Jennie Megquier prospered in California, though not to the same extent as her fellow hotel-keeper Luzena Wilson. On a visit home to Maine in 1851, she bought a large, well-situated piece of land with her California earnings. In 1854, on another visit, she set about building a spacious, imposing house. Her descendants would keep the house for a century. Maine held hard-to-resist temptations—this was the home of her children and two grandchildren (one named Jennie, in her honor)—but, family aside, Megquier vastly preferred California. “The very air I breathe seems so very free,” she wrote from San Francisco in 1855, “that I have not the least desire to return.”
She had made her latest trip to California on her own. Thomas stayed behind in Maine, in poor health and out of favor with his wife. Jennie did not spell out her grievances, but she did not hide her feelings. “I have never regretted for a moment that I left Winthrop,” she wrote her daughter, Angie. “That beautiful house has no charms for me at present and should I know I would never visit it again, it would give me no sorrow as I should have the trials I have endured there.” Thomas died in 1855, a continent away from his discontented wife. She seldom spoke of him again.
“I should never wish to be in Maine again,” Jennie wrote Angie in 1856, and the implicit message was scarcely hidden: and you should leave, too. This was well-worn ground, but Jennie tried once more to tempt Angie to her. Maine was a land of petty scandal and raised eyebrows; California was “the place to enjoy life.”
In San Francisco, Jennie wrote, all was hustle and bustle and commotion and energy. She could look out her window to a view of “a dozen big clippers unlading their freight” and three steamers bound for Sacramento, “and I can hear every revolution of the wheel as they pass the window.” On an April day in 1856, the captain of a steamer took out his handkerchief and waved it to Jennie, who happened to be ironing. She outdid him, lifting an entire bedsheet into the air and proudly saluting back.
After the day’s hard work came the night’s diversions. “We dine at seven in the evening and then comes the frolic and dancing,” Jennie wrote. “Shan’t I miss them at home. I shall have the blues.”
Jennie Megquier had once prophesied that she would “come trudging home with an apron full” of gold. Unable to coax Angie to join her in the West and unwilling to face the prospect of a life without her family, she did indeed trudge her way back to Maine, in 1856. This was her third and last round-trip across the continent. She would spend the rest of her life in Maine.
Joseph Bruff, despite his fears, was not abandoned by his family and friends, and lived to a venerable age. Back at home in Washington, D.C., after his two-year adventure, he returned to his work as a draftsman and never ventured off again. Bruff racked up “54 years in the service of the Government,” he wrote proudly in his old age, “49 years of which steadily employed in designing and executing every description of drawing, for nearly every branch of public service… to the perfect satisfaction of my employers, and having their respect and esteem.”
Dutiful to the end, he marched off to his office every day until a few months before his death, at age eighty-four. (Age offered little protection. At eighty-one, according to notes in his personnel file, Bruff was reprimanded for tardiness on five different occasions. He had arrived one and a half minutes late one morning and five minutes late on another, and “offers no excuse.”) Bruff rarely mentioned his gold rush adventures. A death notice in the Washington Weekly Star compressed the whole life-and-death ordeal into a dozen or so words: “For the past sixty-three years Mr. Bruff has been in government employ”—the Star’s count was off by nine years—“and there was only one interregnum, when, in 1849, with other young men, he was stricken with the gold fever and started for California to amass a fortune. He was unsuccessful.”
But Bruff did succeed in bringing home his journals and sketches. They nearly vanished before anyone had a chance to see them, and more than once they almost cost Bruff his life. Late in 1849, trapped in the snow in the Sierra and starving, he’d had to choose whether to try to make his escape. “I cannot abandon my notes and drawings,” he wrote, and he stayed put. Months later, he could wait no longer. He packed up a shirt, a comb, a few matches, and his journals. He might die on the trail, he knew, but perhaps his rescuers would examine the bulky parcel in his knapsack. “Labeled my papers and drawings so that they may possibly reach my family if I am lost,” Bruff wrote, and then he staggered off, to rescue or to death.
A year later, he nearly lost them again. Late on the night of May 3, 1851, San Francisco caught fire, and two thousand buildings burned to the ground. Bruff’s room was ablaze, but he rescued his papers and dashed into the street. In the confusion, a horse-drawn carriage ran him down; friends dragged him and his cargo to safety. Finally, on July 17, 1851, Bruff landed in New York, his journey home nearly at its end. That night thieves ransacked his baggage and made off with “every thing of value I possessed except my books and drawings.”
Today those notes and drawings are acclaimed as the best and most thorough of all the gold rush diaries. That was Bruff’s judgment from the beginning. In 1850, he recalled later, “I was offered Ten Thousand dollars cash [$200,000 in today’s money] for my rough sketches of the overland Travel, but declined it, for obvious reasons.”
The adventurer whose wanderlust had led him across a continent died in his bed a few hundred yards from the home where he had been born.
As for California, the legacy of the gold rush long outlasted the gold itself. Those who had hoped for something else—perhaps the fever would break and the patient would return to a normal life?—glowered in frustration. “The rush to California,” declared Henry Thoreau, in a lecture delivered in 1854, reflects “the greatest disgrace on mankind.” The miners had worked until their bodies gave out, but that was beside the point. “It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. So does the Devil work hard.”
It was the nature of that work, not its difficulty, that so riled Thoreau. “The gold-digger in the ravines of the mountains is as much a gambler as his fellow in the saloons of San Francisco. What difference does it make whether you shake dirt or shake dice?… The humblest observer who goes to the mines sees and says that gold-digging is of the character of a lottery; the gold thus obtained is not the same thing with the wages of honest toil.”
It wasn’t the same thing. It was much better, as everyone in California knew. Who would choose a paycheck over a jackpot? (The difference in effort between a man working for hire and a miner digging to make himself rich, one eyewitness in the goldfields reported, was like that “between the agonizing, aimless movements of the sloth and the pounce of the panther.”) In any case, what need did California have for scoldings from staid New England? What did Boston, with its long history and its stern and disapproving ways, understand of bold, bad San Francisco, born the day before yesterday?
“There is nothing around us older than ourselves,” Hubert Bancroft proclaimed happily, in 1888. “All that we see has grown up under our eyes.… We lack the associations running back for generations, the old homesteads, the grandfather and grandmother, and uncles and aunts.” Lacking such restraints, Californians could bound joyously ahead, like puppies who slip their leash. That should have brought trouble, but it did not. “Men thrived on what elsewhere would prove their destruction,” wrote Bancroft. “Old maxims were as useless as broken crockery.”
Save for a rainy day? Haste makes waste? Look before you leap? Bancroft scoffed. “Deliberation and caution are well enough in their place… but a good driver does not put the brakes on going uphill.”
California was different, and it celebrated that difference. “In California the lights went on all at once, in a blaze,” wrote the historian Carey McWilliams, “and they never have dimmed.” What set California apart from other places was that it “has not grown or evolved so much as it has been hurtled forward, rocket-fashion, by a series of chain-reaction explosions.”
The first deton
ation, triggered by the rush of people from around the globe, set the tone. From its earliest days as a state, California was cosmopolitan. In 1860, its population was 39 percent foreign-born, triple the rate in the rest of the United States. San Francisco had more daily newspapers than did London, and they appeared not only in English but in Chinese, Swedish, French, Italian, and German. California was rich, with the highest per capita income in the nation. California was rowdy. In Massachusetts in 1856, a ship captain named Kemble, who had returned from a three-year voyage on a Sunday, was sentenced to two hours in the stocks for kissing his wife on his front doorstep; this was deemed “lewd and unseemly behavior.” California’s founding fathers were made of different stuff.
And, from the beginning, women were rare, which gave them bargaining power unavailable to their sisters back east. Many miners refused to wash a shirt or cook a meal, on the grounds that this was “women’s work.” All the better for the few women around, who could charge sky-high prices. Scarcity paid off in other ways, too. In the East, a woman in a bad marriage was often stuck; in California, she could boot a second-rate husband to the curb and try again.
Every new arrival saw at once that California was not like home. Some recoiled, as Israel Lord had. But many in that great human flood exulted in their new freedom, like residents of small towns today who flee to the big city, or teenagers who suffer through high school and then reach college and thrill at the chance to start over. California’s array of natural wonders only heightened those feelings of happy disorientation. Towering mountains, an endless ocean, countless acres of rich soil, rivers strewn with gold—everything in California was out of scale, everything was biggest and boldest and best. In 1852, for example, newcomers to California saw sequoia trees for the first time. Almost unfathomably gigantic, the biggest trees soared three hundred feet into the air and measured one hundred feet around the trunk. This seemed completely unlikely, a crude spoof like a jackalope postcard today. And yet, there the trees were, further proof that California was the Land of Fable where nature had suspended all the rules.
The emigrants felt that the rules that had held them in check, back at home, had been suspended, too. A missionary named William Taylor, sent to San Francisco to civilize the gold-seekers, found himself appalled at what these new Californians had got up to with the grown-ups two thousand miles away. Taylor spent seven years preaching on San Francisco’s streets and in the diggings, starting in 1849, with meager results. Though he liked and admired the miners, he noted regretfully that they seemed vastly to prefer the here and now to the prospect of bliss in the afterlife. “Many men of fine mind and good education have laid all their intellectual strength [toward] the manufacture of witticisms and vulgar sayings… and spend their evenings in detailing them for the entertainment of the fun-loving crowds,” he wrote. “Very few of them are particularly anxious to go to heaven.”
This indifference stemmed not from any philosophical quarrel with religion; the problem was more that the miners looked on their time in the West as an interlude in their life, a time-out from the usual strictures and creeds. They “cared nothing about California except for her gold,” Taylor reported, “and hence felt but little responsibility in regard to their conduct or character.” What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, nineteenth-century style.
The miners put their case to Taylor openly. “I knew I couldn’t carry my religion with me through California,” one man told him, “so when I left home in Missouri I hung my religious sign on my gate-post until I should return.”
The twist in the tale was that many of these miners never did return. Or they gave home a try but found that, once they had basked in California’s sunshine and savored its freedom, life on an Indiana farm or in a Cleveland office had lost its allure. “Many of us have gone back to the Eastern United States, attempting to make homes there, but found the attempt a complete failure,” wrote one gold-seeker. “Life was a dull and commonplace routine; once accustomed to the whirl of Californian speculation and the cordiality of Californian society, we could not live without them.”
A miner named William Manly, who returned home to Wisconsin in 1852 to settle down, found himself desperate for distraction. “Every day was like Sunday so far as anything going on,” he wailed. After weathering a few months’ peace and quiet, he set off for the West Coast again.
Nobody was bored in California. “Recklessness is in the air,” wrote Rudyard Kipling, after a visit to San Francisco in the 1880s. “I can’t explain where it comes from, but there it is.” Kipling, only in his twenties himself, found himself surrounded by men as active and spirited as he was. “The young men rejoice in the days of their youth. They gamble, yacht, race, enjoy prize-fights and cock-fights, the one openly, the other in secret; they establish luxurious clubs; they break themselves over horse-flesh and other things, and they are instant in a quarrel. At twenty they are experienced in business, embark in vast enterprises, take partners as experienced as themselves, and go to pieces with as much splendor as their neighbors.”
The observation about going broke in style was key. In California failure was an option; sometimes it seemed almost a requirement. Nearly all of California’s rich men had risen and fallen again and again, the trajectory of their careers almost always a jagged peak-and-valley sawtooth rather than a smooth incline. This, too, set California apart. The notion in the East had always been that to fail in business was to suffer a humiliation that could last a lifetime. People stared and whispered at their fallen neighbors with an almost lascivious malice. A man’s reputation as fiscally sound, nineteenth-century moralists delighted in pointing out, was akin to “a woman’s chastity, which a breath of dishonor may smirch and sully forever.”
But Californians seemed almost to take pride in their falls. “In any little random gathering of a dozen men in San Francisco, you will probably find some among them who have been wealthy on three or four occasions and then poor again,” wrote one miner-turned-journalist. “When men fail they do not despair… they hope to be rich again.”
In the newcomers’ eyes, this was testimony to their nerve, not to their lack of judgment. Everyone knew the story of California’s great fortunes, after all, and everyone understood that, in a land awash in money, fortune favored the bold. Or the lucky. Charles Crocker, a shopkeeper who rose to colossal riches as one of the “Big Four” railroad tycoons, put it bluntly (as, indeed, he put everything). “One man works hard all his life and ends up a pauper. Another man, no smarter, makes twenty million dollars. Luck has a hell of a lot to do with it.”
Riches might arrive from any direction. Swinging a pick was seldom the best option. (Crocker had failed as a miner but prospered as a dry-goods merchant selling to other miners.) An Italian candy-maker named Domenico Ghirardelli raced to California in 1849 to try his hand at mining. It didn’t pan out. He opened a store and then a second one. Both burned to the ground. He started over. The new business failed. His next venture, which in time changed its name to Ghirardelli Chocolate Company, made him rich. Levi Strauss famously made his fortune by outfitting the miners not with underwear or even shovels (though he did sell both) but with newfangled, hard-to-wear-out “waist overalls.” The turning point in his career—the moment when the rise from successful merchant to millionaire began—came in the summer of 1872. A fellow German Jewish immigrant named Jacob Davis wrote Strauss a letter. A tailor (and another failed miner), Davis knew Strauss because he bought cloth from him. He had news—he had come up with a better way to make sure that pant pockets didn’t come undone. “The secret of them Pents”—you can hear Strauss’s German-inflected English—“is the Rivits that I put in those Pockets and I found the demand so large that I cannot make them up fast enough.” So it proved.
California found its formula early on: a coyness-be-damned scramble for money, a taste for gambling and all-in bets, a gaze directed intently at the future, an embrace of talent regardless of age or accent or pedigree. It was a recipe for change. It worked, an
d it still works, but it is not a simple business. The race for fortune brought a trampling of those caught in the way; the eager taking up of new ideas carried with it a vulnerability to cults and fads of every stripe. On the complicated control panel that is California, the alluring and the off-putting, the brilliant and the inane, have always been only a few knob twists apart.
The pace has seldom slowed. It would be ludicrous to claim that innovation in America always starts in California. The car, perhaps the iconic image of American technological prowess, had nothing to do with California, nor did Henry Ford, patrolling his assembly line with stopwatch in hand, bear any relation to the buccaneers who grabbed up fortunes on the West Coast. But when the New York Times recently referred, and merely in passing, to “the great laboratory state of California,” they knew that every reader would understand. In entertainment, in free higher education, in environmental reform, in aerospace, in electronics, California more often than not shows the way. Apple, Google, Disney… the list of California-based innovators is long.
Is it coincidence that such companies thrive in a state founded by speculators with a fondness for risk taking? “The cowards never started,” Californians liked to say when their state was young, and there was truth as well as self-congratulation in the remark. Just as important, the tolerance of failure that marked the gold rush years lives on today. In Silicon Valley, it has become dogma that if you haven’t failed, you haven’t tried hard enough. “You’ve got to be willing to fail,” Steve Jobs preached. “You’ve got to be willing to crash and burn… with starting a company, with whatever. If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.”
The biggest of California’s innovations was California itself. Elsewhere, “heritage” and “tradition” were hallowed words; here, they were not living links to history but dead weights. The new state beckoned the world with an invitation it had never heard, and the world came running: Come to California, where the end of the story has not yet been written.
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