The Rush

by Edward Dolnick

  Certainly the new emigrants believed they had walked into a place like no other, where a man could shed his past like a snake sloughing off its skin. The freedom to grow rich was only part of it. Gold rush California was the land of the self-invented man and the second chance. “If he could blow a fife on training days, he will be a professor of music here,” wrote one early arrival. “If he have built a pigsty or kennel at home, he will be a master-builder in California.” One Englishman found himself addressed as “Captain,” for no good reason. “If I was a real Captain,” he noted wryly, “I should of course be a General there.”

  A popular song captured the mood. “Oh, what was your name in the States?” it began, “Was it Thompson, or Johnson or Bates? / Did you murder your wife / And fly for your life? / Say, what was your name in the States?”

  Jennie Megquier was one of many who exulted in her newfound freedom. “It is all the same whether you go to church or play monte,” she wrote a friend. “That is why I like [California]; you very well know that I am a worshipper at the shrine of liberty.”

  Worshippers at that shrine tended not to spend much time in silent prayer or even quiet deliberation. California was loud, rambunctious, and dangerous, its brand of liberty smacking more of the fraternity house than of the Greek public square or the New England town meeting. The new arrivals set the tone from the get-go. On Independence Day 1849, in San Francisco, oratory and top hats played little role. “The glorious Fourth was ushered in by drinking to the constitution in bumpers, until the celebrants were half-seas over,” wrote one miner who had arrived in California only the week before. “Then began the fun. Instead of firecrackers, pistols were used. Instead of sending up rockets, men would show their adroitness with the gun by shooting through windowpanes, hitting lighted lamps or candles and offering to shoot off buttons from their friends’ garments.”

  Parlors, chaperones, and church socials belonged to another world. Gambling dens, saloons, and bordellos took their place. Professional gamblers—“knights of the green table”—were the most admired men in town. “There, sin is stealthy, and cunning, and still, and goes in the dark,” the Reverend Charles Farley declared in a Thanksgiving sermon in 1850, in San Francisco’s First Unitarian Church. “Here it is open, unmasked, makes no apologies and asks none. It unfurls its flag in the most public and conspicuous places.”

  But fear not, Farley went on. The gold-seekers had the fortitude to resist all temptation, and they had better things to do besides. “Time here is money, and they are a great deal too busy to spend much time at Vanity Fair, or to make common cause with the devil.”

  Well, maybe. The reverend had a good heart but a dull eye. An excited miner from North Carolina did a better job of capturing the glee of the hordes of young men who found themselves running free. “I have seen purer liquors, better segars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtesans here, than in any other place I have ever visited,” twenty-six-year-old Hinton Helper exclaimed, “and it is my unbiased opinion that California can and does furnish the best bad things that are obtainable in America.”

  Dizzy at the opportunities on offer, the new residents of California did their best to sample those bad things. Lucius Fairchild spoke for many in the boisterous throng. Fairchild would go on to a distinguished career, first as a brigadier general in the Civil War (he lost an arm at Gettysburg) and then as a three-term governor of Wisconsin. In time, he would pose for John Singer Sargent in formal dress and bedecked with medals. (The portrait looked to him, Fairchild told his wife, like “a lot of badges running off with a bald-headed man.”) But in 1850 Fairchild was not a grand and imposing figure but a randy young man on the loose. “Gambling, drinking and houses of ill fame are the chief amusements of this country,” he wrote a friend back home. “Therefore you see that we have nothing but work, reading and writing to amuse us,” he teased, “as we are all nice young men and do not frequent such places.”

  Gambling halls and saloons conjured up countless ways to separate lonely young miners from their money. For an ounce of gold, a young woman would sit next to you while you nursed a drink or played a hand of cards. Some gambling dens found more creative ways to lure miners inside. They featured “artists’ models” who posed in see-through silk or gauze or even, for those miners whose taste ran to the classics, “clothed in nature’s robes.”

  In eastern cities, brothels and saloons were hidden in the bad part of town. California was different. San Francisco and Sacramento and the rowdy mining camps had sprung up overnight and helter-skelter, and bordellos and gambling dens sat on main street, next to hotels, restaurants, and stores. Even a man of sedate tastes was bound to bump up against gamblers, brawlers, and painted ladies. A man seeking diversion did not have far to look.

  Teetotaling Israel Lord stepped inside a gambling den in Sacramento and gazed about in mingled horror and fascination. “It is fitted up like a palace,” he wrote. “On one side is a counter, 30 feet long, behind which stand three fine looking young men dealing out death in the most inviting vehicles—sweet and sour and bitter and hot and cold and cool and raw and mixed.” Nearby, “more like a dream than reality,” stood tables lined with “oyster and lobster and salad and sauce and fruit and flesh and fish and pies and cakes,” and, astonishing even to tell, “this department is served by females.” Even across a gap of 150 years, we can see Lord flinch.

  His every sense assaulted, Lord reeled in dismay. On a balcony high above the crowd, musicians bleated out tunes in random keys and shaky tempos. Drinkers sang in loud, cracked voices. Laughter and curses rang out. Tobacco smoke rose in thick clouds. Accommodating women smiled and flirted. “The walls are covered with pictures, many of them men and women almost or quite in a nude state,” Lord squawked. “Everything is got up, arranged and conducted with a view to add to the mad excitement of gambling.”

  Gambling halls all employed good-looking female dealers, as if gambling itself was not enough of a temptation. One young miner witnessed a shooting at a card table, which started as an argument and ended with a man slumped dead with a bullet through his heart. Through it all the beautiful “Mademoiselle Virginie” carried on unperturbed. “She greeted me with a fascinating smile,” wrote William Perkins. “ ‘Ah Monsieur, quel horreur!’ turning up her brilliant eyes towards the roof, and dealing slowly the cards at the same time.”

  With women in California so rare, men reveled in the most cursory encounters. Any woman anywhere, including those who had nothing whatever to do with gambling or any other shady behavior, drew a crowd. “Every man thought every woman in that day a beauty,” Luzena Wilson recalled. “Even I have had men come forty miles over the mountains, just to look at me, and I never was called a handsome woman, in my best days, even by my most ardent admirers.”

  Nineteenth-century etiquette forbade anyone to speak openly of prostitutes or sex. Prostitutes were “soiled doves” or “fallen angels” or, in the sympathetic words of one woman in the diggings, “unfortunates who make a trade—a thing of barter—of the holiest passion, when sanctified by love, that ever thrills the wayward heart of poor humanity.”

  Language was coy, the doves themselves less so. Some were “quite shameless,” one miner observed, “often scrawling their names and reception-hours in big letters on their doors.” For many prostitutes, exploited by pimps and abused by customers, life in California was as ugly and dangerous as elsewhere. But those who managed to fight their way to a bit of independence found that, like other entrepreneurs, they could boost their prices sky-high and nobody in gold-mad California would blink. In Sonora, one shocked Philadelphia native wrote to her family at home, several brazen women had not only set up a bordello but kept “a man servant to clean their house, and they eat in a restaurant.” When the women had first arrived, they’d sent someone “out with a drum to excite notice,” literally drumming up business.

  A young miner named Henry Packer took the bold step of writing to his fi
ancée about the exotic women all around him. “Look—a back door stands ajar. Take a peep in—papered walls, a table on which a fire globe lamp stands… by heaven, a woman stands at the door. She is richly dressed. In her ears and on her fingers are massive gold rings, displayed around her neck a chain of the same. Glossy curls play over her full neck and shoulders.” In an age when an ankle was an erogenous zone, these were sights to make a man gasp.

  “On her countenance,” Packer went on, “plays a smile that would bewitch if not beguile a minister.”* Finally, the woman spoke. “ ‘Come in, you fellow with mud on your hat. I like a miner.’ ” The miner hurried in. “Do you blame him?” Packer asked. He himself “did go in just once,” he wrote, “only once, and then but for a few minutes.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  AT EASE IN A BARBAROUS LAND

  FOR JENNIE MEGQUIER AND countless others who would follow in her footsteps, freedom meant far more than an excuse to pick a fight or place a bet. Gambling halls and saloons were not the draw; the thrill, after a hemmed-in and cloistered life, was in flinging open the windows and breathing fresh air. When her children passed along news of old friends in Maine, Megquier stifled a yawn. “I am right glad to hear they are enjoying themselves so much,” she wrote back, “but I have seen so much of things a little more exciting I fear I shall never feel perfectly satisfied with their quiet ways again.”

  Ministers back east had warned against California for precisely this reason. “Will you not bring back with you a restless, morbid desire for change, excitement, and wild adventure?” the Reverend Elisha Cleaveland had challenged his congregation in Connecticut in 1849.

  Yes, it turned out, yes, you would, if you ever came back at all. Just try to imagine the contrast between stodgy New England and dazzling San Francisco, Jennie Megquier asked her children. “In San Francisco,” she wrote excitedly, “you can step out of your house and see the whole world spread out before you in every shape and form. Your ears are filled with the most delightful music, your eyes are dazzled with everything that is beautiful, the streets are crowded. The whole city are in the street.”

  Within steps of her house, she went on, was “a splendid ice cream saloon which surpasses anything I have seen in the states.” This temple of indulgence boasted large windows, silk curtains, marble floors and tables, and was “as light as day at all hours of the night.” What fun! “The homeliest man in the city treated me to an ice cream there a few nights since at one dollar a glass.”

  Megquier looked past California’s squalor and violence and reveled in the tumult and the new sights all around. “I suppose you will think it very strange when I tell you I have not attended church for one year, not even heard a prayer,” she wrote to her mother, in April, 1850. What of it? she asked, as if she could see her mother’s glare across a continent. “The churches are very well attended without any of my help.”

  This would become a familiar theme. “I suppose she thinks I am very wicked,” Megquier griped a few weeks later, taking on her mother again, this time in a letter to her daughter, and still bristling. “That which says ‘I am more holy than thou’ has no resting place in my bosom.” And besides, her new neighbors, rough as they were, had virtues of their own. “There is no such thing as slander known in the country, no back biting, every ones neighbor is as good as himself.”

  Megquier liked corresponding with her daughter. Angie was nearly twenty, and Jennie dished to her as if they were peers. “You would be astonished could you peep in at one of our parties. The gaiety of dress, the lots of belles, beautiful dancers, splendid music, bouquets of the richest kind, sumptuous tables, last & not least so many fine looking men.” Jennie wrote happily of dancing until two or three in the morning.

  If only Angie could come to San Francisco herself. But Jennie hadn’t made much headway there. “Your Father thinks it is no place for you. I suppose he is afraid you will be led astray. He has his hands full to keep me straight.”

  Megquier loved concerts and theater as well as dancing, and San Francisco offered every kind of spectacle. Not all were to her taste, but she liked the bustle. Performers high and low swarmed to California, which everyone knew was rich, restless, fast growing, and starved for entertainment. Crowds flocked to see prizefights, minstrel shows, magic acts, Shakespearean plays, juggling exhibitions, “bullfights” that featured not a matador but a grizzly bear pitted against a bull. Lonely men gawked enthralled at such visiting stars as Kate Hayes, “the Swan of Erin,” and Elisa Biscaccianti, “the American thrush.” Megquier was especially eager to see Lola Montez, a notorious singer and dancer who was distinguished more for her biography than for her talent. Beautiful, exotic, and racy, Montez was the one-time mistress of the king of Bavaria and supposedly the ex-lover of, among many others, Franz Liszt.

  People said that “it is not proper for respectable ladies to attend,” Megquier complained, “but I do want to see her very much.” Montez’s prize number was her “Tarantula Dance,” which featured a vigorous search for a spider that had supposedly hidden itself under her clothes. Megquier enjoyed it, though she conceded that “some thought she was obliged to look rather higher than was proper in so public a place.”

  Megquier’s enthusiasm calls to mind the most talented of all gold rush writers, Louise Clappe, who came to California in 1849 and soon headed off to Rich Bar, on the North Fork of the Feather River. A “shrinking, timid, frail thing,” as she put it, Clappe was originally from Amherst, Massachusetts (she was a near contemporary of Emily Dickinson). To her astonishment, she flourished in conditions that should have left a proper New England lady clutching her hankie and wincing. “I have slept on tables, on doors, and on trunks,” she wrote her sister, who had stayed home. “I have reclined on couches, on chairs and on the floor.” In former times she had been guided by other people’s opinions, but “now I generally act, think and speak as best pleases myself.”

  In the diggings Louise Clappe lived without churches, lectures, gossip, or ladies’ lunches, among rough, hairy miners who often found themselves “in that transcendental state of intoxication, when a man is compelled to hold on to the earth for fear of falling off.” Not to worry, she reassured her sister. “I like this wild and barbarous life.… I look kindly to this existence, which to you seems so sordid and mean. Here, at least, I have been contented.”

  Jennie Megquier was often happy, too, though perhaps only occasionally content (her style ran more to bursts of glee punctuated by fits of restlessness than to tranquil nights by the fireplace). But eager as she was to embrace new experience, her new life was not all concerts and ice cream. In every letter home, she begged for letters in return (“I will give a dollar a word for one long letter”); she had nightmares about her children dying while she was thousands of miles away; though she and Thomas had more money than ever before, they never had quite enough to declare victory and return home in triumph. And her work was endless.

  At the boardinghouse she ran in San Francisco, Jennie’s workday started at seven o’clock. “I get up and make the coffee,” she wrote, “then I make the biscuits, then I fry the potatoes, then broil three pounds of steak and as much liver.” Guests ate breakfast from eight o’clock to nine, and then Jennie started in on lunch. “I bake six loaves of bread (not very big), then four pies or a pudding,” and she prepared lamb, beef, pork, turnips, beets, potatoes, radishes, salad, soup. After lunch came tea, with some kind of cold meat and a sauce, and more bread, and cake.

  “I have cooked every mouthful that has been eaten,” Megquier moaned, and that was only part of the story. “I make six beds every day and do the washing and ironing… and if I had not the constitution of six horses I should have been dead long ago.” Miners weren’t the only ones who worked like demons.

  The work itself was nothing new; women in California did not suddenly become doctors and lawyers. What was new was the opportunity to do so well, so quickly, doing work that had traditionally been relegated to women and taken for granted.
This was hard-earned money—Megquier had long since lost patience with dreamers who thought they could wander into the diggings and make their pile in a carefree day or two—but it was real, and it was substantial.

  Luzena Wilson saw the same opportunity that Jennie had, and she grabbed on just as fiercely. She and her husband had lost everything in an enormous flood in Sacramento in 1849. Battered but not defeated, they dragged themselves to Nevada City, at the time little more than a canvas campground but destined to become one of the busiest, best-known mining towns.

  “I cast my thoughts about me for some plan to assist in the recuperation of the family finances,” Wilson recalled. “As always occurs to the mind of a woman, I thought of taking boarders.” But where would she find a boardinghouse?

  “I bought two boards from a precious pile belonging to a man who was building the second wooden house in town,” Wilson went on. “With my own hands I chopped stakes, drove them into the ground, and set up my table. I bought provisions at a neighboring store, and when my husband came back at night he found, mid the weird light of the pine torches, twenty miners eating at my table. Each man as he rose put a dollar in my hand and said I might count him as a permanent customer.” She named her not-quite-hotel the El Dorado.

  “From the first day it was well patronized,” Wilson recalled proudly, “and I shortly after took my husband into partnership.”* (Mason Wilson was the head of the household. Luzena, who would not say so outright, was the brains and the muscle.) In six weeks Wilson earned $700—about two years’ pay for a workman back east and enough to cover all the family debts. Soon after, with her makeshift hotel now a rambling, wooden structure with a roof, “we had from seventy-five to two hundred boarders at twenty-five dollars a week. I became luxurious and hired a cook and waiters. Maintaining only my position as managing housekeeper, I retired from active business in the kitchen.”