The Rush

by Edward Dolnick

  Farley, Charles A. “The Moral Aspect of California: A Thanksgiving Sermon” (New York: Henry Spear, 1850).

  Federal Writers’ Project. California: A Guide to the Golden State (New York: Hastings, 1939).

  Fey, Marshall, R. Joe King, and Jack Lepisto. Emigrant Shadows: A History and Guide to the California Trail (Virginia City, NV: Western Trails Research Association, 2002).

  Foner, Philip. History of the Labor Movement in the United States: From Colonial Times to the Founding of the AFL (New York: International, 1972).

  Garrett, Lula May. “San Francisco in 1851 As Described by Eyewitnesses,” California Historical Society Quarterly 22, no. 3 (Sept., 1943).

  Gay, Theressa. James W. Marshall: The Discoverer of California Gold (Georgetown, CA: Talisman, 1967).

  Goodman, Matthew. The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-bats in Nineteenth Century New York (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

  Gordon, John Steele. An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).

  Groh, George. Gold Fever (New York: William Morrow, 1966).

  Herrington, Richard, et al. Gold. (London: Natural History Museum, 1999).

  Hill, William E. The California Trail: Yesterday and Today (Boise, ID: Tamarack, 1993).

  “History of the Origin, Progress, and Mortality of the Cholera Morbus,” London Medical Gazette 44 (1849).

  Hittell, John. A History of the City of San Francisco (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1878).

  ______. The Resources of California (New York: Widdleton, 1874).

  Holliday, J. S. “Failure Be Damned: The Origin of California’s Risk-taking Culture.” This was a lecture delivered on May 3, 2000, at the Milken Institute Forum.

  ______. Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of California (Berkeley: Oakland Museum of California and the University of California Press, 1999).

  ______. The World Rushed In: An Eyewitness Account of a Nation Heading West (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981).

  Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

  Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  Hurtado, Albert. Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).

  ______. John Sutter: A Life on the North American Frontier (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006).

  Isaacson, Walter. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003).

  Jackson, Donald Dale. Gold Dust (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2004).

  “J. Goldsborough Bruff,” Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Online at http://tinyurl.com/mfu3vtm.

  Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World (New York: Riverhead, 2006).

  Johnson, Susan Lee. Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: Norton, 2000).

  Jones, Peter. The 1848 Revolutions (London: Longman, 1991).

  Kelley, Robert L. Gold versus Grain: The Hydraulic Mining Controversy in Caliornia’s Sacramento Valley (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1959).

  Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery 1619–1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993).

  Kowalewski, Michael, ed. Gold Rush (Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 1997).

  Krech, Shepard, III. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: Norton, 1999).

  Kurutz, Gary. The California Gold Rush: A Descriptive Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets Covering the Years 1848–1853 (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1997).

  Lapp, Rudolph. Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977).

  Larkin, Jack. The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790–1840 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).

  Lavender, David. California: Land of New Beginnings (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972).

  Lepler, Jessica M. 1837: Anatomy of a Panic (Ann Arbor, MI: Proquest, 2007).

  Levy, JoAnn. They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992).

  Lewis, Oscar. The Big Four (New York: Knopf, 1938).

  ______. Sea Routes to the Gold Fields: The Migration by Water to California in 1849–52 (New York: Knopf, 1949).

  Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987).

  ______. Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (New York: Norton, 2000).

  Lorenz, Anthony J. “Scurvy in the Gold Rush,” Journal of the History of Medicine 12, no. 4 (October, 1957).

  Luskey, Brian. On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

  Mackay, Charles. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1932).

  “Make Everything Golden,” Popular Science, June, 2005. Online at http://tinyurl.com/kfzsa9x.

  Martineau, Harriet. Society in America, v. 1 (New York: Saunders and Otley, 1837).

  Marvin, Judith, Julia Costello, and Salvatore Manna. Northern Calaveras County (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2007).

  Matt, Susan J. Homesickness: An American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  Mattes, Merrill. The Great Platte River Road: The Covered Wagon Mainline via Fort Kearny to Fort Laramie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987).

  McPherson, James. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

  McWilliams, Carey. California: The Great Exception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949).

  Meldahl, Keith. Hard Road West: History and Geology Along the Gold Rush Trail (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

  ______. Rough-hewn Land: A Geologic Journey from California to the Rocky Mountains (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

  Merry, Robert W. A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009).

  Mindich, David T. Z. Just the Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define American Journalism (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

  Minnigerode, Meade. The Fabulous Forties, 1840–1850 (Garden City, NY: Garden City, 1924).

  Morris, Roy, Jr. Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

  Morton, Julius, and Albert Watkins. History of Nebraska from the Earliest Explorations of the Trans-Mississippi Region (Lincoln, NE: Western Publishing, 1918).

  Muir, John. The Mountains of California (New York: Century, 1894).

  Newell, Olive. Tail of the Elephant; The Emigrant Experience on the Truckee Route of the California Trail, 1844–1852 (Nevada City, CA: Nevada County Historical Society, 1997).

  Nugent, Walter. Into the West: The Story of Its People (New York: Knopf, 1999).

  Owens, Kenneth, ed. Gold Rush Saints: California Mormons and the Great Rush for Riches (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005).

  ______. John Sutter and a Wider West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).

  Paul, Rodman. California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1947).

  ______. The California Gold Discovery: Sources, Documents, Accounts and Memoirs Related to the Discovery of Gold at Sutter’s Mill (Georgetown, CA: Talisman, 1966).

  Pearce, Roy Harvey. “The Significances of the Captivity Narrative Author,” American Literature 19, no. 1 (March, 1947).

  Pessen, Edward. Riches, Class, and Power: America Before the Civil War (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990).

  Rapport, Mike. 1848: Year of Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

  Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biograp
hy (New York: Vintage, 1996).

  Richardson, Robert. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

  Roberts, Brian. American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

  Roberts, Sylvia Alden. Mining for Freedom: Black History Meets the California Gold Rush (Bloomington, IN: Universe, 2008).

  Rosenberg, Charles E. The Cholera Years (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

  Roth, Mitchel. “Cholera, Community, and Public Health in Gold Rush Sacramento and San Francisco,” Pacific Historical Review 66, no. 4 (Nov., 1997).

  Rydell, Raymond. “The Cape Horn Route to California, 1849,” The Pacific Historical Review 17, no. 2 (May, 1948).

  Sandage, Scott. Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

  Schlissell, Lillian. Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (New York: Schocken, 1982).

  Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978).

  Shepard, Edward. Martin Van Buren (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1892).

  Spann, Edward. New Metropolis: New York City 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

  Starr, Kevin. Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

  Starr, Kevin, and Richard J. Orsi, eds. Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold Rush California. This collection of essays was published as a special issue of California History, v. 79, no. 2 (Summer, 2000).

  Stashower, Daniel. The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder (New York: Berkley Books, 2006).

  Stellman, Louis J. Sam Brannan: Builder of San Francisco (Fairfield, CA: James Stevenson, 1996).

  Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Empire and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

  Stewart, George R. The California Trail (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962).

  Stillson, Richard Thomas. Spreading the Word: A History of Information in the California Gold Rush (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).

  Thoreau, Henry. Walden (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1910).

  Tong, Benson. Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994).

  Trollope, Frances. Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York: Dover, 2003).

  Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1883).

  ______. Roughing It (Hartford, CT: American, 1872).

  Unruh, John D., Jr. The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979).

  Weber, Shirley H., ed. Schliemann’s First Visit to America, 1850–1851 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Gennadeion Monographs, 1942). Online at http://tinyurl.com/kv394mb.

  West, Elliot. “Family Life on the Trail West,” History Today, Dec., 1992.

  Whaples, Robert. “California Gold Rush.” Online at http://tinyurl.com/6vnxoxm.

  Whipple, A. B. C. The Challenge (New York: Morrow, 1987).

  Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

  Wright, Doris Marion. “The Making of Cosmopolitan California: An Analysis of Immigration 1848–1872,” The California Historical Society Quarterly 19 (Part I, Dec., 1940; Part II, March, 1941).

  *The population of Greater New York today is about forty times larger than in the mid-1800s, but the number of millionaires has grown much faster. In comparison with ten millionaires in 1848, the number of millionaires in the New York metropolitan area today is 650,000.

  *More than two centuries after America’s birth, tourists visiting the United States still find themselves surprised at how deeply optimism is built into the culture. “The palpable sense of newness here creates an odd sort of optimism,” according to the 2012 edition of the Rough Guide to the USA, “where anything seems possible and fortune can strike at any moment.”

  *Eventually, some poor soul kneeling at the base of a mountain of electronic trash will break open those discarded televisions and phones and pluck out the gold.

  *Brannan’s Mormonism did not conspicuously constrain him; he drank with gusto and happily sold to others what he enjoyed himself, and for a variety of sins would eventually be booted from the church.

  *Many of Sutter’s ablest employees were Mormons, ex-soldiers who had fought in the Mexican-American War in the so-called Mormon Battalion. Brigham Young had come up with the idea of the all-volunteer unit, by way of demonstrating Mormons’ loyalty to the United States. With the war over, many of the veterans had set out for Utah, but Young had ordered them to wait a bit. Salt Lake City could barely feed the people already there. Forced to linger in California, Bigler and five other Mormon Battalion veterans found work at a spot called Sutter’s Fort, and stepped into history.

  *A sailor’s life in the navy was as brutal as on a whaler, making the prospect of gold and independence all the more appealing. In 1848 naval officers still routinely punished sailors by whipping them with a cat-o’-nine-tails. In a speech in 1852, one impassioned senator demanded, “Who, O Senators, is the American sailor, that he is to be treated worse than a dog?… Let me remind you that he has recently gained for his country an empire.”

  *Names in the nineteenth century had heft and savor. You could roll them around on your tongue. Emigrant archives are dotted with the likes of Pardon Dexter Tiffany, or Ichabod and Silence Bryant, or Plutarch and Seneca Knight.

  *This was a prudish age, with strict rules about what could be said outright, but in the privacy of their diaries and letters some writers veered toward openness. On September 12, 1849, for instance, six weeks into his marriage, the Vermont schoolteacher Alfred Rix wrote happily in his diary, “This is warm weather and we are pretty well wearied out when we are done. GUESS.”

  *That kind of wanderlust-on-hyperdrive had marked Americans as different almost from the nation’s birth. “In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it, and he sells it before the roof is on,” Tocqueville wrote in amazement, in Democracy in America. “He plants a garden, and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he brings a field into tillage, and leaves other men to gather the crops.”

  *One gold-seeker composed a song that captured the same theme in rhyme. “Oh, I’m going far away from my Creditors just now,” it began, “I ain’t the tin to pay ’em and they’re kicking up a row.” James Pierpont would go on to write “Jingle Bells,” but he managed not to make any money from one of the best-known of all American songs and not to find any gold in California either.

  *On May 27, 1849, Israel Lord noted that the rough going did offer one consolation: no one needed to churn milk into butter. All you had to do was put milk or cream into a closed container and tie it on the wagon in the morning. The day’s jouncing ride “throws the milk from one end of the churn to the other,” Lord wrote delightedly, and by day’s end “the butter gathers in lumps of the size of a walnut, and may be poured from a small hole.”

  *It was Everett, a famous orator, who was the featured speaker at the dedication of the national cemetery in Gettysburg in 1863. The ceremony was postponed for three weeks to give Everett time to prepare. He spoke for two hours and was followed by Abraham Lincoln, who delivered his Gettysburg Address in two minutes.

  *Danger followed Bates ashore. Within weeks of her arrival, San Francisco itself burned nearly to the ground.

  *It was this move that inspired Marx’s famous observation that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

  *“The past is a foreign country,” observes the anthropologist Gregory Cochran. “Don’t drink the water.”

  *Chimney Rock was an American name.
The Sioux called it Elk Penis.

  *A wagon train in 1849 presaged many of the miseries of a family vacation in a hot, crowded car today. “Grown men are apt to become children again and make mouths at one another on very slight provocation,” Reid complained. On one summer night he had been forced to step in as peacemaker in the Battle of the Sugar Sack—the supply of sugar had begun to run low, and some of the Pioneers accused others of taking more than their share.

  *Harrison was in fact the son of a prominent planter who had signed the Declaration of Independence and served as governor of Virginia, but never mind.

  *Schliemann took the same route, but he focused more on the human threat than on the danger of a fall. Here, away from the river, outsiders had to fear not drowning but mugging. “On the way from Gorgona to Panama they equally shoot or stab them, and throw them down in the abyss, where never a living human being has put his foot.”

  *The few responses to the convention fell on a spectrum that ran from mockery to outrage. Philadelphia’s Public Ledger and Daily Transcript declared, for example, “A woman is nobody. A wife is everything. The ladies of Philadelphia… are resolved to maintain their rights as Wives, Belles, Virgins and Mothers.”

  *Mary Walker was no softie. Her diary entry from March 16, 1842, read: “Rose about five o’clock, had an early breakfast, got my housework done up about 9. Baked six more loaves of bread. Made a kettle of mush & have now a suet pudding and some beef boiling.… Nine o’clock P.M. was delivered of a son.”

  *He had planned to spend the winter nestled along the river’s banks, safe and sheltered, but instead Frémont and his men ended up nearly out of supplies, desperately fighting their way across the Sierra Nevada through snow so deep it swallowed up the horses.

  *Just four days before Polk’s speech, another steamer, the Panama-bound Falcon, had slipped out of New York empty and unnoticed. Then came the speech, and men chased after the Falcon in desperation, as if they had seen a winning lottery ticket swept away by a gust of wind. Hundreds galloped on horseback to New Orleans, the Falcon ’s first port of call, hoping to catch her. Even if they made it aboard, they would have to slog their way across Panama to catch another ship on the Pacific side. Fine, we’ll take that chance. For years to come, no ship bound for California, or even its general vicinity, would sail empty again.