Matteson was a Connecticut miner with a knack for tinkering. His bright idea came to him not when an apple fell on his head but when a landslide nearly buried him. It was a March morning in 1853. Matteson had been digging away at a gravel hillside with a pick. The hill collapsed. Matteson scrambled to safety, emerging with his life and with a bright idea besides: what a man with a pick could do slowly and at great risk, a man directing a mighty hose could do quickly and from a distance.
By 1853, the easiest-to-get-at gold, which sat on the surface or near it, was nearly gone. Forced to move on, miners turned their gaze upward. Gold, after all, could only sit in place or tumble and fall. If today it was buried in a streambed or tucked behind a boulder in a river, then it stood to reason that yesterday—and “yesterday” might have been a million centuries ago—it was farther up the stream or higher up the hill. This was one reason the Gold Lake tales had proved irresistible. Look high enough, the miners all assumed, and you might find gold in its original, intact state, not broken up and scattered in flakes and pebbles as it was at lower elevations but in pristine and astonishing profusion.
The miners’ geology was educated guesswork, and not very well educated at that, but they had grasped the big picture—once upon a time, vast geologic forces had thrust the Sierra Nevada high into the air. The huge, ancient rivers that had flowed down what was now the mountains’ western flank had vanished long ago, but they had carried gold, and much of that gold was surely still there. The problem was that it lay buried under hundreds of feet of rock and gravel, and far from the nearest water. How to get at it?
With picks and shovels and blasting powder, for a start. Anywhere that a gravel outcropping showed hints of gold, or a steep canyon or a cliff edge offered a promising peek inside a mountain, miners set to work. They tore into the hills with the tirelessness of burrowing ants, but this was brutal, dangerous work. To dig to paydirt with hand tools, through tons of rock and rubble, took weeks. After all that, there might be no gold.
In the winter of 1853, at a spot called American Hill, near Nevada City, Matteson put his idea into practice. He had joined forces with a sailmaker named Anthony Chabot, who sewed a hose out of canvas, and a tinsmith named Eli Miller, who shaped a three-foot-long nozzle from a piece of sheet iron. Their idea could hardly have been simpler. Pounded by a torrent of water bursting from an enormous, high-pressure fire hose, entire hillsides of dirt and gravel would crumble away. A massive chunk of mountain would become a thick, muddy river. That rock-filled river could be directed into the enormously stretched-out, open-ended troughs called sluices, and riffles at the sluices’ downstream end would catch any gold that the hillside had formerly concealed.
The scheme succeeded from the start. Before Matteson came along, miners working high in the hills with pick and shovel had faced a predicament akin to digging out gold coins hidden deep within house-sized blocks of ice and snow. Armed with Matteson’s hose, “hydraulickers” could blast the ice away with ease and collect the coins at their leisure.
Everything depended on scale. Since the fire-hose streams were powered only by gravity, the plan required that immense quantities of water be pooled high in the mountains and directed downhill to the hydraulickers. In the words of one modern historian, Matteson had “devised a way to use living rivers to exhume the dead.”
A river roaring downhill and then bursting from a hose made a fearsome spectacle. “No person who has not seen them in operation can have an idea of the force of these streams,” a report by California’s state mineralogist declared. “If a giant nozzle should be set in front of the strongest building in San Francisco and a stream turned on it, the walls would melt away in a few minutes.”
The impact on the old-style miner, a loner with a pick, a pan, and a mule, was almost as devastating. In the early days, when gold could be found glittering in a streambed and dug free with a knife or even a spoon, industrial might was beside the point. But as soon as that surface gold vanished, corporations—which could muster capital and technology on an enormous scale—knocked individuals out of their way. The day of the free spirit laboring on his own was done. “It takes a mine,” a newly coined proverb declared, “to run a mine.”
The age of the independent miner had lasted five years.
As technology improved, the hoses grew ever larger and sturdier. Stitched canvas gave way to stitched canvas bound with rope, then to double-thick canvas bound with iron hoops, and finally to iron pipe. The fire hose had become a water cannon. In time the cannon barrel would stretch twenty feet in length and a foot across. Water shot out from that barrel at one hundred miles an hour. “The velocity of the water makes boulders two feet in diameter jump twenty feet in the air when it hits them,” one observer gasped. “Trunks of trees lying in the mine can be made to spin like straws or be hurled away many feet distant.” Anyone hit by the blast would be killed instantly.
The names of the new models—“Monitor,” “Dictator,” “Chief,” “Little Giant”—hinted at their power. Even so, a writer from Scientific American exclaimed, the hoses boasted an ingenious swivel apparatus that permitted them to be “moved in any direction by a child” or a man using only one hand. “Thus one man, with perfect ease, moves as much gravel in a day as 1,000 men could with shovels and cars.”
Hydraulicking was hugely effective but startlingly wasteful, akin to gathering acorns by clear-cutting a forest and then bulldozing the shaved hills. Millions upon millions of gallons of water pulverized rocky hillsides, and millions of tons of dirt and gravel formed a muddy slurry, all in pursuit of golden flecks and pebbles that weighed not tons or pounds but fractions of an ounce. The impact on the landscape was devastating. Mudslides swallowed up farms and orchards, burying them waist-deep. Sand and gravel choked the waterways that fed the Sacramento River and then the Sacramento itself, transforming clear rivers into thick, chocolate-hued streams. When snow melted in the mountains and poured downstream, the mud-clogged, gravel-dammed rivers flooded. Cattle drowned by the thousands. Farms washed away. Town dwellers lost their homes. In Sacramento, in 1862, the governor-elect had to travel to his inauguration by rowboat.
But hydraulicking took its heaviest toll in the mountains. Decades afterward the wounds had still not healed. “The hills have been cut and scalped,” one horrified observer wrote in 1894, “and every gorge and gulch and valley torn and disemboweled.”
At the time of that cutting and tearing, few miners had any misgivings. It took an outsider to look at the landscape and see what the bounty had cost. “This place,” wrote a New York newspaperman touring gold country, “makes one think of a princess who has been captured by bandits who cut off her fingers for the jewels she wore.”
No independent miner could stand up to a water cannon, any more than John Henry could outwork a steam hammer, but the story could not have gone on for long regardless of technology. The problem was numbers. “There are now thousands of men more here than will ever get paid for coming, and thousands still on the road,” one Baltimore man wrote a friend on August 2, 1850. “I thought the country full to overflowing some time ago, but they still come. There are a thousand per day arriving by the overland route. They come into the country strapped and have no place to strike a lick, for all the diggings are claimed that can be worked.”
Many of the gold-seekers had begun to fear early on that they had made a dreadful mistake. They had raced to California, one miner lamented, like “an excited and impatient audience into a theatre, when it is known that a favorite actor is about to perform.” Thousands of men had pushed their way through the doors, fought for seats, and settled back to enjoy the show.
But only a few liked what they saw. As early as July, 1850, Israel Lord had begun losing hope, and most of the gold-seekers felt their spirits sagging at roughly the same time. California was a scam, Lord fumed; in summer, it was “all dried and withered, blasted and scorched,” and in winter, drenched and unlivable. “It is a worthless country for anything but gold,” he
complained, “and even for that, every day is accumulating evidence of its depreciating value.”
Lord noted bitterly that he had been gone from home for a year. “A lost year and one that will never return.” What had he been thinking? “Strange that we cannot believe without personal experience. Every pig must needs burn his nose, before he will be convinced that the swill is hot.” Lord now spent his days digging for gold and his nights condemning that pursuit with the vehemence of an ancient preacher.
“Come here and see,” he thundered in his journal. “Come where the restraints of social life, of Christian fraternity, of church discipline are not felt.” On second thought, stay put, but open your eyes. “Save yourself the trouble and only cast a hasty glance into those sinks of moral pollution, those hotbeds of vice, those slaughterhouses of virtue, our great cities—and our small cities—and our villages.” Then Lord doubled back again, adding a characteristically bitter twist to his diatribe. Yes, come! “The more fools the better—the fewer to laugh when we get back.”
Countless thousands shared Lord’s fury and shame (though, as noted, most of the emigrants had less trouble with California’s wicked ways). They had left home and struggled their way to the far end of nowhere, and now they looked like chumps, not heroes. California was “a beautiful prison,” one downcast miner lamented, and he himself was not an emperor in a realm of gold, as he had once dreamt, but merely an exile in “so pleasant a Siberia.”
“You will hear many very exaggerated stories of gold diggers,” Lord wrote his brother, in January, 1850. “You may rely upon it that the man who has gone back with his $20-or $30,000 did not dig it & none but a gambler can make $100,000 in a year.” Statistically minded historians have confirmed that Lord had it about right. Fortunes were made in California but seldom by those wielding pick and shovel. Though incomes were far higher in California than in the rest of the United States, prices were, too. A few lucky winners aside, most miners would have done as well financially if they had stayed home working at their old trade.
By the reckoning of Rodman Paul, one of the most eminent gold rush historians, the average miner earned twenty dollars a day in 1848, sixteen in 1849, ten in 1850, eight in 1851, and six dollars a day in 1852. In the same years, the total amount of gold dug up increased year by year. That helped, but not enough. Even the biggest pie, when cut into 100,000 slices, would yield each man scarcely a mouthful.
Strangely, that turned out not to be the whole story. For many, it proved not even its most important aspect. What was different about California, the gold-seekers had thought way back before they set out, was that a man could get rich there. Most who took that bait soon gagged on it.
Many never did overcome their anger and disappointment. But a fair number who failed to find a fortune reported, to their surprise, that they had found something nearly as enticing: they had found independence. Briefly, at least, they had been their own masters.
“What glorious old times they were!” one miner recalled, years later. “Who then was so much better than anybody else, when any man might strike it rich to-morrow? Who would beg for work or truckle and fawn and curry favor of an employer… when he could shoulder pick, shovel, and rocker and go down to the river’s edge?”
Like old soldiers, the ex-miners looked back on the worst but most eventful time of their lives and skipped over all the gruesome parts. From what remained they composed a kind of epitaph. They had not found a treasure, most of them, but what of it? For a few astonishing years, they had lived in a land of perfect equality and absolute independence. They had woken every morning in a shabby tent or a crude cabin and dreamed that they would fall asleep that night as rich as Croesus.
They had dared to hope.
EPILOGUE
ISRAEL LORD RETURNED HOME in 1851, as angry with California as if it had personally betrayed him. His last looks around served only to confirm his disdain (a harmless pelican was “a crooked disgusting deformity” and “a slovenly compound of stupidity and ignorance”). Humanity was even worse. A farewell peek at San Francisco revealed a “steaming, boiling, seething, reeking” abomination, Lord raged, and the gold rush itself had been less an adventure than a desecration.
Nearly home again, on a steamship from Panama, he summarized all he had seen on his westward journey: “A rushing, living tide of men and animals sweeping across the trackless deserts and wild mountains; the bowels of the earth ransacked, and the rivers turned from their courses; their banks uptorn, plundered, ravaged, deserted—villages, towns, cities rising like Aladdin’s palace in a single night, vanishing at noonday, and forgotten at eventide.”
He concluded his journal with one last, characteristic harrumph. “If I should get time, I will give you my reasons why I think ninety-nine out of a hundred who shall hereafter go to California are either madmen, fools—or radically unprincipled, and of course, dishonest. Meantime, I remain as ever, yours, I. S. P. Lord.”
Then he put the whole dismal business behind him and resumed his medical career.
Alonzo Delano invested more hope and effort in the diggings than did Israel Lord, but he reaped the same meager reward. A bit too soft and a bit too old to sift gravel for a living, Delano had nevertheless “performed prodigies in moving rocks and throwing out dirt,” to little profit. But California appealed to him. A far less earnest character than Lord—“I haven’t got to drinking, stealing, or gambling yet, but expect to commence in a day or two,” he assured his friends back in Illinois, in 1851—he saw early on that he was temperamentally suited to the make-your-own-rules West.
Game for nearly anything after failing as a miner, Delano tried every moneymaking scheme he could think of. First came a stint painting miniature portraits of his fellow miners, at an ounce a drawing. In three weeks he earned $400 but promptly lost it all in real estate investments gone bad. He put money, when he had it, into dam-building and river-dredging schemes, but spring floods washed out his investments. He opened stores in the diggings but ran into trouble with timing—he tended to have bare shelves when his customers arrived, or mountains of goods at a time when all the miners had moved elsewhere.
He found his niche as an author. Like many of his fellow gold-seekers, Delano had arranged to send reports of life on the trail to newspapers back east. A quick and versatile writer, he moved smoothly from straightforward accounts of the journey over the plains to humorous sketches of exotic California. A two-act farce called A Live Woman in the Mines made the biggest splash. The title was the plot, and the dialogue what you would expect. “Whoora! For a live woman in the mines. What’ll the boys say? They’ll peel out o’ their skins for joy. A live female woman in the mines!”
Bret Harte and Mark Twain would mine the same vein with more art, but Delano got there first. He brought his family to join him in California in 1857 and lived contentedly in a mining town called Grass Valley for another two decades, a prominent citizen and a beloved emblem of pioneer days. There he celebrated in cornball verse the eureka moment he never achieved in life:
The vein is struck! Ah, noble heart!
A thrill of joy is thine!
A purer and a better thrill
Than that produced by wine.
Those looking to dig their way to fortune seldom fared as well as Alonzo Delano’s poetic hero. On the other hand, merchants, lawyers, hotel-keepers—everyone providing a service and not just a strong back—often did far better than they could have at home. For an entrepreneur like Luzena Wilson, California truly was a land of gold.
Wilson proved nearly impossible to discourage. Flush after her first hotel success and then left penniless by a flood in Sacramento and homeless by a fire in Nevada City, she and her husband had promptly rebuilt their lives. (In the Sacramento flood of 1849, Luzena had retreated to an upper floor of her hotel with her children and forty other people, while water lapped at the windows. For food, the marooned group fished for bags of onions or anything else they could snag from the water. For fire, they burned driftw
ood. They kept rowboats tied up at the window for scavenging expeditions.) Luzena seemed to have no doubt that she would rise again. And so she did. Her mini-empire began with still another open-air “hotel” with tree-stump chairs and a dining table slapped together from scavenged boards.
Luzena, who had a gift for viewing hardship as opportunity, marveled at her good fortune. What could be more enviable than a hotel where there was “no fussing with servants or housecleaning, no windows to wash or carpets to take up”? Soon she noted proudly that “my hotel had the reputation of being the best on the route from Sacramento to Benicia.”
Over the next few years, as Luzena’s hotel grew more permanent and more prosperous, she and Mason began investing in real estate. By the time of the Civil War, they were wealthy. Life ran smoothly for another decade. Then, in December, 1872, a local newspaper ran a story under the ominous headline “Unaccountable Affair.” “On Wednesday of last week,” it began, “Mason Wilson, one of the oldest, wealthiest, best known and most highly respected citizens of Vacaville, left home to go to Dixon on business, telling his wife that he might be gone all night.”
Luzena, who was fifty-three, never saw him again. (In her account of her journey across the plains and her early days in California, dictated to her daughter in her old age, she referred to “my husband” but never called him by name.) She sold her hotel for the considerable sum of $6,000 (in today’s money, $120,000) and moved to San Francisco, where she lived in comfort and style to the age of eighty-three.
For the last fourteen years she lived as a guest at the Hotel Pleasanton, a “Family and Tourist Hotel,” where, after so many years, it was the task of others to wait on her.
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