The kitchen in Luzena Wilson’s hotel took up one room. The rest of the space had a less familiar look. Decades later she could still conjure up her first peek inside. “Imagine a long room, dimly lighted by dripping tallow candles stuck into whisky bottles, with bunks built from floor to ceiling on either side,” she wrote.
This single room, jammed with miners, was virtually the entire hotel. The bar stood in one corner. Two or three miners clutched their drinks. An elegantly dressed barman, resplendent in blue shirt and flaming red sash, presided over the rows of bottles and the collection of glassware. A barkeep was an important figure, and his loud voice and imperious manner conveyed that message to the greenest newcomer.
In the opposite corner several men sat around a table, playing cards. A clumsy fiddler wrestled with a tune called “Money Musk” (“Whirls Mary Martin all in blue / Calico gown and stockings new”), while half a dozen men did their best to dance. A homesick young man, not yet old enough to shave, sat by a candle reading a letter and crying.
Around the edge of the room, stuffed in their bunks like letters in the pigeonholes of a post office, were the hotel’s residents. “Some of the men lay sick in their bunks,” Wilson wrote, “some lay asleep, and out from another bunk, upon this curious mingling of merriment and sadness stared the white face of a corpse.”
No one had bothered even to pull a blanket over the dead man’s face. “Nobody missed him. They would bury him tomorrow to make room for a new applicant for his bunk. The music and the dancing, the card-playing, drinking, and swearing went on unchecked by the hideous presence of Death. His face grew too familiar in those days to be a terror.”
From here on, this would be Luzena’s world.
Luzena Wilson’s moment of jaw-dropping astonishment at California’s wealth passed quickly. Most new arrivals stumbled around a while longer, happy and befuddled, content to gawk at the riches on display around them.
“Every new-comer in San Francisco is overtaken with a sense of complete bewilderment,” wrote Bayard Taylor, only twenty-four years old but already a star at the New York Tribune, which had sent him to cover the biggest story of the age. Taylor was a cosmopolitan figure and a quick study—he had published a book of poetry at nineteen, and roamed Europe on foot for two years in his early twenties and written a much-admired book on his wanderings—and he took pride in thriving wherever life took him. A hut in Panama, with pigs snuffling around a dirt floor, made for a fine excursion; so did a palace in Vienna. But San Francisco sent him reeling. “One knows not whether he is awake or in some wonderful dream. Never have I had so much difficulty in establishing, satisfactorily to my own senses, the reality of what I saw and heard.”
The sights confronting him at every turn, Taylor wrote, would strike his readers as make-believe. Out of fear for his credibility, he went on, he hesitated to report what he’d seen. He had met a soldier, a Mexican War veteran, who was reputedly a millionaire with an income of $50,000 a month. Another man had died in debt to the tune of $41,000; by the time his affairs were settled, his real estate holdings had gained so much in value that, after his heirs had settled his bills, they still had $40,000 a year left over.
Taylor had come from New York, but the pace he now encountered was like nothing he’d ever seen. San Francisco began bustling at sunrise, and everyone raced at top speed through the day. “You speak to an acquaintance—a merchant, perhaps,” Taylor wrote. “He utters a few hurried words of greeting, while his eyes send keen glances on all sides of you; suddenly he catches sight of somebody in the crowd; he is off, and in the next five minutes has bought up half a cargo, sold a town lot at treble the sum he gave, and taken a share in some new and imposing speculation.”
Entrepreneurs with big dreams cast about for backers, but everyone, regardless of station, joined the golden scramble. In the street in front of the grandly named United States Hotel, Taylor watched a dozen men on their hands and knees gouge up clumps of ground with knives and then crumble the dirt to powder in their hands. They blew the dust away and scanned their palms for specks of gold. The gold had leaked from miners’ bags or been swept out the door by someone wielding a broom. In a single day these urban miners could earn five dollars. If the streets weren’t actually paved with gold, they were at least littered with it.*
Everything was “hurry and skurry,” as one newcomer put it, and all the commotion centered on money. Every conversation turned on how one could make a fortune; every dream turned on how one could spend it. “It is impossible to witness this excess and dissipation of business, without feeling something of its influence,” Taylor wrote. “The very air is pregnant with the magnetism of bold, spirited, unwearied action, and he who but ventures into the outer circle of the whirlpool is spinning, ere he has time for thought, in its dizzy vortex.”
Jennie Megquier felt a bit dizzy herself. She had opened a small boardinghouse in San Francisco, and she scarcely had time to catch her breath. “People seem to be very near crazy. God only knows where it will end, some days we have made fifty dollars but I have to work mighty hard.”
She thrived on the speed and the commotion. San Francisco had materialized almost instantly, like a stage set of a city wheeled into place between the acts. Where two days ago a lot had stood vacant, a visitor might find a store packed with merchandise and jammed with customers. Over the course of those two days, a total of forty new buildings might have risen up. Anyone trying to take a census would have been trampled by newcomers—between 1849 and 1851, San Francisco’s population would grow some thirtyfold.
“The most busy streets in New York will not compare with the business here,” Megquier wrote excitedly in September, 1849. “Goods of all kinds nearly fill the streets & yards.” Six weeks later, the pace had only picked up. “There never was a place where money is spent so lavishly as here.” Megquier had seen a single pair of boots sell for ninety-six dollars. “Gold is so very plenty,” she wrote, “it makes but very little difference what they have to pay.”
By now, the Megquiers had been in California five months. “We have made more money since we have been here than we should make in Winthrop in twenty years,” Jennie crowed. Even somber Thomas Megquier, knocked happily off-balance by fifty-dollar paydays, could not resist a bit of boasting. Go ahead and buy his son some new winter clothes, Thomas wrote to a friend back in Maine who was helping to look after the children, “and you shall be paid in California gold.”
In the city named in honor of that mild saint, Francis of Assisi, quiet and contemplation had no place. “People lived more in a week than they would in a year in most other places,” one emigrant remarked. “More money was made and lost, there was more buying and selling, more sudden changes of fortune, more eating and drinking, more smoking, swearing, gambling, and tobacco-chewing” than anywhere else in the world.
The gold-seekers reveled in the anything-goes openness, at least at first. “A man, on coming to California, could no more expect to retain his old nature unchanged,” Bayard Taylor observed, “than he could retain in his lungs the air he had inhaled on the Atlantic shore.” The first change was a fit of exhilaration akin to the bucking and snorting of a horse that slips its rider and bounds away unconstrained. A “reckless and daring spirit” marked the new Californians, wrote Taylor, no matter how placid they had been at home. “It was curious to see how men hitherto noted for their prudence and caution took sudden leave of those qualities.”
For many of the gold-seekers, this social freedom proved fully as important as the economic freedom that had lured them in the first place. Gold might prove hard to find; freedom was impossible to miss. Life in California was different from life elsewhere, hugely different and different in a huge number of ways.
“You are right in thinking that we live here just as we please,” a miner named Franklin Buck wrote to his sister back home in Maine. “If we want a hot whisky toddy we have it. If we choose to lay abed late, we do so. We come and go and nobody wonders, and no Mrs. Grundy�
�—the nagging, censorious voice of conventional morality—“talks about it. We are free from all fashions and conventionalities of Society, so called with you. I like this.”
So did many others. And even those who feared the unaccustomed freedom recognized that there was no point in denying its existence. In new, wide-open California, warned one San Francisco minister, “gigantic temptations” lurked. Fretful mothers and nosey neighbors were two thousand miles away. A young man could trample the hometown rules and no one would notice or care. Nearly everyone was young, single, male, rolling in money and eager to spend it or dead broke and eager to forget it.
San Francisco was a city packed with lottery winners, and they lorded it over everyone else. Newly flush miners pushed their way into gambling halls, sauntered over to the tables, and bet a bag of gold on the turn of a single card.* They sent off their tobacco-stained shirts and grimy underwear by clipper ship—to be laundered in Honolulu or Canton. No one quite lit a cigar with a hundred-dollar bill, but the fashionable way to pour a drink was to spill an entire bottle of liquor into a wineglass, so that the excess splashed out in exuberant bounty. Drinkers who were even more flamboyant opted for the boldest flourish of all—they strode up to the bar, took a glass, filled it partway with gold dust, and handed it to the barman. His task was to exchange that gleaming glass for one filled with wine or whiskey to the same level. (Like barbers who found gold in their patrons’ trimmed whiskers, barmen quickly learned to sift for gold after they swept the floor at the end of the night.)
In this raw, money-mad culture, conspicuous display was the norm from the start. At Sutter’s Fort, in the Christmas season of 1848, one observer noted “great numbers of young men… with at least a thousand dollars worth of finery upon them. They were almost loaded down with trinkets.” The dandies strolled up and down, basking in the stares of passersby. One young man, all in black, wore a large cloak, also black. Though the night was cold, he kept his cloak unfurled so that it would flap and billow and draw the eye. Another well-dressed man marched back and forth in front of a busy tavern. “In his right hand he held a large bell, and at short intervals he would stop and tingle his bell, as much as to say ‘Look here, this is me.’ ”
To witness such scenes was to burn with hope and envy. One new arrival described his torment. Everywhere he looked “the returned gold-diggers were there with their ‘piles,’ exhibiting the glittering ‘lumps’ and bags of ‘scales’ and ‘dust’; elated with their acquisitions; in some instances, giddy with their suddenly acquired wealth.” It was almost impossible not to wonder if you, too, could live so splendidly.
Miners who had made a strike took special delight in parading through town and teasing and tantalizing brand-new arrivals. A group of Chileans ran into a friend from home and thrust their wealth under his nose. “Wrapped in rags were nuggets as big as walnuts,” the newcomer gaped, “and gold dust like lentils.” Another group banded together, adorned themselves with knives and pistols, and staggered conspicuously through the streets carrying heavy sacks (laden with sand) labeled “MUCHA ORA” and supposedly full of gold. “The immigrants would stop in amazement… and ask all sorts of questions,” one of the pranksters exulted. Some of the greenhorns panicked that there would be no gold left, and others thrilled at the prospect of infinite riches soon to come their way.
In Sacramento, where Israel Lord had temporarily landed, life was just as outsized and unfathomable. Lord was “struck all aback” by the casual way the local shopkeepers handled gold. When a miner brought in his dust, “it is poured out and weighed almost as carelessly as rice or pepper in the States, and very few ever pick up any scattering flake, unless larger than a pin-head, and some pay no attention whatever to so small matters.” The bigger the shop, the less finicky the shopkeeper. “In the large establishments, the dust is dipped about in pint tin cups. In a word, it is an article of produce, as easily got as wheat or corn in the States, and handled with much the same feeling, and comparatively with the same waste.”
Not only miners but land speculators, merchants, farmers, and entrepreneurs of every stripe prospered. Streams of money poured everywhere, and countless newcomers splashed happily in the current. “Everyone must do something, it matters but very little what it is,” Jennie Megquier observed. “If they stick to it, they are bound to make money.”
California needed everything and had nothing—no picks or shovels or beds or blankets or nails or bricks, and few men willing to do any labor except dig for gold. (In 1850 there were 624 miners for every 1,000 people in California.) With nearly everyone off to the mines, wages for carpenters, blacksmiths, and masons tripled and quadrupled, sometimes reaching $15 or $20 a day. Anyone who could drive a nail, stitch a boot, plow a field, bake a pie could rake in money. Deliverymen could earn $6,000 a year ($120,000 in today’s money).
After a brief, exhausting stint in the mines, a sign painter named Lyman Bradley retreated to the city and made the happy discovery that he could make more money with a paintbrush than with a shovel. Speed was everything, skill nearly irrelevant. “All were in a hurry,” Bradley recalled. “If you could get a job done quick enough to suit, you could have almost any price your conscience allowed you to ask.” Gold from gold.
The big names—like Sam Brannan, the entrepreneur and con man who had roused San Francisco by waving a bottle of gold in the streets and shouting “Gold! Gold!”—had already begun accumulating their fortunes. The surprise was that this was a mass frenzy, not a game for high rollers only. Brannan’s wife, Ann, was one of countless small fry who joined in the fun. “Now is the time for making money,” she wrote to her sister-in-law in New York, in September, 1848. “You will hardly believe me when I tell you that this summer in little more than three months I have cleared five hundred dollars by making and getting made cheap clothing.”
It was so easy. Pants and shirts that would bring twenty-five cents in New York sold for six times as much in San Francisco, “and they have only one pocket in them,” Ann Brannan exclaimed, so that it was no challenge at all to make five or six in a day. Come out here!
A month after his arrival in San Francisco, in December, 1849, a New York artist named William Jewett could hardly count his money. Jewett specialized in painting the newly rich, and they lined up for the honor. “I charge from one hundred and fifty to eight hundred dollars—shall paint two or three per week if they come fast enough.” Amidst such plenty, Jewett reported, he was “as jolly as a clam at high water.”
He branched into real estate and prospered there, too. At one point he bought an empty lot in San Francisco for $200; three days later, he sold half of it for $250. (In real estate especially, prices rose seemingly without limit; a lawyer who was looking for office space found that “a cellar in the earth, about twelve feet square and six feet deep,” commanded $250 a month in rent.) One man cornered the market in candlewicks, of all things, and made a killing. Another bought up $10,000 worth of barley and resold it in a week, for $20,000. A musician could earn two ounces of gold in two hours ($600 in today’s money), a French miner observed, “by scraping on a squeaky fiddle… or by puffing into an asthmatic flute.” A group of new arrivals in San Francisco sold a flock of chickens for $25 each (in today’s money $500 apiece).*
The career of a farmer named John Horner highlighted just how extravagant California’s reality could be. Horner, originally from New Jersey, had arrived in San Francisco in July, 1846. (A Mormon, Horner was one of the passengers who had traveled to California on the Brooklyn with Sam Brannan.) He planted wheat, barley, peas, and potatoes but earned no money at all that first year, and when gold was discovered, he took off for the diggings. This turned out to be a miscalculation. “We did not get much gold,” Horner recalled, “but we got the ague without much exertion, and did considerable shaking.”
Cured of gold fever, Horner returned to farming. When the hordes of gold-seekers poured in, he was ready. “Nothing seemed to be craved by the appetites of these people so much as ve
getables; many of them had, or were rapidly approaching, scurvy. They would eat a raw onion or potato with as great and apparent relish as though it were a nice flavored apple.” Horner was the only farmer around. In 1849 he cleared $8,000 (in today’s money, $160,000).
In January, 1850, Horner’s brother arrived in California and joined him on the farm. “We worked and flourished together the next four years,” John Horner wrote, “perhaps as no other farmers ever flourished before in America, in so short a time.” He may well have been right. “Fortune is said to knock at least once at every man’s door,” Horner would recall in his old age. “She found us at home; we opened the door and bid her welcome, and thankfully accepted her offer.”
This was an innovation—farming on an industrial scale, farming to make a fortune rather than feed a family. As much as mining, it would become a hallmark of California life. In 1850 alone, the Horner brothers’ vegetables brought in $150,000 (in today’s money, $3 million).
While everyone had dreamt of fortune, few new arrivals knew just what you would need in order to thrive in the diggings. The overland travelers had been too busy and too tired to spend much time planning. Those who came by sea, on the other hand, had spent months with little to do but buff and hone their fantasies. On countless ships converging on California, passengers whiled away the days tinkering with gold-finding machines and cobbling together containers to carry home the gold they would dig. Aboard the clipper ship America, for instance, one eager young man had fashioned leather pouches from the legs of old boots; another preferred bags sewn from canvas; still another favored empty pork barrels, which could be rolled rather than lugged.
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