The Rush

by Edward Dolnick

  The main goal, five hundred miles ahead, was the Humboldt River, which meandered some 350 miles across the Nevada desert. The Humboldt was a sluggish, narrow, soapy stream, more a vile canal than a proper river but essential nonetheless. It would carry them to the final obstacle, the Sierra Nevada. If they made it as far as the Humboldt, the emigrants knew from their guidebooks, they would cling to it and curse it with equal fervor.

  Until a decade or two before the gold rush, maps of the West had depicted a mighty river called the Buenaventura that ran all the way from the Rockies to the Pacific Ocean. As renowned an authority on the West as Frémont fully believed in its existence. In the winter of 1843–44 the Pathfinder set out to map this westward-flowing river. Confident at first, then bewildered, then horrified, he finally gave up his search in January, 1844.*

  No Buenaventura meant that there was no highway west, no river like the Platte for the emigrants to follow. As they’d headed toward the Rockies, nearly all the gold-seekers had followed essentially the same route. From here on, they would divide up, some opting for supposed shortcuts and others sticking with familiar routes, before coming back together again in Nevada.

  By 1849 guidebooks had at least deleted fictional rivers from their maps. But the result was a landscape dotted with blank spaces and dubious shortcuts. The gold-seekers took on the gaps with hope and guesswork, and some who guessed wrong paid with their lives.

  First came a sprawling, featureless wasteland called the Green River Basin, in Wyoming. Israel Lord found himself unable to muster the strength for a full-fledged denunciation of the landscape. “The whole country is one vast sand bed,” he noted dismissively, “poorly covered with sage and bunch grass.” But it had to be crossed. Worse still, the trek featured a forty-five-mile stretch of desert. There would be no water for humans or animals, except what they could carry, until they reached the Green River. The journey was best made at night, when it was comparatively cool. Alonzo Delano’s company started at four in the afternoon, hoping they could reach the Green in a single, twenty-four-hour marathon.

  Night fell and they plodded ahead in the darkness, through the sand and gravel, everyone on foot to spare the cattle. Dozens of dead oxen marked the trail. As the night wore on, conversation died away. Occasionally someone cursed, but after a time there were no human sounds at all, and finally no noises of any sort, hour upon hour, except the creaking of wheels and the howling of wolves.

  By daybreak, Delano’s company had made it halfway. They stopped to give the animals water and then took to the road again. At the start Delano had tried to fill a rubber bag with water for himself, but it had burst when he poured in one last bucket. He did without. The dust was ankle-deep. A gale began to blow. The men shuffled along like convicts in chains and tried to wipe their eyes and nostrils clean. “Our faces, hair, and clothes looked as if we had been rolling in a heap of dry ashes.”

  The date was July 2, 1849. Delano noted later that it was his forty-third birthday, “the hardest one of all my life.” He had walked fifty-five miles in a day, without sleeping, and he had made it to the Green River.

  Green River was a milestone, but hardly one to make the heart soar. After an all-night march of his own, Israel Lord did his best to dismiss the whole trek with a brief, bitter joke. “All is dry, dry, dry. Let those who are troubled with water in their cellars move their houses up here.” Such restraint in the face of genuine hardship was typical of Lord, whose fury was stirred only by trifles. The sight of an unshaven jaw or a garish shirt could move him to red-faced outrage; a desert crossing inspired only quiet fortitude.

  Generally, though, when the gold-seekers looked around at Green River they felt more inclined to slump in despair than to grit their teeth and carry on. “This whole region is a miserable, dreary waste,” wrote John Banks, a member of Ohio’s Buckeye Rover company. “You seldom see a bird and he can scarcely warble for sadness.”

  But even here, the rush showed its variety. Few of the gold-seekers felt much like warbling, but some in the giant crowds did find an entrancing picture where most saw only an empty frame. “Our road led in sight of the snow mantled peaks of the Rocky Mountains,” wrote Eleazer Ingalls, and as he trudged through the desert night he marveled at how the moonlight transformed the snow and ice into “mountains of molten silver.”

  A lawyer with a lyrical streak, Ingalls delighted in the stone-clad vistas. “Green River presents the most romantic scenery in the world; it is deep set in the midst of bluffs that take the shapes of towers, castles, cities, and of every imaginable work of art.” From the bluffs, the river “looks like a silver thread winding through a green landscape.… It would be a paradise for a landscape painter.”

  Joseph Bruff, too, found that the rushing river seen from above “appeared like a curved silver thread.” Then he turned his gaze to the “perilous descent” the wagons would have to take down the steep bluffs, and that put an end to the poetry. On both sides of the trail down to the river, the way was lined with “fragments of disasters in the shape of upset wagons, wheels, axles.” Earlier that morning, the path had been so steep that the mules had sat on their haunches and inched their way downhill. Now Bruff’s men had come to an even sharper drop, one-third of a mile long, over sand, loose stones, and chunks of slate. Slowly they descended—very slowly.

  All safe at the water’s edge, finally, with no one hurt and no runaway wagons to join the roadside junkyard. “One of the hardest tramps I ever took,” Bruff wrote, “and extremely hard on the mules.”

  Now came an unexpected break. The Bear River Valley, in what is today Idaho’s southeast corner, charmed even Israel Lord. The river wandered through the mountains “until it opens into the most romantic and beautiful valley we have yet passed, or that I ever saw,” wrote Lord, who tended to find more solace in landscape than in his fellow human beings. The valley was perhaps sixty miles long and twenty across, Lord reckoned, and “covered with timber” and “dotted with patches of snow.” A large lake gleamed a dark blue so enticing that for a moment Lord let down his guard.

  In roughly the same area, Alonzo Delano gazed about in delight, briefly disoriented by the first grove of trees he had seen since crossing the Missouri. “For more than two months we had been traveling, exposed to the fervid heat of the sun or the cold and stormy blasts along the Platte, without a leaf to offer protection.” But now they had come to “deep green foliage” and shade and quiet and birds. These familiar sights offered a bittersweet solace, a short-lived diversion from the endless labor of walking mile upon mile, day upon day. Delano dissolved into a fit of homesickness, consumed with memories of the “happy and favored land” he had left behind.

  Such wistfulness was only one strand in a complex braid of emotions. Delano and all those who had thrown away their old lives yearned for home, but at the same time they took pride in knowing that they had left home far behind, in every sense. They had seen sights—mountain panoramas, especially—that surpassed anything that anyone back east had ever seen. “When we commenced the journey, trifling hills were considered great obstacles,” wrote Eleazer Ingalls, “but now we lock our hind wheels and slide down a thousand feet, over rocks and through gullies, with as much sang froid as a school boy would slide down a snowbank.”

  But all such boasting came with a queasy undernote. Pride and trepidation rubbed uneasily together. “You may think you have seen mountains and gone over them,” one gold-seeker wrote to his family back in Missouri, from Idaho, “but you never saw anything but a small hill compared to what I have crossed over, and it is said the worst is yet to come.” In the next sentence, he reminded himself (and his family) not to lose heart: “But never mind. Gold lies ahead.”

  Throughout his journey west, the indomitable Joseph Bruff had kept up with his sketches, his notebooks, and his counting and collecting and recording. (Even during the gruesome, waterless, all-night desert crossing to the Green River, he had paused, when it was still light enough to see, to gather fossils.
) Almost regardless of his company’s plight, Bruff found something to engage his curiosity or distract his mind. He might take note of dire news in one sentence—“Men & oxen suffering much from dust, heat, and sandy trail”—and, in the next, bounce cheerily to a description of his newfound fossils.

  At one campsite, Bruff was delighted to discover “innumerable large black mice,” all of them temptingly “fat and very soft & silky.” He roasted one and “found it very tender and sweet.” Two days later he found an abandoned wagon and near it, on the ground, a small piece of apple pie. Delicious! Near Soda Springs, Idaho, the “character of the country very interesting and picturesque to me.” Water sprayed into the air in natural fountains and “only needed lemon syrup to render it perfect soda water.”

  If no other distractions presented themselves, Bruff could always revive his spirits by communing with whatever dog the company had recently adopted. A large yellow mutt named Bull was the latest favorite. Bull’s routine was to beg his breakfast in the morning and then, when the men began the tedious process of hitching up the mules, to start ahead on his own. He would find a shady spot, doze off, and then amble on again when the train drew near. Bruff came to look to Bull for help in choosing a spot for the company’s midday rest. “Bull would come up and whining look towards a stream, and bark at the train,” Bruff noted proudly, “as much as to say, ‘Halt here, it is time.’ ”

  But few emigrants could match Bruff’s stamina. Many of the gold-seekers now passed over their sufferings in a few exhausted words. Alonzo Delano sagged almost visibly. “Weary, weary, weary,” he wrote on July 17, not far from Soda Springs. The next day, “with nothing in the view to cheer the traveler,” he sunk even lower, his disappointment all the keener “after having passed through the fine valley of Bear River.” They had reached Fort Hall, a trading post run by the Hudson’s Bay Company and, in the glory years of the fur trade, an always-bustling bazaar. Now the fort saw more emigrants than trappers, but Delano came up empty—earlier arrivals had cleared the shelves.

  He settled for information instead. How much farther? Seven hundred miles, his informants at Fort Hall told him. This made sense, but it was disheartening news even so. The landscape, which only weeks before had startled the emigrants with its new forms, had lost its power to distract and console. “Through burning sand, and in dense clouds of dust, we pursued our way,” Delano wrote, “with the scenery of the plain but little varied.”

  They met other travelers who were worse off still. “We began to see many traveling on foot, begging their way—having broken down their animals and having no way forward but to walk.” Those few in Delano’s company who had anything to spare offered up meager handouts. Eight days later Delano met an especially sorry wanderer, whose story was biblical in its torments. His oxen had died, and he had bought a horse. His horse had died, and now he was on foot, alone, limping his way along, his only possession a bag of flour tied around his neck.

  The gold-seekers dragged themselves past the towering, mysterious stone monoliths of what is now City of Rocks National Reserve, Idaho, and across the blisteringly hot and misleadingly named Thousand Springs Valley, where the few springs were boiling hot or icy cold.

  Ahead lay Nevada and Nevada’s own River Styx, the Humboldt.

  Jennie and Thomas Megquier sat in Panama City, stranded, waiting for a ship. “Here we are yet in this miserable old town with about 2,000 Americans all anxiously waiting for a passage to the gold regions,” Jennie wrote her daughter on May 12, 1849. Occasionally a ship did turn up and take away a few fortunate passengers, but the flood of new arrivals more than made up for them. The Megquiers had tickets for the steamer California, which seemed to have vanished.

  Two weeks before, a whaler had turned up, lured by rumors of crowds of desperate passengers willing to pay virtually any price to reach San Francisco. (The captain had unloaded his oil in Peru and sped to Panama.) The Megquiers decided to sell their tickets for the California and take their chances on the whaler, but its departure was delayed, and then someone spotted the California on the horizon. The Megquiers changed plans again. The steamship drew near. Wrong ship. The Megquiers waited.

  As they sat fretting, the steamer Oregon arrived from San Francisco. Homeward-bound argonauts spilled ashore, and the waiting crowds pummeled them with questions about life in the diggings. Jennie passed along the “great news” to her daughter in a breathless word geyser worthy of Molly Bloom. “The passengers that come in here are all loaded with gold, but they have to endure many hardships, and it is almost impossible to get a shelter for your head, but womens help is so very scarce that I am in hopes to get a chance by hook or crook to pay my way, but some women that have gone there are coming home because they can get no servants to wait on them, but a woman that can work will make more money than a man.”

  In the meantime, with the California lost, the Megquiers did their best to distract themselves with sightseeing. Jennie, a glutton for all things new, finally spotted her whales, and schools of porpoises, too. She and Thomas and some companions visited an island nine miles off the coast, Jennie exulting at the sight of unfamiliar trees, lush flowers, and pelicans “in flocks so large they look like a cloud, when rising from the ground.” Everyone slept on the floor or in hammocks, with lizards scurrying by “in every direction.”

  From the moment she left Maine behind, Jennie had wallowed in new experiences; the unknown was not a threat but a glorious opportunity. In her letters home, she gleefully passed along offhand descriptions of sights that she knew would induce squeals and shivers. “We killed two scorpions in our sleeping room,” she wrote. “The Doctor was stung by one.” Not a crisis. “Another insect which is rather troublesome, gets into your feet and lays its eggs. The Dr. and I have them in our toes—did not find it out until they had deposited their eggs in large quantities; the natives dug them out and put on the ashes of tobacco—nothing unpleasant in it, only the idea of having jiggers in your toes.”

  At a picnic one day, in the shade of a mango tree, someone spotted an enormous snake climbing on a branch just overhead. “One of the party shot him,” Jennie wrote. “He measured nine feet, about as large as my arm a little above the wrist.” Later in the day, a second giant snake slunk down a nearby tree. It, too, was killed. “The gentlemen took them to the village,” Jennie teased, “to show what big things they had done.”

  Megquier liked to confound expectations, but her toughness was real. While traveling, especially, she shrugged off hardships with proud disdain. (One hotel room had “scarce light enough to see the rats and spiders,” she noted offhandedly, and grim meals with “bristles on the pork and weavels in the rice” did not faze her. “My stomach is not lined with pink satin,” she boasted.) In an age when men ruled and women curtsied, the New England lady in the long dress had more strength and spark than nearly all the gun-toting adventurers she would meet on her way.

  When the Megquiers returned from their stint fending off snakes and scorpions, they found that the crowd waiting with them for passage to the goldfields had grown even larger. Where was the California? The Megquiers would have wept at the answer. The California had sailed from New York in October, 1848, bound for San Francisco. The plan called for the ship to ply a Pacific circuit, back and forth on a monthly Panama City–San Francisco–Oregon route. But that scheme had fallen apart.

  When the California had first set out to sea, no one in the East believed that California’s gold was real. The two-hundred-foot paddle wheeler left New York carrying a grand total of six passengers. Even those six had no interest in California; each planned to depart at an intermediate stop along the way. Then, in December, President Polk gave his State of the Union speech touting California’s gold.*

  On the day of Polk’s announcement, December 5, the California was fighting its way through storms in the Strait of Magellan, at South America’s southern tip. By the time the California steamed into port at Valparaiso, Chile, that city was in a gold frenzy. Captain
Cleaveland Forbes, who had been warned that hordes of ticket-holding passengers were awaiting him farther north, in Panama, passed the Chileans by. But when he reached Callao, Peru (now called Lima), Forbes gave in to the throng and took seventy Peruvians aboard.

  In the meantime, in Panama City 1,500 angry, impatient men spent their days scanning the horizon for the California. (The Megquiers, who had yet to reach Panama City, were not among them.) The ship’s capacity was 250. On January 17, 1849, the California arrived; the crowd learned there was room for only a few of them. Disaster was averted when the captain assured the furious Americans that they would not be left to sulk in Panama while foreigners got rich on American gold. The Peruvians would not be thrown overboard or locked up—these had been popular suggestions—but they would give up their cabins and sleep on deck instead. The California would carry as many Americans to the goldfields as could squeeze aboard.

  In the end, some 250 Americans clambered onto the California, where they joined the 150 passengers already on board and filled the ship far beyond its safe capacity. The price for a single ticket had risen as high as $1,000. The California reached San Francisco on February 28. All the passengers raced off to make their fortune. So did all the crew except a single engineer.

  Which left the California in need of a new crew before she could return to Panama for another batch of argonauts. And left the Megquiers, and everyone else with tickets to San Francisco on the California, in limbo.