The Age of Gold

by H. W. Brands

  The discovery of these vast deposits of gold has entirely changed the character of Upper California. Its people, before engaged in cultivating their small patches of ground and guarding their herds of cattle and horses, have all gone to the mines, or are on their way thither; laborers of every trade have left their work benches, and tradesmen their shops; sailors desert their ships as fast as they arrive on the coast….I have no hesitation now in saying that there is more gold in the country drained by the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers than will pay the cost of the present war with Mexico a hundred times over. No capital is required to obtain this gold, as the laboring man wants nothing but his pick, shovel, and tin pan, with which to dig and wash the gravel; and many frequently pick gold out of the crevices of rock with their butcher knives in pieces from one to six ounces.

  To corroborate this testimony, Sherman suggested to Mason that they send some gold along with the letter. Mason agreed, and Sherman bought enough dust—over 200 ounces—to fill a small oyster-can (or tea caddy, as others interpreted the squarish metal container). The letter and the oyster- can left Monterey at the end of August, in the keeping of a special courier, a Lieutenant Loeser, whose orders were to get to Washington as quickly as possible.

  2

  Across the Pacific

  But travel was slow. Lieutenant Loeser caught a ship bound south past Mexico and Central America for Peru. He waited in Peru for a second ship, bound back north to Panama, which he crossed by mule. A third craft carried him to Jamaica, and a fourth to New Orleans. From there he telegraphed ahead to Washington, saying he had arrived and was bearing an important message. But he didn’t reach the capital himself—with the letter and the load of gold—till late November.

  Loeser’s arrival prompted an announcement by President Polk of the momentous discovery in California, an announcement that is often interpreted as the starting pistol for the Gold Rush. In a narrowly American sense it was, for in the months that followed Polk’s announcement, a flood of American adventurers headed west, determined to fill their pockets with gold and their lives with the miracles sudden wealth would bring.

  But in fact the rush to California had already begun. In terms of the most common means of long-distance transport—that is, by sea—every country that bordered the Pacific Ocean was closer to California than were the states of the American union. New York was sixteen thousand nautical miles from San Francisco, compared to two thousand for Acapulco and Honolulu, four thousand for Callao, six thousand for Valparaiso, and seven thousand for Sydney and Canton. While Lieutenant Loeser was struggling east, the word of James Marshall’s discovery rippled out the Golden Gate (previously named with fortuitous aptness by John Frémont) and spread north, south, and west across the greatest of the world’s oceans. In every port that heard the news, it set hearts racing. People dropped what they were doing, bought passage for the golden coast, and headed out upon the waves. They didn’t all get there before the rush from America hit, but they did ensure the international character of the invading force.

  THE NEWS REACHED South America almost before Loeser left Monterey. In May 1848 the supercargo of a Chilean ship at San Francisco heard the stories of gold on the American River and immediately offered $12 per ounce for as much dust as anyone would bring him. This commercial officer knew his business, for his price was substantially above the $8 to $10 local merchants were paying for gold (Sherman paid $10 per ounce to fill the oyster-can), yet comfortably below the $17 gold sellers were getting in Valparaiso, where his ship was headed.

  The ship was the brig J.R.S., owned by (and initialed for) José Ramón Sánchez of Valparaiso; its regular trade was hides and tallow, which heretofore were California’s principal exports. (Richard Dana’s Pilgrim was similarly engaged in the hide-and-tallow trade.) How much gold the supercargo acquired is unknown; if he ran short of cash to make good his promise, owner Sánchez had sufficient credit in San Francisco to supply the shortfall. The J.R.S. weighed anchor on June 14, cleared the Golden Gate, and reached Valparaiso on August 19.

  Within hours the news that it carried California gold traversed the Vale of Paradise for which the town was named, and flew to Santiago, a hundred miles inland. Within days merchants were consigning cargoes for California; gold seekers were purchasing passage north. Two dozen hopefuls filled the berths of the Virjinia, which got away first. By chance another ship arrived from San Francisco just as the Virjinia was casting off; the additional gold it carried confirmed the earlier evidence of California’s riches and further inflamed the dreams of the Virjinia’s argonauts.

  “The gold nuggets were the authorized ambassadors of those riches,” wrote Vicente Pérez Rosales, in line for one of the next boats north. “Their fame acquired the proportions of the calumny of the Barber of Seville, and aroused in the minds of the tranquil Chileans an explosion of such feverish activity that, ignoring the voices of prudence, led thousands of adventurers to the rich honeycomb where so many hopes perished. For those who gave credence to the existence of California gold, the only imprudent ones were those who did not rush off.”

  Pérez Rosales was too old for such stay-at-home imprudence. Forty-one when the news arrived from California, he was descended from parents who were patricians under the Spanish and rebels under José San Martín and Bernardo O’Higgins. During the Chilean war for independence they sent young Vicente to France to school; he returned to pursue what he thought would be a life of genteel, if perhaps radical, letters. But family bankruptcy overturned his plans, and he was cast upon his own practical talents. These proved more varied than most of those who knew the sheltered young man would have guessed. He dug gold in the Chilean Andes and rustled cattle, crossing into Argentina to round up the animals, then driving them back to Chile by precipitous paths only he and his fellow outlaws knew. After increased settlement brought too many witnesses to the backcountry, he abandoned the mountains for the cafes of Valparaiso, where aspiring but impoverished intellectuals like himself could talk for hours over a single cup of coffee. They read Rousseau and argued Locke, and printed their opinions on a press fitted with type purchased from the heirs of Benjamin Franklin. Upon hearing of the gold in California, Pérez reflected that however much the intellectual life nourished the soul, it left the body—at least his body—hungry, and he decided to join the adventurers heading north.

  “Four brothers, a brother-in-law and two trusted servants constituted the personnel of our expedition to California,” he recorded.

  The common capital of our escapade was: six sacks of toasted flour; six of beans; four quintals of rice; a barrel of sugar; two of Concepción wine; a small assortment of shovels, axes and picks; an iron kettle; powder, and lead for bullets; 250 pesos cash, and 612 for the cost of passage. The private equipment of each one, apart from the linen which was abandoned over there because no one could be bothered to wash dirty underwear, only to wash gold, consisted of: military boots, a wool shirt that at the same time served as a jacket; thick woolen trousers; a leather belt; a dagger; a brace of pistols; a rifle; and lastly a canvas hat that had to serve as both a hat and a pillow. Completing our individual furnishings were: a small leather pouch for toasted flour, a tin pitcher or bowl capable of withstanding the heat of a fire; a hunter’s gear; and a fire-flint.

  Their ship was a French bark, the Stanguéli, which was so crowded that Pérez and his companions had to leave their common equipment for the next vessel. The departure evoked equal measures of anxiety and anticipation. “California for the Chileans was an unknown country, nearly a desert, full of dangers and infested besides by epidemics of disease,” Pérez wrote. “There we had no friends or relatives to lend a hand; personal safety could be found only at the barrel of a pistol or the point of a dagger; and nevertheless, the risk of robbery, violence, sickness, death itself, were secondary considerations before the dazzling promise of gold.”

  The passengers were ninety men, two women (including a prostitute named Rosario Améstica, a favorite among the men)
, four cows, eight pigs, and three dogs (besides the seventeen sailors and the captain and pilot). Most seemed ordinary enough, but two attracted the special attention of Pérez Rosales. One was a gentleman named álvarez, a Chilean by birth, eccentric to the point of paranoia. Though rich and able to afford the first cabin, he refused it, saying the Frenchmen operating the boat were all thieves and would not feed him as well as he could feed himself with the food he brought aboard. The other noteworthy passenger was “a Frenchman of such massive hips that, to enter the passageway through the narrow door that communicated with the cabin, he always had to turn sideways. For this we gave him the mischievous name Culatus [Big Butt].”

  The ship set sail just after the solstice of the Southern Hemisphere summer, and for the first month the passengers and crew sweltered north toward the equator. On January 18, 1849, Pérez Rosales entered in his diary: “Until today our only torment has been the exasperating monotony and the suffocating heat.” Amid the torpor the ship crossed the equator; none could rouse themselves to celebrate.

  Yet before the mast, the steerage passengers were restive. “álvarez is at the heart of the matter,” Pérez wrote, “for it seems that his provisions, poorly distributed, will not last until the end of the voyage. We fear a mutiny on board.”

  Next day the ship sighted another vessel, which upon approach proved to be an American whaler. The Yankee captain dropped a boat, which rowed over to the Stanguéli. The captain was friendly and modest; the sailors who accompanied him were eager for faces and voices other than their own. The sailors grew more than eager upon perceiving one face— and form—in particular; they “nearly fainted with envy to see among us the charming Rosarito.”

  The captain told how he and his men had been thirty-nine months at sea without once touching land. (Either the Yankee captain, in the telling, or Pérez Rosales, in the retelling, may have been exaggerating; whalers often went long without landing, but rarely that long.) He savored the luncheon set before him: the soft bread and fresh meat, which he had almost forgotten after three years of hardtack and salt pork. The Chileans were lucky, he said, and doubly so to be off for the goldfields to win their fortunes. But he added, with the sigh of the homesick, “I do not envy your luck, for I am on my way to embrace my children.”

  The Americans continued south toward Valparaiso, carrying the Chileans’ good wishes and their hastily scrawled letters; the Stanguéli proceeded slowly north. The restiveness in steerage persisted, until on the last day of January, when Pérez Rosales and the other cabin passengers were dining with the officers, a seaman burst into the saloon and frantically whispered a message to the captain. The captain turned to his messmates and declared, in a voice of alarm, “We have a revolution on board! álvarez is leading it, and if you don’t help me, we are lost!”

  Pérez and the others literally leaped into action. While the others hurried to their cabins to retrieve weapons, Pérez hastened to deck to summon some additional passengers. Together they managed to subdue álvarez before the mutiny spread. “This is no small luck!” Pérez remarked, pondering what the insurrection might have become. The prisoner was chained and kept under close guard.

  The monotony resumed. On February 13, Pérez wrote: “Today makes 47 days of the voyage. The state of health, perfect; we have delivered to the sea but one poor dead sailor. According to what the captain says, in about four more days we shall arrive at the country of hope or deception. The wind is fresh; we are traveling at a rate of eight miles per hour. If this continues, the four days will turn into two. Dense clouds surround us on all sides. The captain has been lamenting all day the absence of the sun.”

  Pérez thought the captain simply disliked the gloom; in fact it was the danger the fog enshrouded that worried him. That danger became apparent shortly. “Only an hour ago we should have perished, shattered against the shores of the Farallones, which rise up just five leagues from the entrance to the port of San Francisco,” Pérez recorded on February 15. In the fog the captain had shortened sail and readied anchors; this pleased the passengers, who assumed it meant they were about to land. But rather it was a precaution against striking unseen rocks. The captain, in order to keep the passengers from retiring but not wishing to frighten them by hinting at imminent wreck, proposed a game of whist.

  Great satisfaction filled the saloon. Some were playing, others were taking tea, all were talking at the same time, all boasting about what they intended to do. The good Culatus, who liked to sleep more than anything else, had placed his corpulent self upon the first step of the stairway that led from the cabin to the deck, tranquilly taking the air there, when the captain, suddenly throwing down his cards, rushed to the deck. An instant later, and when least expected, terrified shouts—“Rocks ahead! A bar to windward! Unfurl all sails!”—hit us like a thunderbolt.

  Those still in the saloon couldn’t flee fast enough. They scattered cards, broke china, overturned chairs, and splintered tables in their haste toward the exit. “As this was blocked by the fat Culatus, who in his fright had forgotten that he had to turn sideways to pass, the combined momentum of all of us blew out this devilish obstruction in our path to the deck like the wadding of a cannon, and we clambered over him.”

  Fortunately the captain’s alertness rescued the ship and all aboard. Pérez was left to look over the rail at “the white and booming surf that marked the base of the black rocks where, without the swift action of the captain, we should have lost not only our dreams of riches but our very lives!”

  The immediate danger past, the captain dropped anchor in forty fathoms. That day and the next, the fog persisted. A distant storm sent heavy seas that combined with the recent near-disaster to keep everyone uncomfortable. The sea lions and seabirds that inhabited the Farallones contributed to the discomfort with an incessant cacophony.

  On the third day a heavy rain sheeted out of the fog. A rising wind convinced the captain to leave this dangerous zone; in doing so he almost collided with a brig that appeared ghostlike from the mist. Disaster was averted by an even narrower margin than before, as the brig scraped the stern beneath Pérez Rosales’s feet. “What a hazardous position!” he scribbled.

  Finally, at dawn on February 18, after a fitful night during which all slept in their clothes, expecting to have to swim for their lives at any moment, they awoke to glorious relief. “We beheld the most beautiful panorama that could have unfolded before our eyes at such a distressing moment. We described to the south the black Farallones, which had held such danger; and to the east, to which we were steering under a clear sky and with a fresh wind, the mouth of the Golden Gate, which inspired awe but at the same time smiled, seeming to open wide to receive us.”

  WHILE PéREZ ROSALES and his Chilean shipmates were creeping north toward the equator, far across the Pacific in Australia an ambivalent Tom Archer pondered the startling news from America. Archer had come to Australia in his teens after his Scottish parents, transplanted to Norway, feared he would grow irretrievably Scandinavian and accepted the offer of an uncle to take the lad down under. Tommy wasn’t consulted, being just then at death’s door from typhus. By the time he recovered, the decision had been made, and the fourteen-year-old boy, after a brief visit to England, arrived at Sydney in company with two hundred Irish emigrants, at midnight on December 31, 1837, following a passage from Plymouth of 120 days.

  During the next dozen years Tom Archer grew up with the country. Most of his time was spent in the outback herding sheep and some cattle, fending off larcenous and occasionally murderous “bushrangers,” intimidating certain aboriginal “blacks” and employing others, and generally learning to survive in some of the most unforgiving country on earth. Years later he would summarize his lessons: “Morals—don’t make shortcuts through the bush without food, matches, or tinder; don’t attempt the impossible feat of rubbing a fire with a dry branch on a big log; don’t imagine you have slept for hours when you have only slept for minutes; and finally, don’t forget to be thankful fo
r the exquisite luxury of sleeping on a sheepskin beside a roaring fire, having consumed a pot of delicious hot tea, with the usual accompaniment of damper and mutton.” Archer regularly spent months at a stretch far from anything that passed for civilization, and longer than that from various accoutrements of domestic life. He remembered distinctly a day when he went to a creek to bathe. “I caught sight of the reflection of a tall broad-shouldered young man, who, on closer inspection, turned out to be myself.” The Australian Narcissus gazed in wonder at his own figure. “For the first time, it occurred to me that I was verging upon eighteen, and nearly grown up. The knowledge of this inspired me with much veneration for myself.” He added wryly, “But I was unable to perceive any approach to that feeling in anyone else.”

  Outback life was rigorous in other ways. A mate developed a severe toothache and begged the local doctor to pull the offending grinder. The doctor explained that he lacked the requisite tools. The patient moaned that the tooth must be removed or he’d die. A helpful bystander suggested that in the absence of pliers a bullet-mold (hinged and handled to accept the hot lead) might do. The doctor was game and the patient imploring, so into the mouth the instrument went. Much larger than pliers, it nearly choked the patient, who made awful noises as the doctor grappled for the tooth. Finally, after a mighty yank, the doctor triumphantly displayed the bloody molar. The patient, by now in shock, discharged a mouthful of gore before telling the doctor that what he had been trying to say—while the doctor was apparently trying to kill him—was that he had the wrong tooth. The doctor’s face fell, and the patient fled as if from a torturer. But soon he was back, determined to have done with his malady or his life. The second operation succeeded.