The Rush

by Edward Dolnick

  Life at sea was a new experience for Megquier and her fellow passengers. She marveled at the sight of flying fish and ran to look whenever anyone spotted a whale, but she never arrived in time. Nearly all the gold-seekers, at least those not felled by seasickness or trapped in steerage, discovered wonders of their own. In April, 1849, after seven weeks at sea, one Maine farmer touched land at an island off Brazil. He described an exotic fruit he had just seen for the first time: “We found benaners growing wild in the clearing & et our fill you eat only the core first peling off the skin which is bitter & contains little nurisshment.”

  Early on, even humdrum events stirred the travelers to gleeful anticipation. Aboard the ship Duxbury one winter morning, a young Massachusetts man named William DeCosta wrote eagerly about the delectable treats the cook had prepared. “Duff, plum duff for dinner this day!” he wrote in his diary on February 28, 1849. “Duff” was dough, flour mixed with salt water and pork fat, then dotted with raisins or sugar or meat, tied in a bag, and boiled for four or five hours. It tasted no better than it sounds, and the texture was worse still. (The names of shipboard dishes often hinted at their quality. Dandy funk and fruit grunt were desserts, for instance, consisting mainly of bread dough and broken-up biscuits.)

  For the moment, though, DeCosta and his new shipmates were thrilled. “The cry has gone through the ship,” he exclaimed, “and the echo is still ringing in my ears. What a treat it will be—every man’s eyes sparkle, one would suppose we had heard the cry of ‘Land ho!’ ”

  The gold-seekers would learn soon enough that food at sea was bland at best, unspeakable at worst. Duff, which was meant to be light and spongy, usually emerged from its long bath as a leaden mass or a pasty blob. “Mine were generally of the hardened species,” recalled one man who had worked briefly as a ship’s cook, “and the plums evinced a tendency to hold mass meetings at the bottom.”

  One traveler described shipboard meals as an endless succession of “wormy bread, putrid jerked beef, musty rice, and miserable tea.” Another described the dreadful fare in verse:

  It might be mule

  or the leg of a stool

  Or the horn of a mountain sheep

  Or a Spanish hide

  or cork chips fried

  Or a swordfish from the deep.

  To dream of plum duff was a beginner’s mistake, as if a college freshman today were to chortle in glee at the prospect of tuna casserole in the cafeteria. But on February 28, William DeCosta had been at sea only seventeen days, and visions of sugarplums danced in his head. A month later, he wrote sadly that “Sunday has become ‘Duff day,’ ” and “to eat it is like brick-laying.”

  As weeks turned to months, the excitement of life aboard ship gave way to ennui. Days consisted of long episodes of squalor and excruciating boredom when nothing at all happened, punctuated by bouts of terror when everything happened at once and storms tossed the ship about or fire burst out in the cargo bay. Mostly, it was changeless, enervating tedium. Young men nodded over their card games or placed bets on how many miles the ship would cover in the course of the day. They gathered in groups for halfhearted contests to see who could jump farthest. They retreated on their own to write in their journals or strum the banjo.

  The prospect of riches and adventure at journey’s end—if their journey ever did end—only heightened the frustration. One traveler, becalmed five days, found it “oppressive almost beyond endurance.” With the sun beating down and the sails barely fluttering, he felt trapped, as if “the ship and all that is in it are chained to one particular spot of the vast ocean, and all human exertion is futile.”

  From around the world, ships bound for California carried hordes of passengers every bit as hopeful, and as ignorant and frustrated, as Jennie Megquier and her fellow Americans. The gold rush was primarily an American story, but no nation found itself indifferent to California’s news. Gold-seekers from Australia, Chile, Mexico, France, England, and China swarmed to the diggings, pouring into California as though spilled from a giant scoop. The Americans and the foreigners had overlapping but not quite identical motives. By and large, Americans felt pulled to California, drawn by dreams of freedom and riches. Foreigners felt pushed from home, shoved out the door by war, hunger, and economic hardship.

  In 1848 and 1849 the world was falling apart. Australia had been hit by a depression, China by famine and seething political unrest, Europe by a series of devastatingly bad harvests. Europeans had dubbed the decade the Hungry Forties, as they watched the price of bread and potatoes, the staple foods of the poor, soar out of reach. “The old year ended in scarcity,” a Prussian minister wrote in January, 1847, “and the new one opens in starvation.” Food riots broke out in France, Italy, Germany, and Holland. Angry peasants broke into granaries and attacked merchants, landowners, and tax collectors. As the cost of food shot ever upward, people had little or no money left to spend on nonessentials, and the economy spiraled farther and farther downward. Thousands upon thousands of workers and small craftsmen lost their jobs, in an era when government help for the poor scarcely existed.

  For a brief time, it looked as if the grim story in Europe would have a glorious outcome. Democracy would supplant monarchy; freedom and equality would overcome feudalism and oppression. The year 1848 saw revolution break out in one European country after another, most dramatically in France. In February crowds of demonstrators barricaded the streets of Paris with cobblestones. Shouting “Vive la réforme!” and singing “La Marseillaise,” they brandished looted rifles and waved shards of iron wrenched from gates and railings. The king’s soldiers opened fire; the revolutionaries fought back. Within weeks, King Louis Philippe fled to England. Ecstatic crowds swarmed into the abandoned palace and jostled for a turn sitting on the throne. In the same month, February, 1848, Karl Marx published his Communist Manifesto. “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution,” he thundered.

  It was not to be. The revolutions of 1848 first raised hopes and then dashed them, as if a brief, giddy spring had suddenly transformed itself into a long, gray autumn. Across Europe reformers and radicals found that they had succeeded mainly in shaking the old regime out of its complacency. The economy continued to stagger, the same tired leaders clung to power, and the heady talk of liberty and workers’ rights vanished into memory. With few prospects at home—even worse, with yesterday’s jubilant visions turned to ash—countless Europeans clutched at the news of gold and made their way to California.

  Desperate as the times were, the gold-seekers did not come from the worst-off classes, who could not afford the fare to a distant land. The story took on the same shape abroad that it had in the United States—the poor could not afford to leave home in search of gold, and the rich had no reason to take the risk. The gold rush was a mass exodus of the restless, dissatisfied middle. The truly destitute found themselves shut off from this enticing possibility, as from so many others. In famine-racked Ireland, for example, in the five years between 1846 and 1851 a million people died of starvation and diseases brought on by malnutrition. With a chunk of bread an unattainable luxury for so many, a voyage across the ocean was as unimaginable as a trip to the moon. Men died with mouths stained green from grass. But in those miserable years a million slightly better-off emigrants did leave Ireland; in the year 1849 alone, ten thousand made their way to California.

  France played on the craving for a better life in an especially cynical way. After the French deposed their king, in 1848, they put a republican government in place. The newly elected president was a small, goateed, erratic figure named Louis Napoleon whose sole credential was that he was the nephew of the great Napoleon. Soon he named himself emperor.* Partly to move radicals and troublemakers safely out of the way, the government and a private firm helped organize a lottery, the Society of the Golden Ingots. Tickets cost one franc, roughly $3 in today’s money. First prize was 400,000 francs, and, what was even more exciting, five thousand lucky ticket holders would win a free tr
ip to California to make their fortune.

  Karl Marx railed against the scheme, out of fear that the lottery would lure the working class away from socialism. Rather than fight for revolution, Marx warned, France’s radicals would find themselves seduced by golden dreams. And so they were. Crowds of gawkers shoved against one another at 10 Rue Montmartre in Paris, lottery headquarters, jostling for a view through the window. Inside, a pile of gold ingots gleamed in the light. Eager buyers grabbed up millions of tickets, not only in France but also in England, Spain, and Italy. In the end, the Society of the Golden Ingots sent seventeen shiploads of emigrants to California to pan for gold.

  In England, even without a lottery to stir people’s dreams, hopes soared. This was the era of Dickens’s Hard Times, when grim factories swallowed dispirited workers who “went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.” No wonder so many grabbed onto the dazzling news. In Liverpool, an observer marveled at the ever-rising buzz of gold talk. “The gold excitement here and in London exceeds anything ever before known or heard of,” he wrote in January, 1849. “Nothing is heard or talked about but the new El Dorado.”

  And not only talked about. A new song, to the tune of “Yankee Doodle,” caught the rollicking mood. The casual bigotry was age-old, the jaunty optimism brand-new:

  Now’s the time to change your clime,

  Give up work and tasking;

  All who choose be rich as Jews,

  Even without asking.

  Go! Go now!, the song proclaimed, and it built to a rousing final chorus:

  Every one who digs or delves,

  Stout, and tough, and brawny,

  Buy a pick and help yourselves—

  Off to Californy.

  In Norway, in 1850, a newspaper printed a letter from a gold miner who wrote that in California he was making fifteen dollars a day; back home in Bergen his daily take had been all of ten cents. So many ships set off for California that one Norwegian newspaper pleaded with would-be gold miners to stay home. “Nothing in Norway’s condition—economic, political, or religious—makes emigration necessary.”

  In Hawaii the exodus began the moment the first rumors wafted ashore. (Rumors crawled by land and sped by sea. With the settled portions of the United States cut off from California by two thousand roadless miles, Honolulu had quicker access to California’s news than Saint Louis did.) Between June and October of 1848, before most of the world knew what was up, nineteen ships crammed with gold-seekers had left Hawaii for California. Few blamed them. Maybe California wasn’t the land of milk and honey, wrote one newspaper editor in Honolulu, in 1848, but “it abounds with wine and money, which some folks like better.”

  Versions of the same story played out across the globe. In Canton (now Guangzhou), China, ships’ brokers cast for passengers with leaflets baited with promises. Throughout the 1840s China had been pummeled by drought, flood, and famine. Against that backdrop, even a journey across the Pacific to an unknown land and an unknown fate beckoned temptingly.

  Chinese travel brokers had no need to remind potential emigrants of the horrors at home; they concentrated instead on fantasies of luxury. America was Gum Shan—Gold Mountain—and life on the far side of the ocean was soft. “Money is in great plenty and to spare,” one leaflet proclaimed. “There will be big pay, large houses, and food and clothing of the finest description.” Not only could you grow rich; just as amazingly, you could walk free. “It is a nice country, without mandarins or soldiers. All alike: big man no larger than little man.” For those who could not read, cartoon leaflets told the same enticing story in pictures.

  Twenty thousand Chinese borrowed the fare and bade goodbye to their families. They squeezed their way aboard old, run-down ships; steerage was so overcrowded that some passengers held “standee” tickets and had to sleep in shifts. The trip took six weeks if wind and weather cooperated, twice that long if storms blew up. The number of newcomers peaked in 1852. In a single two-day span that summer, two thousand Chinese men clambered ashore in San Francisco and walked into a new life.

  CHAPTER SIX

  AN ARMY ON THE MARCH

  ON MAY 5, 1849, Alonzo Delano noted contentedly in his journal that he and his companions were making good time. Fifteen miles a day was impressive, especially because every day seemed to bring another gale. Nobody from the East had seen windstorms like these. (On Nebraska highways along the same route today, high winds can spin cars and flip tractor-trailers onto their sides.) Delano’s men battled their way through the buffeting, their task made all the harder by a mistake in the wagons’ design. The canvas sides rose too high; as the wind howled across the prairie, it flung the wagons about like tiny sailboats in a storm. Delano saw the threat—“the force of the wind made the labor much harder on our cattle”—but he pooh-poohed it. Surely a bit of rejiggering the canvas would set things right.

  On the same day that he remarked on the gusting winds, Delano shrugged off the discovery that his wagon train had been scammed in Saint Louis. The bacon they had bought, he wrote, “began to exhibit more signs of life than we had bargained for.” The mild reaction was characteristic of the man. Delano was cheery in all but the most dire circumstances, a novice in the outdoors but willing to try anything, constantly wandering off on his own to scout for shortcuts or to survey the scenery (and nearly always managing to lose his way). In the same diary entry in which he brushed aside gale winds and moldy food, he noted matter-of-factly that “We found this morning… that one of Mr. Greene’s oxen had become too sore to travel.”

  Nearly all the next day was wasted chasing a runaway pony. It raced off while its dismayed owner ran behind shouting “Whoa!” The pony did stop after a minute or two, surprisingly, and the out-of-breath owner staggered up and reached out a hand to grab its bridle. Close, closer, and then… the escapee wheeled around and, in Delano’s words, “kicked up his heels like a dancing master.” After a few yards, the horse halted again, and the game resumed. The chase continued for several miles until finally the pony, “like a coy maiden suffered his resolute follower to put his arm around his neck, and bring him in.”

  Travelers of a more fretful frame of mind might have been disheartened by mishaps like these, but, then, they might not have started in the first place. More than optimism was involved, more even than optimism compounded by inexperience and youthful resilience. The gold-seekers seemed almost to welcome misfortune. They had to, because they could not permit themselves to think of their venture to California as an enormous bet, though in truth it was. Instead, they framed all the difficulties of the journey—and later the harsh labor of mining itself—as evidence of their own good faith. They weren’t gambling, which would have been indulgent and immoral; they were taking on a challenge that demanded hard work, stamina, and persistence, the very traits their culture valued most highly.

  So Delano’s company dismissed their missteps and decided to find a shortcut across the plains, the better to speed their way to California. Setting off on their own, they promptly headed in the wrong direction; eventually, they sorted out their mistake; by day’s end, they had managed to return to their starting point. Delano’s diary entry for May 8 concluded, “Distance gained, nothing.”

  Nearly all those who headed west endured similar misadventures. Every hurdle these novices encountered, no matter how low, posed a challenge. Delano and his companions could not cross a stream without someone careening into the water. (When one man fell in twice in a single day, the group proclaimed him the best marksman in the group, “for without firing a shot he had got a brace of ducks—certainly two duckings in one morning.”) The company’s most experienced hunter spotted an antelope and galloped after it, rifle at the ready. By the time he abandoned the chase, both the antelope and the wagon train had disappeared. A search party set out after the lost hunter. The search party d
isappeared. A second search party managed to rescue the rescuers.

  To make up for their meanderings, the company decided once again to find a shortcut. They lost their way again. Delano noted wearily that the whole procession had wandered the plains as lost as “the children of Israel in the wilderness.” Even so, they looked on their mistakes as mere blunders rather than disasters. “Fifty able-bodied men… were not to be easily discouraged,” Delano wrote proudly, in mid-May.

  Look how far they had come, and not only in miles. In what already seemed the remote past, before he had even reached Saint Joe, Delano had nearly been undone by the task of repairing his wagon. That should have been a routine job, the nineteenth-century counterpart of changing a tire. But “being unaccustomed to labor,” as he put it, Delano had struggled for a time and then collapsed into an exhausted heap.

  Now, after a bit of seasoning in the outdoors, he could pitch a tent in the rain and wake up dry! He could take a turn as a night guard, rifle at the ready. He could shoot a raccoon, skin it, gut it, and cook it over a fire. “While it is roasting, walk ten miles, fasting, to get an appetite,” Delano wrote proudly, “then tear it to pieces with your fingers, and it will relish admirably with a little salt and pepper, if you happen to have them.”

  The other companies crawling over America’s sea of grass felt the same glow of accomplishment. Several weeks into their journey, the emigrants had begun to grow confident in their know-how. The rituals that marked each day—the 4 a.m. wake-up, the cooking of breakfast and boiling of coffee, the break at midday, the setting-up of camp in the evening—had grown familiar. Reality was hard, with its storms and mud and dust, but the gold-seekers had come to feel they had made it through their growing pains. They could manage. They no longer looked like “a company of Christians bound on a business excursion,” one greenhorn wrote proudly. Instead, he and his companions were “sunburnt and bearded, with belts full of bowie knives and revolvers.” When a “perfect tornado” hit, these swarthy buccaneers reveled in the chaos. The sight of flying tents and tumbling wagons, one traveler wrote, “would have made a parson split his sides with laughter.”