Ahead, as far as the eye could reach, a thin cloud of dust marked the route of the trains, and behind us, like the trail of a great serpent, it extended to the edge of civilization.”

  Pulverized by wagon wheels and then kicked up by countless hooves, the dirt and dust hung in clouds like fog. (Perhaps the image of a wagon train as a snake turns up in so many diaries not just because the trains wound their way along but because the emigrants found themselves condemned to creep in the dirt.) On many a bright, sunny day, one emigrant remarked, he had walked next to his wagon and been unable to make out the oxen in the murk just a few paces ahead. When the wind kicked up, it hurled dirt and sand “like fine hail.” The travelers choked on the grit and stumbled along red-eyed, some of them in makeshift goggles made from window glass jammed into leather frames.

  When the rains came, the dirt turned to mud. This was not a relief but simply a change of hardship. The animals, who had struggled to drag heavy wagons through thick sand and deep ruts cut into the dry ground, now slipped through heavy, sucking, squelching muck that tugged at their hooves and grabbed at the wagon wheels. Wagons sunk to the axles, immobile. Mules and oxen flailed. Drenched, exhausted, and frustrated, the emigrants unharnessed animals from one wagon and yoked them to the mired one. Animals pulled with all their might; humans leaned their shoulders into the work and shoved. With enough pushing and heaving, the wagon would lurch free, and the animals could be yoked back where they belonged. Then the train would move ahead a few paces and run aground again.

  If the rain kept up, camp was a grim affair. With a downpour making it impossible to build a fire, dinner at the end of a grueling day would be beef jerky and hardtack washed down with muddy water, while squeezed into the wagon or cowering beneath it. Come nightfall, sleeping space was hard to find. The wagons were small and cramped and, in any case, the covers leaked. Tents were no better. The best alternative was to bed down under the wagon, on a piece of canvas or a blanket, and hope for sleep to come quickly.

  In these first weeks on the trail, there were not even any landmarks to serve as beacons. Even today, driving through Nebraska at eighty miles an hour following the emigrants’ route, you can scarcely tell you’re making progress. The landscape is flat to the horizon, and the view is grass in all directions. (The novelist Willa Cather moved to Nebraska as a child, from the East, and never forgot her initial shock. Nebraska was “the end of everything,” she’d moaned, and “as bare as a piece of sheet iron.”) Tooling down the road in a car, breathing cool, clean air and sipping an icy drink, a driver covers as much distance in an hour as a gold-seeker did in a week’s hard walking.*

  There was no good way to travel to California, but there was a choice of bad ways. Those who lived inland immediately thought of wagons drawn by animals. Near the coast, thousands upon thousands opted for travel by ship. Newspaper editors and guidebook authors hurried to lay out the options. Maps showed the various sea routes from New York to San Francisco and explained their pros and cons.

  To travel by way of Cape Horn, around South America, was fairly safe but maddeningly slow. The route covered nearly fifteen thousand miles—five times the overland distance—and took five months. Passengers suffered through a long, storm-racked passage around the Horn and then a mind-numbing stretch of motionless torpor in the tropical heat off the west coast of South America, where the sun beat down and the winds failed and ships wallowed in place.

  To go by way of Panama was faster but riskier and more expensive. You sailed to Panama, then traveled some sixty miles overland, and completed your journey on a second ship. The land leg was the hardest. One mapmaker remarked matter-of-factly that “the swamps, stagnant waters, reptiles etc. render walking across next to impossible.” To sail to Mexico instead, and then cross overland to the Pacific coast, was faster still but even less inviting, especially bearing in mind the lingering hostility from the just-concluded Mexican-American War. “To prevent danger of being attacked by robbers through Mexico,” the same mapmaker advised, “persons should go in parties of 50 or more.”

  A journey by sea had considerable advantages over a trip by wagon, though both took about five months. A shipboard traveler could start at once, for one thing, rather than wait for spring to come to the prairie. In a race, this was no small factor. And, as a fare-paying passenger, you would have little to do for much of the journey but pass the time while someone else carried you toward your goal. The overland emigrants, trudging their way along step by weary step, could only dream of such luxury.

  Shipbuilders and shipowners raced to capitalize on gold fever. With hordes of passengers thrusting their money at anyone who would carry them westward, California-bound ships jammed every port. A few were elegant affairs, like the new and roomy Edward Everett out of Boston, named for Harvard’s president, which boasted a library and a troupe of musicians who performed each evening.* Many were converted whalers whose opportunistic owners saw more profit in hauling gold-struck passengers than in hunting fifty-ton beasts with hand-flung harpoons. A fair number were ancient, barely seaworthy relics that had been built to carry cargo. Passengers shoved their way aboard these floating wrecks only to find themselves crammed into the dark, dank space between decks. There they slept in makeshift bunks and gulped for fresh air at hastily cut hatches.

  Ships that plied the Panama route were especially shoddy, because shipowners gambled that nearly any tub could survive the short haul. “Nine men occupied a space of but six feet square,” wrote a dismayed passenger on the steamship Crescent City, newly embarked on his first sea voyage. “The farmers in bringing into our villages dead hogs for market, dispose of them with as much regard to their comfort, as dictated the arrangement of our sleeping accommodations.” Crammed belowdecks, 160 men fought for elbow room and groaned in misery in a stinking slosh of bilgewater and vomit.

  On such hulks, safety was no sure thing. One singularly unlucky traveler, a ship captain’s wife named Dolly Bates, sailed on three different California-bound vessels, and all three caught fire or sank at sea. She left Baltimore in July, 1850, “with bright hopes and glowing anticipations,” but did not reach San Francisco for a full nine months.*

  Jennie and Thomas Megquier, setting out from Maine, scarcely gave a thought to inching across the continent in a jolting wagon. They would travel by ship, but by which route? Everyone had opinions, and every opinion was contaminated with rumor and guesswork. Newspapers warned that to sail round Cape Horn would mean week after week squeezed tight against your fellow passengers belowdecks and tossed by towering waves. Panama or Mexico would mean heat and disease and dugout canoes and churning rivers. “You must not believe half you hear,” Jennie noted crossly, as she pondered the gloomy alternatives.

  On December 17, 1848, her last day in Maine, Jennie wrote a letter to the friend who would be watching over her children. Angie, at seventeen, was the oldest (and only nineteen years younger than her mother); John was fifteen, Arthur nine. Jennie’s decision that the best thing she could do for her children was to leave them and travel to the far side of a broad continent, perhaps for years, tore at her. And
yet she could see no other path to financial security.

  “Sunday night, lonesome as death,” she began her letter. It had been a bleak day, and she had spent it dutifully. “I have been to church all day to please the Deacon”—this was a reference to her father, deacon of the local Baptist church—and she resented the “sacrifice” of her time. She had cried, she admitted, but she made sure that no one saw her tears. “I thought it best to keep them back for my own amusement when I am alone.”

  The reluctance to display emotion was simple good manners, as practiced in New England, but the wry, aloof tone was something more. That was Jennie all over, and it was an act of will as much as a matter of style. Her preference was to tame a predicament not by denying its existence but by holding it at a distance and viewing it with a cool, ironic eye. In the trials that lay ahead, she would draw strength again and again from the same tactic. Melancholy had its temptations, but yielding was unthinkable.

  The Megquiers opted for Panama. They would take a steamer from New York to the village of Chagres, on the Atlantic side, then find a way to cross the isthmus, and then take another ship to San Francisco. “It is a long route and a dangerous one,” Jennie wrote a hometown friend in Maine on February 18, 1849, just before setting out from New York, “but I have not regretted for one moment that we left your peaceful village.”

  Nor would she.

  The Megquiers left New York City on March 1, 1849, in a “splendid steamship” called the Northerner. Almost at once, “a fine northeast storm” hit the ship, and for three days the passengers took to their beds in misery. Then the skies cleared and the mood lightened. “There is about two hundred gentleman and I am the only lady,” Jennie wrote cheerfully, “and in that case I receive every attention.” She had, she went on, “plenty of company all to myself.”