The Rush

by Edward Dolnick

  William Perkins, the Cincinnati greenhorn who had stared goggle-eyed at real, live miners, found himself amazed that anyone could summon the strength to persist. Then he recalled the adrenaline-fueled poker marathons he knew from back in the States. He had often watched “a party of gentlemen sit playing poker for three days and three nights without sleep or rest.” Jazzed by cash-drenched fantasies, they’d played hand after hand, eagerly and alertly, “when not one of them but would have been half dead with fatigue by the end of the first night, had he been called upon to sit up with a sick friend.” In the mines as at the poker table, Perkins concluded, a chance at a golden jackpot could energize a corpse.

  For the same reason, no one in California paid much heed to grim accounts of how rare it was to strike it rich. The odds didn’t matter nearly as much as the size of the treasure. A miner grubbing in the dirt might be exhausted, filthy, and poor today, but so what?—he could be rich tomorrow.

  So on they dug.

  Every miner learned quickly that caprice was the first law of the diggings, and caprice could drive men mad. “The fever and uncertainty of mining made the people grow old and haggard,” Luzena Wilson recalled. “They might dig, dig, dig, fruitlessly for days, making scarcely enough to keep body and soul together, and then disheartened, sell the worthless claim for enough provisions to last till they struck another camp. Perhaps the first day’s work on the old claim by the new owner would yield hundreds of dollars.”

  Faith in tomorrow’s big strike could sustain a man through many a wet, miserable, fruitless day. But to live in the gutter while dreaming of the stars was a hard fate. The very psychology that sustained one man—If you keep at it, you could still win!—might break the heart of his neighbor. “I have seen a thousand dollars washed out of a single panful of dirt,” wrote William Perkins, and his exclamation rang with hope and frustration both, for it seemed equally difficult to quit and to persist.

  The problem was not merely that nature paid out her prizes willy-nilly. Everyone knew that mining was a lottery. The problem was that this lottery ran by especially devilish rules. First, the price of a ticket was so high. “It was strength, absolute brute force, which was required to win the gold of the placers,” Alonzo Delano remarked, and there were no shortcuts. And every day required a new ticket, purchased in sweat. As the bitter lyrics of one gold rush song put it, “They told about the heaps of dust and lumps so mighty big, / But they never said a single word how hard they were to dig.”

  Second, the prizes were distributed in plain view, so that downcast losers could not avoid the sight of exultant, shouting, back-pounding winners hoisting bottles of champagne and springing for drinks all around. It was the fate of every embittered, empty-pocketed miner to retreat to the bar, night after night, and toast other men’s good fortune. “There seems to be but one way to work in the mines,” Alonzo Delano wrote, “and that is to stick to it till your turn and time comes, and be not discouraged because you are getting nothing and the man within three feet of you is taking out $100 per day.” The catch—and Delano, a thoughtful man, knew it—was that his advice was virtually impossible to follow. None but a saint could look on even-tempered at a neighbor’s triumph while he himself was trapped deep in a useless ditch.

  In tandem, the two rules made mining both a physical and a psychological ordeal. To mine was to work to the limits of one’s strength, tormented by exhaustion but afraid to stop for fear that the next turn of the shovel might unearth a bonanza. “The miseries of a miner might fill a chapter of woes,” wrote Hubert Bancroft. “Digging and delving with eager anxiety day after day, up to the waist in water, exposed now to the rays of the burning sun, and now to cold, pitiless rains… heart and brain throbbing and bounding with success, or prostrate under accumulated disappointments.

  “It was,” Bancroft concluded simply, “more than a man with even an iron frame could endure.”

  The whole point of the gold rush, everyone had proclaimed from the beginning, was to make a pile and then run home with it. In practice, gold-seekers no sooner found a fortune than they threw it away. To strike it rich and to go home rich, it turned out, were vastly different things. “I have myself seen dozens who have worked for a week, made one, two or three thousand dollars and have then thrown up work until the whole of the amount was spent,” wrote William Perkins. “I have seen men invent the most extravagant means to get rid of their dust.”

  Let a man heft a handful of gold, and he forgot in an instant every maxim about putting away today what could be used tomorrow. Euphoria fogged the mind. Yesterday a man moaned, “If I ever make my pile, I’ll never let it go.” Today he proclaimed, “Plenty more where that came from.” Perkins witnessed such scenes again and again, but never quite figured out what lay behind them. “Gold became a drug, and the class of people then in California did not value it,” he wrote. “In those days almost every miner made what is called a ‘strike’ every week or so that gave him a small fortune, and he then seemed to be on thorns until it was spent.”

  The journalist Bayard Taylor, by training and temperament an observer rather than a participant, looked on and marveled. “Weather-beaten tars, wiry, delving Irishmen, and stalwart foresters from the wilds of Missouri became a race of sybarites and epicureans,” he wrote. “Secure in possessing the ‘Open Sesame’ to the exhaustless treasury under their feet, they gave free rein to every whim or impulse which could possibly be gratified.”

  Many of those impulses took the shape of food and drink. “It was no unusual thing,” Taylor went on, “to see a company of these men, who had never before had a thought of luxury beyond a good beefsteak and a glass of whiskey, drinking their champagne at ten dollars a bottle, and eating their tongue and sardines, or warming in the smoky camp-kettle their tin canisters of turtle-soup and lobster-salad.”

  Partly this was the exuberance to be expected of men who had never had money to spare and suddenly had more than they could fathom. Many of the miners “only knew the difference between having money and having none,” one of them wrote. “A hundred dollars was to them as good as a thousand, and a thousand was in their ideas about the same as a hundred.” When it came time for a spree, “they made a clean sweep of everything and spent their last dollar as readily as the first.”

  Without a second thought, miners paid any price a hotelkeeper or bartender asked. In Coloma, two miners gulped down a not-especially-grand breakfast of sardines, bread, cheese, and two bottles of ale, and handed over $43 (in today’s money, $860) without a qualm. One grizzled loner, who claimed to have dug up between $30,000 and $40,000 (in today’s money, $600,000 to $800,000), spent all of it on the most luxurious meals he could find—cans of oysters or corn or peas at $6 a throw and champagne at every meal. In Indian Bar, a drunken bash began at nine in the evening on Christmas Day 1851 and roared on for three weeks. The festivities began with an oyster and champagne supper in the Humboldt, the hotel and gambling hall in town, and moved on to toasts, songs, speeches, and dancing. “They were dancing when I went to sleep,” wrote Louise Clappe, “and they were dancing when I woke the next morning.” Three days later they were still dancing. “On the fourth day,” Clappe wrote, “they got past dancing” and moved on to “howling.” Some “barked like dogs, some roared like bulls, and others hissed like serpents and geese.” Come New Year’s the party spun to a newer, rowdier level.

  High spirits and inexperience fueled much of the spending, but a touch of the perverse figured in, as well. Take a reckless chance and you were flirting with self-destruction, but at the same time you were demonstrating that you were a free man who dared to thumb a nose at fate. Precisely because it made no sense, the man who flung his hard-won gold onto the gambling table was a swashbuckling buccaneer, to be admired and envied, and not a rule-bound bookkeeper, to be pitied.

  Israel Lord—an antidrinking, antismoking, scripture-quoting Baptist—was the last man in the world to feel the temptation, when standing at the edge of a cliff, to step off. But L
ord was a realist who saw that, though recklessness and indulgence repelled him, they exhilarated many others. Gambling was “a perfect mania” across California, he wrote, and in Sacramento, in December, 1849, he saw dozens of gambling halls jammed with “insane” miners who placed bets from breakfast to midnight. “Common laborers, mechanics, etc. will risk a whole day’s earnings on the turn of a card”—and they did it eagerly, Lord noted, and you can hear the disdain in his voice change to astonishment—“as if it was a pleasure to get rid of the stuff.”

  Seldom have extravagance and deprivation been so entwined as in gold rush California. Ten years before Dickens wrote that “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” one gold rush diarist after another wrestled with the paradox of living in a golden slum. Men fed on cold beans and slept on dirt floors and woke hoping that the day’s work would see them transformed into millionaires—and sometimes it did.

  It was not simply a matter of wealth and poverty bumping heads. “The character of the pioneers was a paradox,” wrote Luzena Wilson. “They were generous to a degree which we can scarcely realize, yet selfish beyond parallel.” Despite the crowds and the brand-new cities, men talked often of isolation and seldom of common bonds. “There were few close ties and few friendships,” Wilson noted, “and when a familiar face dropped out, no one knew whether the man was dead or gone away, nobody inquired, nobody cared.”

  This indifference had partly to do with how transient the mining camps were, with new arrivals perpetually showing up and older hands daily heading off to look for richer grounds. Fatigue made for a kind of isolation, too, for at the end of the day, men had enough energy to take a drink or place a bet or collapse in a heap, but seldom much more.

  The longer they spent in the diggings, the weaker the miners grew, their vigor sapped by sickness and their miserable diet. Meals were an endless succession of grease and starch unrelieved by even an occasional bit of greenery. Food was “stewed beans and flapjacks,” one miner recalled, “and they were generally served twenty-one times a week.” Cooking techniques were primitive. Men learned, by sad experience, that rice could not simply be flung into a pot and put on the fire, but required water. So did beans.

  A well-equipped cabin had a frying pan and a cooking pot, both permanently grimy. The “table” might well be a shelf built out from the wall. Plates sat out all day, seldom washed (but, on the bright side, always in place for the next meal). A potful of pork and beans would last several days. Between meals it would sit out, to be dipped into as required. Flapjacks, made of flour and water, usually took the place of bread, which required more skill.

  Israel Lord, who had ventured into the mines along the Feather River, could almost see his strength ebbing. “Cramp is so common that a person can hardly hold his hand tightly closed for a moment and open it again, without a violent effort to overcome the spasm which is almost sure to follow a strong contraction of a muscle. Rheumatic pains are rife; scurvy as common as damaged flour, and diarrhea haunts the dwellers of this famous land.”*

  The men lamented their predicament in song:

  I’ve lived on swine ’till I grunt and squeal,

  No one can tell how my bowels feel,

  With slapjacks swimming round in bacon grease.

  I’m a lousy miner,

  I’m a lousy miner; when will my troubles cease?*

  The tone was light, but such songs were laments in jaunty dress. The carefree life of a gold-miner too often took on the aspect of a prison sentence at hard labor, with sickness only adding to the misery. Miners talked of “bloody flux” and “chill-fever” and other vague, untreatable afflictions. Medical care was little more than quackery, and nursing unavailable. With hundreds or thousands of miners crammed into primitive camps upstream and downstream from one another, with nutrition abysmal and sanitary standards low or nonexistent, dysentery and intestinal woes were all but universal.

  Those too weak to stagger to work lay in fetid rags, shivering convulsively with fever, clutching their bellies as dysentery emptied their guts, watching helplessly as scurvy turned their flesh black and loosened their teeth. “Each squalid death,” wrote the historian Kevin Starr, “and there were thousands, turned California’s golden fleece into a vomit-stained shroud.”

  Of all the miners’ afflictions, scurvy was perhaps the most dreaded. Men with scurvy “rotted to death by inches,” one miner wrote, and he described one sick man so bent in pain that he was “drawn up into a kind of ball, and could have been rolled over and over like a bale of carpet.”

  Scurvy had been known since ancient times, but it had always been an affliction of sailors on long voyages on the open ocean.* To their sorrow, the gold-seekers had learned firsthand that the disease could fell landbound travelers, too. Now it had taken hold in the California foothills, where countless men dug in the soil but few had time to plant a row of potatoes or tomatoes. Miners spoke of “land scurvy” and “bachelor’s scurvy.” In desperation, they choked down fistfuls of grass or tried such folk remedies as burying themselves in the ground, up to the neck. (The idea was that the soil had healing powers.) “Whole camps were sometimes buried at once,” wrote one surprised observer, “except a few who remained out to keep off the grizzlys and coyotes.”

  When the rainy season began, in October in a typical year, the picture grew darker still. Rivers burst their banks and made work in the diggings nearly impossible. Cold, wet, hungry miners escaped to town or retreated to their crude cabins, or tents, or simply shelters beneath a tree, and tried to wait it out. They called these months the “sickly season.”

  Mining was a race against the coming of the rain. In the hot, dry days of spring and summer, when rivers ran low, miners worked ferociously. Even Israel Lord found himself caught up in the excitement. “The bottom of the river is covered with gold,” he wrote his brother from Long’s Bar on the Feather River, “& a company strong enough to dam it frequently will take out several 1000 dollars in a day.”

  The challenge was to take advantage of low water, by forcing the river out of its accustomed course. Only starstruck men could have conceived the notion of lifting up entire rivers and setting them down to one side. The territory was rugged and remote, the tools rudimentary, the entire scheme unprecedented and madly ambitious. Trained engineers would have blanched, and these were farmers and lawyers making it up as they went along.

  The danger was a match for the difficulty. Miners wrestled boulders and packed tons of dirt to make dams and then hammered together long wooden flumes to carry the diverted river away from its now-exposed bed. Then they dug with all their might, hunting for gold the river had left behind, while the clock ticked. “The whole current of the river is turned into the flume,” one miner wrote. “The descent being rapid, the water moves with such velocity that men have been drowned in a flume in which the water was less than two feet in depth.”

  The remote Sierra foothills swarmed with crowds of men whipsawing planks for the flumes, hammering together supports to hoist the waterways into the air, and, everywhere, digging, shoveling, tunneling. Hundreds of miles of flumes zigzagged their way downhill. Countless waterwheels powered pumps that drained water from spots where the river had escaped the flume and pooled up. Innumerable heaps of dirt and gravel rose next to deep pits, as if a race of gigantic terriers had been set free in the night.

  “I have often been in a position upon some projecting point of a mountain,” one gold-seeker wrote, “where at a single view I could see a river thus flumed for several miles. The river seems to be all alive and in motion. Hundreds of wheels are rolling, each with its accompanying pumps working, and through the entire distance, throngs of men of various colors, with blue or red woolen shirts, broad brimmed hats and long Jew beards, digging with picks and shovels on each side, or immediately under the rushing torrent coursing its way over their heads.”

  When the floods came, the game was up. On November 7, 1849, Israel Lord made a worried entry in his journal. “Rained al
l night long, more deliberately—more maliciously, more unmercifully than ever.” The rain smacked against the roof with a sharp, unrelenting clatter. “This journey is through extremes,” Lord wrote. “In the desert we had no water. Dying of thirst. We are now in danger of drowning.”

  On November 10, Lord noted that there had been no letup. “Rained all night, steady, deliberate pouring and the river has raised in that time seven feet and is rising fast.” Swollen, rushing rivers pounded through dams and broke flumes and sawmills into matchsticks. When the Feather River careened through one camp, wrote a startled miner, “the Methodist church turned around on its foundation like a dancing master on his heel.”

  Foam-capped waves swept downhill. Barrels, pans, and splintered boards spun and bobbed in the surging waters. “The river seemed as if it had suddenly arisen to assert its independence and take vengeance for all the restraints which had been placed upon it,” one awed miner wrote, as he looked out on a hillside suddenly stripped of everything man-made. A mine could vanish as if it had never been.

  So could the miners who worked it, as Luzena Wilson had noted. In California you risked dying unnoticed and unmourned. You might die broke, besides, despite the money all around. But you would not die without ever having lived, trudging your life away only to collapse at last like a beast in harness. Instead, you would die, if it came to that, like a man who took a valiant leap across a mountain chasm and fell short. That was California’s dark bargain, but only now did the miners read the fine print.

  This two-edged freedom—the freedom to be left alone (to do as you pleased) and to be left on your own (regardless of need)—marked California from the outset. Here was a society that was cosmopolitan, rowdy, violent, brand-new, thrilled with itself when it was not horrified, exploding in size, knee-deep in wealth, with no entrenched leadership class but instead a churning, changing hierarchy based on fortunes newly made and newly lost. Some gold rush boosters insist that this heritage continues to shape California today—that California remains the land of the fresh start, the new idea, that Silicon Valley’s visionaries and entrepreneurs are direct descendants of the dreamers who took to the Sierra foothills armed with little more than nerve, ambition, and a shovel.