The Rush

by Edward Dolnick

  These were flush times. “Everybody had money,” Wilson wrote, “and everybody spent it. Money ran through one’s fingers like water through a sieve.” It didn’t all run through. Within six months of opening her hotel, Wilson added a store (with $10,000 worth of goods on the shelves) to her fledgling empire.

  Guests at the El Dorado sometimes paid their bills in gold. Wilson stored bags of gold dust in her oven overnight and stuffed the overflow under her mattress: “At one time I must have had more than two hundred thousand dollars lying unprotected in my bedroom.” Wilson seized this opportunity, too, entering the banking business and lending money at 10 percent a month.

  Wilson had been a farmwife in an out-of-the-way corner of the country, struggling to get by. Now, in topsy-turvy California, she was prosperous and admired and in charge. Her husband had wanted to go west and leave her behind. She had gone with, and now she had gone ahead.

  For men, California’s opportunities were even more disorienting. When the job demanded that a man shovel tons of dirt or wrestle rocks and sandbags while standing half submerged in a mountain stream, what use was a law degree or a rich daddy?

  Alonzo Delano delighted in the “perfect equality” that reigned in the diggings. “Sparta could not hold a candle to it. The judge, the ex-member of Congress, the lawyer, the merchant, the farmer, the mechanic, the sailor, the soldier, the scholar, all grades, shades and classes, ‘mingle, mingle, mingle,’ and you would as often take the dunce for the judge, as the judge for himself.”

  A common sight, Delano went on, was a judge or a college professor “bending over the wash-tub… or sitting on the ground with a needle, awkwardly enough repairing the huge rents in his pantaloons.” Few pleasures compared with seeing a great man engaged in so humble a task and teasing him, “ ‘Well, Judge, what is on the docket today?’ ”

  Once set in motion, the push for equality was hard to slow. Delano himself watched with dismay when his two indentured servants ran off. “Smith and Brown, whom I had brought across the plains, and with whom I had a written agreement to continue in my employ, taking advantage of circumstances where there was no law to enforce the fulfillment of their contract, immediately left me, and I never received one farthing by way of remuneration.”

  Even skeptical Israel Lord found it hard to resist the notion that in California a man could break his shackles. He jotted down the cheery lyrics of a song he heard one night in the diggings. A group of Ohio miners contrasted a farmer’s life of drudgery with a miner’s independence. Verse after verse proclaimed the same glad message: No bosses in the Golden West!

  Oh, doom me not to slave and toil,

  Beneath a master’s eye,

  Stripp’d of my title to the soil,

  And robb’d of Liberty;

  But let me dig the mountain land,

  No tax, no tariff for the free,

  With beef and bread and golden sand;

  Oh, that’s the work for me,

  Oh, that’s the work for me.

  In this shifting culture, respect went not to the man who could hire others to work on his behalf but to the man who could fend for himself. (One newcomer who asked for help with his bags in a San Francisco hotel was proudly informed that the hotel had no porters. “Every man is his own porter here.”) For ages past, hard labor and low pay had gone together. California snapped that link. In a land seeded with gold, a ditchdigger might be more likely than anyone else to find a treasure.

  With the prospect of wealth went respect. In California, one artist-turned-miner wrote with surprise, the common notion was that “not to labor was degrading—that those who did not live by actual physical toil were men who did not come up to the scratch.” Labor, for once, had dignity.

  This was astounding—Bayard Taylor described the marvel he had seen in astonished capitals: “LABOR IS RESPECTABLE”—but it did not truly mean that the world had turned on its head. Labor had merit not because it was honest, useful work but because it could make a man rich. “It was one intense scramble for dollars,” one miner wrote. “The man who got the most was the best man. How he got them had nothing to do with it.”

  What looked at first like a revolution was in fact an embrace of the old notion that money trumped all other considerations. Money Above All remained the credo of the age. Surprisingly, this grab-it-now doctrine bound men together more than it drew them apart. Everyone sought the same prize—gold—with the same tools—muscles, diligence, luck. While they dug endless day after endless day, they all baked under the same sun and shivered in the same streams. That experience of shared hope and shared misery seemed to unite men separated by deep gulfs of language and culture, in one of the most multinational societies the world had ever seen.

  At least it did for a short time.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  TAKING THE BREAD FROM AMERICAN MINERS

  IN THE EARLY DAYS, when it seemed there would be enough gold for everyone, American miners regarded the peculiar ways of strangers with more curiosity than hostility. In almost the same breath, one newcomer described the wonders he had seen in California—“grisly bears” (1,600-pound animals with huge paws and “hair resembling that of a Newfoundland dog”), and “trees completely changed to the hardest kinds of flint or quartz,” and “the Chinese [who] use neither knives, forks or spoons, but take their food by the aid of two straight sticks (chop-sticks) about six inches long, which they handle with wonderful dexterity.”

  Despite the jumble of nationalities and ethnic groups, California was no melting pot. Racism was not a shameful prejudice but an assertion of a fact too obvious to debate—the world was run by English-speaking white people, as it should be. (The word “racism” did not exist in the nineteenth century, presumably for the same reason that talking fish would not have a word for water.)* Nearly every gold rush journal abounds with descriptions of “lazy Mexicans” and “money-loving Jews” and the clannish Chinese, who jabbered like geese and ate rat pies. Typically the tone is casual, the insults treated as descriptions akin to remarks on the height of the trees or the intensity of the rains. Nothing personal…

  Letters and diaries described sightings of “copper-hued Kanakas” (from Hawaii) or “Mexicans rolled in their sarapes and Peruvians thrust through their ponchos,” as if the writers were bird-watchers in a new locale. As the most unfamiliar strangers of all, the Chinese drew especially close and puzzled notice. Americans called them “Celestials” (because China was the “Celestial Empire”) and stared in open wonder. “Their hats are made of stiff splints of bamboo, and are as unpliable as a basket made of oak.… Their pantaloons are extremely wide, resembling petticoats, and a short garment, something like a loose gown, completes their external costume.”

  Everyone knew the ethnic stereotypes (though they would not have used this word, either), and nearly everyone took them for granted. Mexicans were violent and treacherous, Jews cunning and unwilling to tackle physical labor, the Irish sullen and dangerous. The Germans—dull and plodding—and the French—licentious and harboring peculiar tastes in food—got away comparatively lightly. (A daily chore for one boardinghouse cook was “making coffee for the French people strong enough for any man to walk on that has Faith as Peter had.”)*

  As more and more foreign-born gold-seekers poured in, the tone in the Americans’ letters and diaries changed from bemusement or irritation to anger and resentment. Strangers were seen not as exotic features of the landscape but as intruders. Israel Lord kept his cool, but he was unusual. “I, for one, contend that they have the same right to dig for gold here as in the older States for iron, or wheat, or potatoes.” Digging was digging, after all, the same backbreaking work for everyone.

  Far more typical was the outraged yowl of Lucius Fairchild, the governor-to-be of Wisconsin. Now he railed against “foreigners.” All they wanted was to snatch some gold and carry it home. “It’s a shame,” Fairchild complained, “that our government will allow themselves to be run over by the off scourings of all
Gods creation who are taking the bread out of the American miners mouths, or the Gold which is the same.”

  In April, 1850, California’s fledgling state legislature passed a Foreign Miners’ Tax, which called for foreigners in the diggings to pay twenty dollars a month for the “privilege of taking from our country the vast treasure to which they have no right.” More an angry gesture than a prudent policy, the tax pulled in two directions at once. Its backers insisted that the tax would drive foreigners out of California and would, at the same time, fill the state’s coffers with the foreigners’ fees.

  By then it already seemed a long time—though it was only a year or two—since Bayard Taylor had noted, with happy surprise, that the miners showed no signs of “a grasping and avaricious spirit.” On the contrary, he had written on first arriving in California in 1849, “the co-mingling of so many races and the primitive way of life gave a character of good fellowship to all its members.”

  The camaraderie of the early days, it quickly grew clear, had been artificial. It was not so much that men of all sorts got along as that, in some places, men had only begun to bump up against strangers. As early as July, 1849, Chilean and Peruvian miners found themselves pushed off their claims on the American River. Near the site of the original gold discovery, tacked-up notices spelled out the bad news. Spoken threats sharpened the written warnings. Word came down that “all those who were not American citizens had to leave the area within 24 hours,” one Mexican-born miner recalled, “and that force would be used against those who failed to obey. This was supported by a meeting of armed men, ready to make good this announcement.”*

  “The weak are meat the strong do eat,” the proverb has it, and so it proved in California. In 1850, on Weaver’s Creek, a miner and ex-soldier named Edward Buffum watched a mob of about two hundred men shouting “Hang them!” in the direction of two Frenchmen and a Chilean. The three had been accused of attempted robbery and murder, and found guilty by the mob. Buffum climbed on a tree stump and pleaded for the men’s lives “in the name of God, humanity, and law.” None of the accused men understood English. The three were placed upon a wagon. Nooses went around their necks, and black handkerchiefs over their eyes. At a signal, the wagon lurched out from under them.

  The tens of thousands of Chinese in California came in for some of the harshest abuse. Chinese miners “generally work in diggings that white men have condemned and abandoned,” a gold-seeker wrote matter-of-factly, as if this were yet another quirk of the unfathomable strangers in stiff hats and broad pants, “but should these places happen to prove better than was anticipated, they are commonly soon expelled by the more unscrupulous whites.”

  Shoving “interlopers” aside was, in the American view, if not exactly admirable, then close to inevitable. It was simple fact that Americans were strong and willful, and the Chinese timid and docile. “A dozen armed white men will drive a thousand of these Celestials, as easily as they would a flock of timorous sheep.”

  It was the miners’ inflated self-regard that made such bullying seem natural. Disdain for the rights of strangers runs strong in nearly every age; in gold rush California, it reached flood proportions. The miners had taken California’s physical grandeur and assimilated it; they saw themselves as titans striding across a global stage. So argued Walter Colton, the Navy chaplain-turned-Monterey-alcalde, who saw the emigrants’ bombast and pomposity as the key to understanding their outlook on the world.

  Take slavery, the great issue of the age, destined within a decade to tear the nation in two. California, with its instant population, was sure to come into the union as a new state. The question was whether it would be free or slave. The stakes were immense: in 1849 the United States was made up of thirty states, fifteen slave and fifteen free. As the state that would tip the balance, California drew all eyes. The miners saw that attention as only fitting. “They may offer to come into the Union,” wrote Colton, “but they consider it an act of condescension, like that of Queen Victoria in her nuptials with Prince Albert.”

  The gold-seekers vehemently opposed slavery, but not out of concern for justice or equality. Despite the miners’ constant talk of California as an egalitarian paradise, black men in the diggings were not allowed to sit at meals with whites. In all but the smallest camps, black miners ate at a blacks-only boardinghouse. (If there was no such site, black miners had to wait for whites to leave the table before sitting down themselves.) Those were unwritten rules. The written law was just as plain. California’s first state legislature decreed, in 1850, that “no Black, or Mulatto person, or Indian shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of, or against, a white man.”* Those white men, after all, occupied a spot near the pinnacle of creation.

  In California, their smugness had grown beyond all bounds. These proud men “walk over hills treasured with precious ores,” Walter Colton explained. “They dwell by streams paved with gold, while every mountain around soars into the heaven, circled with a diadem richer than that which threw its halo on the seven hills of Rome. All these belong to them; they walk in their midst; they feel their presence and power, and partake of their grandeur. Think you that such men will consent to swing the pick by the side of slaves? Never!”

  Thus, white miners opposed slavery not because it was a moral affront to the men held in chains; they opposed it because it implied that they, working like slaves, were no better than slaves. Resentment of the slave owners’ easy deal further stoked the miners’ anger. Why should the owners be able to put their feet up and rake in a fortune while men in bondage did all the work? Was that fair?

  No group suffered as much in the gold rush years as Native Americans. For California’s Indians, the rush was a calamity. Before gold was discovered, Indians had outnumbered whites nearly ten to one. By the early 1850s, they were strangers in their own land, outnumbered two to one. Worse still, California’s Indians happened to live in the greatest numbers in the very regions where gold was found. The white invasion came straight to those traditional enclaves, like a knife to the heart. These new enemies, moreover, represented a new threat rather than a familiar danger magnified. The Spanish-speaking ranchers who dominated California in pre–gold rush days had exploited the Indians, but they needed their labor. The newly arrived whites had no brakes on their mistreatment. They simply wanted the Indians gone. Soon they were.

  Native Americans had known about California’s gold long before the first whites arrived, but they had never paid it any heed. While searching for gold in the vicinity of the Yuba River, in November, 1848, Edward Buffum had happened on a group of Indians. (It was Buffum who went on to confront the lynch mob on Weaver’s Creek.) One man, named Pule-u-le, spoke Spanish. Buffum asked if he had ever looked for gold. When he was a boy, Pule-u-le recalled, he had entertained himself by picking out pebbles of gold from larger rocks and flinging them into the river below.

  White traders quickly cashed in on this indifference. One early miner saw Indians “giving handfuls of gold for a cotton handkerchief or a shirt.” A trader named John Marsh packed sugar into the foothills and sold it even-up, a cup of sugar for a cup of gold. Still another brought raisins and similar treats, and a scale. He put the raisins in one pan, his Indian buyers put a matching weight of gold in the other pan, and the deal was done.

  In the earliest days of the gold rush, the surest way to make a fortune was to set large numbers of Indians to work, at peon wages. “They make the most who employ the wild Indians to hunt it for them,” wrote one gold-seeker, in August, 1848. “There is one man who has sixty Indians in his employ: his profits are a dollar a minute. The wild Indian knows nothing of its value and wonders what the palefaces want to do with it; they will give an ounce of it for the same weight of coined silver, or a thimble full of glass beads, or a glass of grog.”

  For whites in a position to exploit Indian labor, profits mounted up almost too quickly to count. One small group of miners dragooned fifty Indians to work for them and gathered 273 pounds of gold in t
wo months. Thirteen pounds went to the Indians. “There are at this time,” wrote an observer, in December, 1848, “not less than 2000 white men and more than double that number of Indians washing gold.”

  It didn’t last. Whites late to the party fumed at the unfairness of competing with cheap Indian labor. What chance did a lone man have, or even a man working with two or three companions, against a squad of conscripted savages? The whole system was an affront to justice.

  The contempt that the newcomers felt for California’s Indians made matters worse. Even Alonzo Delano, who was far more broad-minded than most of his fellow emigrants, recoiled. “A more filthy and disgusting class of human beings you cannot well conceive. They are dark-skinned, nearly as dark as a negro, covered with dust, living upon acorns, wild fruit and fish. They have nothing of the noble bearing of the Indians east of the Rocky Mountains, and they seem to be only a few degrees removed from brutes.”

  Such dismissive ugliness was all but universal. “The Digger Indians, the natives of California, are to be ranked among the least intelligent of the human race,” wrote a Unitarian minister turned gold-seeker.* “Their dwelling houses and their construction display less mechanical genius than the habitations of the beaver, or even the muskrat.” The scientific literature of the day was filled with nearly identical pronouncements. Samuel George Morton, a particularly esteemed authority, spent a lifetime gathering human skulls and painstakingly measuring their volume, to see how different races stacked up. Indians had particularly small skulls and little brains, Morton claimed, in a lavish volume published in 1839 called Crania Americana. These supposed facts provided irrefutable proof of “the inaptitude of the Indian for civilization.” Certainly such backward creatures could not be allowed to take the gold that the emigrants had come so far to find.