The Age of Gold

by H. W. Brands

  If it was almost unthinkable for Jessie to travel to California without a male escort, it was wholly inconceivable for her to depart without a maid. An eleventh-hour search turned up a New England woman of indeterminate years, although apparently at least a score more than Jessie’s twenty- five. Jessie distrusted the woman’s looks. “She was a hard, unpleasing person to my mind,” she recalled. But the steamer sailed the next day, and there was no one else.

  Until the Crescent City, of the Pacific Mail steamship line, left the dock on the morning of March 15, Jessie kept up a brave face. But as the ship slipped down the Hudson estuary and out past Sandy Hook, the magnitude of the ocean and of the task she had set for herself briefly overwhelmed her. The ship carried nearly 350 passengers; all but Jessie, Lily, Jessie’s new maid, and one Irish woman traveling with her husband were male. Jessie had never been to sea; in fact, she had never been much beyond the bosom of her family. “I had never been obliged to think for or take care of myself,” she recalled, “and now I was to be launched literally on an unknown sea, travel toward an unknown country, everything absolutely new and strange about me.”

  That first night Jessie put Lily to bed early, soothing the same fears in her daughter she felt in herself. Then she too crawled under the covers, hoping that what she had told Lily—that things would look better the next day—would prove true. Sleep came slowly, then came and went repeatedly through the night. During one moment of semiconsciousness she heard footsteps in her cabin. Through half-closed eyes she saw a shadow, which became a human figure. The darkness eventually revealed the new maid— but not the new maid, for this woman was much younger, with lighter hair. Jessie, fearing an attack on her own person or Lily’s, kept quiet while the woman rummaged through Jessie’s trunk, pocketing everything that suited her larcenous tastes. After what seemed an age but certainly was no more than minutes, the woman left.

  Jessie flew to the door and bolted it, and guarded it till morning against repeated knocks and calls from the same woman. When morning finally came, she reported the theft to the captain, who arrested the thief and put her under guard for the duration of the voyage. This left Jessie without a maid—for indeed the thief and the servant were one, the latter being the former in disguise—but relieved for the lack. (The woman in question would distinguish herself in San Francisco by being implicated in the great fire that destroyed the city in 1851.)

  The eight remaining days to Chagres, the port on the Caribbean side of Panama, were marginally better. A storm laid Richard Jacob low, rendering him more a queasy burden than a source of strength. Jessie’s double cabin, the best on board, soon seemed almost homey. Indeed, so comfortable did it become that she was tempted not to leave it. “When we reached Chagres,” she said, “if it had not been for pure shame and unwillingness that my father should think badly of me, I would have returned to New York on the steamer.”

  THE SHIP’S CAPTAIN implored her to do just that, with reason. In more placid times the isthmus was merely unhealthy and unruly. Spain had tried to impose order during the three centuries of Spanish rule, and in the salad days of the empire succeeded well enough to get couriers and shipments of gold over the sixty or so miles of mountains and jungle that separated Chagres from Panama City. But when Castile nodded, outlaws, freebooters, adventurers, and other undesirables flocked to this crossroads of two continents and two oceans, and made merry havoc. Order deteriorated further when mainland Hispanic America threw off Spanish rule in the first quarter of the nineteenth century; the successor to sovereignty on the isthmus, the republic of New Granada, lacked the resources and imperial incentive to police the Panama strip.

  The discovery of gold in California compounded the chaos. Thousands, then tens of thousands, of argonauts descended upon Chagres, overwhelming the town’s ecological, economical, and political carrying capacity. Housing had never been plentiful; now it was nonexistent for most of the travelers. They slept in the streets, by the harbor, on doorsteps, and under awnings. The rough living heightened the danger the travelers incurred of contracting insect-borne diseases—chiefly yellow fever (“Chagres fever”) and malaria. The town’s sanitation system had sufficed, more or less, for a population of a few hundred; it failed appallingly under the load of several thousands. Cholera and typhoid were rampant.

  Consequently, Captain Schenck of the Crescent City had ample cause for fearing that Jessie Frémont and Lily might never leave the isthmus alive. It would be far more prudent, he said, for the pair to return with him to New York. If Jessie’s father and husband had known what this part of the passage would involve, under the crush of the argonauts, they never would have let her come.

  Richard Jacob seconded the captain’s argument, for his charges’ sake and his own. He was traveling to California only because they were; his wife was back east and expecting a child. If Jessie would agree to turn around, his own journey would be shortened by more than half. And, by all evidence, his life might well be lengthened.

  But Jessie, despite the trials of the journey so far, insisted on continuing. She had told John she would join him in California. Even now he must be battling his way across the winter mountains. She must meet him when he reached the promised land. Screwing up her courage, she handed Lily over the side of the ship to the crew manning the boat that would take them to shore, and followed her down. The reluctant Richard Jacob climbed in beside them.

  “FOR THREE OR FOUR days before reaching Chagres,” wrote J. D. Borthwick, “all hands were busy packing up, and firing off and reloading pistols; for a revolver and a bowie-knife were considered the first items in a California outfit. We soon assumed a warlike appearance, and though some of the party had probably never handled a pistol in their lives before, they tried to wear their weapons in a negligé style, as if they had never been used to go without them.”

  Borthwick, a Briton, was one of the thousands of gold-seekers who crossed the isthmus by the same route as Jessie Frémont. Like her and most others, he had embarked from New York (smaller numbers came from New Orleans and other ports); like her he encountered at Chagres the first real taste of what the trip to California entailed. To this point it had consisted of a sea voyage, and a generally pleasant one at that (an outcome not lost on later organizers of Caribbean cruises). But all the travelers had heard of Chagres and the isthmus, and all prepared for their first test. “Wondrous accounts constantly appeared in the New York papers of the dangers and difficulties of these few miles of land-and-river travel,” Borthwick wrote, “and most of the passengers, before leaving New York, had been humbugged into buying all manner of absurd and useless articles, many of them made of india-rubber, which they had been assured, and consequently believed, were absolutely necessary.” But how to carry them all, or even how to use them all, was a puzzle. “Some were equipped with pots, pans, kettles, drinking-cups, knives and forks, pocket-filters (for they had been told that the water on the Isthmus was very dirty), india-rubber contrivances, which an ingenious man, with a powerful imagination and strong lungs, could blow up and convert into a bed, a boat, or a tent—bottles of ‘cholera preventive,’ boxes of pills for curing every disease to which human nature is liable; and some men, in addition to all this, determined to be prepared to combat danger in every shape, bade defiance to the waters of the Chagres river by buckling on india-rubber life-preservers.”

  The setting of Chagres was stunning. “The eastern shore is high and steep, cloven with ravines which roll their floods of tropical vegetation down to the sea,” wrote Bayard Taylor, a reporter for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune who was traveling to California to cover the biggest story of the decade. “The old castle of San Lorenzo crowns the point, occupying a position somewhat similar to the Moro Castle at Havana [another stop on Taylor’s voyage], and equally impregnable. Its brown battlements and embrasures have many a dark and stirring recollection. Morgan and his buccaneers scaled its walls, took and leveled it, after a fight in which all but thirty-three out of three hundred and fou
rteen defenders were slain, some of them leaping madly from the precipice into the sea. Strong as it is by nature, and would be in the hands of an enterprising people, it now looks harmless enough with a few old cannon lying lazily on its ramparts.”

  The town itself was another story. “We found Chagres to be one of the filthiest places we ever saw,” said Stephen Davis, a seventeen-year-old New Englander fleeing both the textile mills of his native region, in which he had already done time, and a new stepfather, from whom he anticipated trouble. School had promised an escape of sorts, but after the news of gold in the West, Stephen found it impossible to concentrate on his books and so abandoned the effort. During the voyage from New York he fended off an attempted robbery by one of the ship’s stewards, who tried to divest him of his money belt while he was sleeping; upon reaching Chagres, he discovered that the thieves there operated more openly—indeed, legally. “Early in the morning went ashore in a skiff, for which we paid $2 each…. We engaged passage in a large flat-bottomed boat, with 15 others, for $10 each, to Gorgona.”

  Yet Davis counted himself lucky to be traveling by skiff and flat- bottom. More common as a means of reaching shore from the arriving ships was the native canoe, manned by “negroes in a state of perfect nudity (except for their hats),” as a Virginia doctor put it in a letter home. “We left the ship in a heavy sea, and some twelve of us got into a large canoe, made as all canoes here are, by hollowing out an enormous trunk of a tree some thirty feet long, five wide, and three deep. We sat down in the bottom of the boat, and came near being swamped several times by the large waves, some of which broke right upon our heads and drenched us through and through.”

  Most emigrants passed through Chagres as swiftly as possible. Frank Marryat, an English gold-seeker and traveler who at twenty-three had already been around the world, remarked drolly, “The town of Chagres deserves notice, inasmuch as it is the birthplace of a malignant fever, that became excessively popular among the Californian emigrants, many of whom have acknowledged the superiority of this malady by giving up the ghost a very few hours after landing.” So notorious was the Chagres fever, in fact, that the life insurance policies purchased by many emigrants carried a Chagres-exclusion clause: if they slept ashore at Chagres, they voided their policies. Marryat’s travels had revealed a hardy constitution, but even he made a point of leaving Chagres on the afternoon of the day he arrived. “All was noise and excitement—cries for lost baggage, adieus, cheers, a parting strain on a cornet-à-piston, a round dozen at least of different tongues, each in its owner’s peculiar fashion murdering Spanish, a few discharges from rifles and revolvers, rendered the scene ludicrous, and had the good effect of sending us on the first step of a toilsome journey in a good humour.”

  FROM CHAGRES THE argonauts ascended the Chagres River to Gorgona, a distance of about fifty winding miles. Most of them breathed easier in the purer air outside the town; they also gazed in wonder at a lushness few had observed before. Frank Marryat wrote:

  There is an absence of variety in the scenery of the Chagres river, as throughout its whole length the banks are lined to the water’s edge with vegetation. But the rich bright green at all times charms the beholder, and the eye does not become wearied with the thick masses of luxuriant foliage, for they are ever blended in grace and harmony, now towering in the air in bold relief against the sky, now drooping in graceful festoons from the bank, kissing their own reflections in the stream beneath.

  Every growing thing clings to and embraces its neighbour most lovingly; here is a bunch of tangled parasites that bind a palm tree by a thousand bands to a majestic teak, and having shown their power, as it were, the parasites ascend the topmost branch of the teak, and devote the rest of their existence to embellishing with rich festoons of their bright red flowers, the pair they have thus united.

  The teak, which here is a very bald tree, is much improved by the addition of these parasites, which give him quite a juvenile appearance, and form, in fact, a kind of wig, to hide the infirmities of age. Here is a dead and well-bleached sycamore tree, half thrown across the river, but still holding to the bank by its sinewy roots; and its extremity is an ant’s nest, about the size of a beehive, and along the trunk and branches green leaves are seen to move about at a prodigious rate, under which ants are discovered on in spection. Immediately under the ants’ nest are some glorious water- lilies, and close to these, by way of contrast, floats an alligator who has been dead some time, and hasn’t kept well, and on the top of him sit two black cormorants, which having, evidently, over-eaten themselves, are shot on the spot and die lazily.

  Jessie Frémont was better able to appreciate the scenery along the Chagres than many travelers. As the daughter of one of America’s most powerful statesmen—a legislator well placed to facilitate, or hinder, the business of the Pacific Mail steamship line—she enjoyed a corporate solicitude extended to few others. After she rebuffed Captain Schenck’s efforts to terminate her trip, she accepted his invitation to ride one of the ship’s boats up the Chagres River. Consequently she only saw, rather than experienced, the dowsings the other travelers received in the dugouts, and observed only from a distance—but apparently no less carefully for that—what she described as the native vessels’ crews of “naked, screaming, barbarous negroes and Indians.”

  Eight miles upriver from the mouth, Jessie and Lily were transferred to a smaller boat operated by the steamship company for its own officers and executives. In slack water the crew—consisting of blacks and Indians, but more mild-mannered than those in the canoes—rowed the boat upstream. Intermittently, and more the higher they went, the paddles had to be traded for poles. With great effort the crewmen pushed the craft against the current, often entering the water to propel the boat past a sunken tree, sandbar, or other obstruction.

  By the time they approached Gorgona, on the third day of the ascent, the crew spent more time in the water than aboard. Richard Jacob determined to help, as Jessie related.

  We were near to the close of the last day’s journey, within an hour of Gorgona, when my brother-in-law, being young and strong and a Kentuckian, in his impatience at the delay on one of those sand spits, jumped into the water and dragged the boat, in spite of the men, who told him that it would kill him.

  We did get off sooner than usual through his help, and he was very triumphant about it, when suddenly his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell prostrate from sunstroke just as we reached Gorgona; and throughout that whole night the physician with the engineering corps was doubtful if he could live.

  In fact he did live, but the doctor declared that he must return to New York and civilization if he hoped to recover completely. Jessie insisted that he follow orders, which he did, not least because he realized he henceforth would be even less help, and more hindrance, than he had been so far. Predictably he implored Jessie to join him in the return; so did everyone else she encountered, who said it was impossible for her to continue unescorted.

  “Quite secretly to myself I said so too when I began to see what the emigrants suffered,” she conceded later. At Gorgona the traffic across the isthmus began to back up badly. Hundreds of people were camped on the hillsides above the village, huddling in tents, awaiting transport the rest of the way to the coast. Though the great majority were men, some were women and children; the suffering of the ladies and babes evoked in Jessie both sympathy for them and fear for herself and Lily.

  But as often as the fear arose, Jessie’s stubbornness stamped it down, and she pressed forward. The alcalde of Gorgona personally sought out the American senator’s daughter and invited her to a celebratory feast. Jessie shuddered, and nearly became ill, at the sight of the pièce de résistance: “a baked monkey, which looked like a little child that had been burned to death.” The alternate entrée—iguana—was only slightly more appetizing.

  At Gorgona the emigrants left the river and set forth on foot—mules’ feet, horses’, or their own. Whether the track they followed was a road, a
trail, or something less substantial was a matter of interpretation. “The distance from Gorgona to Panama was about twenty-one miles,” Jessie explained. “It was distance, not a road; there was only a mule track—rather a trough than track in most places, and mule staircases with occasional steps of at least four feet, and only wide enough for a single animal—the same trail that had been followed since the early days of Spanish conquest; and this trail followed the face of the country as it presented itself—straight up the sides of the steepest heights to the summit, then straight down them again to the base.”

  The regular rains hardly helped matters, drenching the travelers and turning the soil into a greasy semiliquid. “Scrambling up ravines of slippery clay,” wrote Bayard Taylor, “we went for miles through swamps and thickets, urging forward our jaded beasts by shouting and beating. Going down a precipitous bank, washed soft by the rains, my horse slipped and made a descent of ten feet, landing on one bank and I on another. He rose quietly, disengaged his head from the mud and stood, flank-deep, waiting till I stepped across his back and went forward, my legs lifted to his neck.”

  Mules carried much of the emigrants’ baggage; porters carried the rest. “It was astonishing to see what loads these men could carry over such a road,” J. D. Borthwick noted. It was especially astonishing in light of what Borthwick and most of his fellow travelers had come to expect of the natives. “It really seemed inconsistent with their indolent character, that they should perform, so actively, such prodigious feats of labor. Two hundred and fifty pounds weight was an average load for a man to walk off with, doing the twenty-five miles to Panama in a day and a half, and some men carried as much as three hundred pounds.”