The Age of Gold

by H. W. Brands

  Before long the reckoning of danger shifted. Furling the sails in such a tempest required coordination of the efforts of several men, coordination that would have tested the most experienced crew. The crew of the Challenge failed the test, horribly and repeatedly. The first man to fall was catapulted from his footrope by the billowing of an unsecured sail. He plunged into the churning waters with a scream that momentarily paralyzed all above and below. No rescue was attempted. If the fall hadn’t killed him, the waves quickly carried him out of reach of a line; to lower a boat would simply condemn several more men to the silent below.

  Even as it was, others soon joined the dead man. The same loose sail that felled him subsequently snapped two others from their perch. One hurtled overboard, joining his friend in the deep; the other plunged to his death on the deck, his crumpled body serving mute witness to the roaring danger that surrounded them all.

  Shorter-handed than ever, the Challenge slashed, bucked, and wallowed through seas that grew larger by the minute. The winds reached hurricane strength—eighty, ninety, one hundred knots. But this was no hurricane, no storm that blew itself out in forty-eight or seventy-two hours. Day after day, for a week, for two weeks, for almost three weeks it continued. Clouds hid the sun and stars, making navigation impossible. Waterman had no idea where they were, whether his tacks to north and south held the ship’s position east and west. Was the Cape behind or ahead? Was this Pacific water that crashed across the decks, or Atlantic? All thought of a record passage to California had been blasted away; survival was the sum of hope now.

  And survival required more brutal measures than ever—by the logic that ruled the Challenge, at any rate. The deaths of the three men terrified all but the most hardened of the rest. Several more reported to sick bay, some with legitimate complaints—pneumonia, frostbite, broken limbs incurred from falls or being battered against rails or bulkheads by waves— some simply from horror. Others wedged themselves in their berths and refused to come out. Still others reported to deck but refused to go aloft.

  Among the latter was George Lessing, who had won the name “Dancing Master” for his agility at evading ropes and heavers swung by Douglass. Amid the Cape Horn tempest Douglass ordered Lessing aloft. Lessing refused, saying he was sick. The mate thereupon forcibly delivered Les- sing to Waterman, explaining that the seaman had refused a direct order. Waterman, cursing and swearing that he’d teach this wretch obedience, seized Lessing and threw him headlong into the scuppers, which were filled with icy slush and water. Douglass took over from there, grasping the seaman by the hair and holding his head below the surface. Just before the victim would have drowned, the mate pulled him up, dragged him to the rail, and tied him fast. For an hour Lessing—who wore only a flannel shirt and thin jacket, a pair of cotton trousers, and no shoes—was exposed to the cutting wind and the freezing water. Finally—whether on Waterman’s order or Douglass’s own volition was unclear—Lessing was cut down and allowed to report to sick bay. Probably he really had been sick; certainly the near-drowning and the exposure aggravated his illness. Within days he died.

  By then the terror had claimed another victim. “Pawpaw” was an Italian immigrant who fell afoul of the crimps and wound up aboard the Challenge without shoes, experience at sea, or understanding of English. The lack of shoes left his feet especially subject to frostbite, which in turn made it nearly impossible for him to climb the rigging. The lack of experience intensified the horror he felt at the storm, at the brutality of the officers, and at the general circumstances in which he found himself. The lack of English made him slow to understand what was being demanded of him. This last deficiency infuriated Waterman during one maneuver on deck, when all hands had to work in unison. Pawpaw continued to pull after the captain ordered a halt. Waterman grabbed a belaying pin and pounded Pawpaw on the back and shoulders for his failure.

  Pawpaw retreated to his berth and refused to return to deck at the next order. Douglass entered the forecastle, bodily dragged Pawpaw out, and, pointing aloft, made clear that he was expected to start climbing. Pawpaw replied in Italian, pleading that his frozen feet forbade any such effort. Douglass began beating him savagely with his fists; when Pawpaw tried to take refuge in the forecastle, Douglass followed, and beat him further. Pawpaw was still breathing when one of the ship’s boys lifted him into his bunk. But he soon lost consciousness, and within an hour died.

  Nor was even this the end of the terror. The second mate, Alexander Coghill, imbibed some of the ferocity of his superiors; when he discovered one of the crew trying to evade his watch, Coghill kicked him so hard the man was incapacitated for days. Waterman took a heaver to a Finnish crewman who complained that scurvy made it impossible for him to answer orders. Meanwhile two more men died in sick bay, of dysentery.

  Then a crewman reported that Fred Birkenshaw, the mutineer who was said to have gone over the side, in fact was hiding out between decks. Evidently this crewman had decided that Birkenshaw ought to share the danger the others were enduring. Douglass didn’t seem surprised, apparently having doubted the drowning story from the start. Now he delivered Birkenshaw to the quarterdeck, where Waterman ordered him placed in irons.

  Birkenshaw initially indicated willingness to confess to his role in the mutiny, but during Waterman’s interrogation he changed his mind. He said he had nothing to do with it. Waterman refused to accept this. He swung a heaver at Birkenshaw, who raised his arm to defend himself. “I felt the bones of my arm crack when he hit me,” Birkenshaw recalled afterward. The captain then fashioned a hangman’s noose from a rope and hitched it to a block and tackle. The noose went around Birkenshaw’s neck; the block and tackle was raised till Birkenshaw’s toes just touched the deck. As the seaman slowly strangled, Waterman asked him again about his role in the mutiny. Birkenshaw decided to confess. The captain let him down.

  Yet Birkenshaw still tried to wriggle free. He implicated Coghill, the second mate, in the conspiracy, besides the several others Waterman had previously identified.

  Waterman might have believed Birkenshaw—but realized he couldn’t afford to. As shorthanded as the ship was, the captain needed the second mate, even if his loyalty was suspect. He sent Birkenshaw to sick bay (where, Birkenshaw later claimed, his broken arm was deliberately neglected), and kept Coghill at his post, albeit under close observation.

  By this time, finally, the storm had abated. After eighteen days the Cape’s guardians were exhausted. The sky cleared, and Waterman discovered that the Challenge was in fact in the Pacific, several degrees west of the Cape.

  AFTER THE CAPE, the passage up the Pacific to California was anticlimactic for most ships. The Courrier de Cherbourg had a close call with some fog-shrouded rocks on the Chilean shore, and with an earthquake that shook the waters near Valparaiso; but otherwise Jean-Nicolas Perlot and La Fortune had leisure to count their blessings, recent and prospective. Six months and three days after leaving Le Havre, they arrived at Monterey.

  Anything would have been anticlimactic for the Challenge. The weather improved, and with it Waterman’s treatment of his men. The ship again made swift sailing, but not nearly swift enough for the captain to win his ten-thousand-dollar prize. The Challenge anchored at San Francisco on the 108th day from New York. For such consolation as the coincidence offered, the eighteen days by which Waterman missed his mark was precisely the duration of the storm off Cape Horn.

  5

  To See the Elephant

  The amphibious assault on California—across the Pacific, via the isthmus, and around the Horn—was a chapter of world history. A great many of the invaders, including an initial majority, were from countries other than the United States; and even the Americans who entered California at Monterey or through the Golden Gate had spent most of their journey in international waters, mingling their aspirations and experiences on equal terms with those of their fellow inhabitants of the blue planet.

  By contrast, the invasion of California by land was a fundamentally Amer
ican affair. Some Mexicans came north over the border, but by far the majority of those who reached the goldfields afoot were from the United States. These were the quintessential Forty-Niners, migrants in the mode of westering that had marked American history from the early seventeenth century. Their numbers outstripped those of the seaborne assailants, and their place in American memory would loom even larger than their numbers warranted.

  A prime reason for the outsized memory was the nature of the overland journey. Although much shorter in distance than the isthmus route, and far shorter still than the Cape route, the overland route was by certain measures the longest, for it required travelers to cross not just distance but ignorance. Since the early nineteenth century, explorers (including John Frémont) and traders had traveled from the Mississippi Valley to the West Coast; more recently emigrants to Oregon had pushed out across the plains and mountains. But vast reaches of the continent west of the 100th meridian remained terra incognita to all but the aboriginal inhabitants—who knew enough to stay out of the most desolate zones. This was more than many of the argonauts knew. Although most of the Forty-Niners kept to well-trod trails, some of the more impetuous, reckless, or greedy struck out on their own, with results that made even the survivors shudder.

  Those who chose the overland route did so for various reasons. Some shunned ships from fear of drowning, in much the way some travelers in a later era would shun airplanes from fear of crashing. For a larger number, the primary consideration was cost. The widely circulated Emigrants’ Guide to California, printed in early 1849, explained that the least expensive sea voyages to California cost three hundred dollars per person, while the overland route would set the gold-seeker back but fifty or sixty. This overland estimate was a net figure; the cash outlay at the start of the journey was greater, perhaps three times as much, but the overlanders would arrive with wagons and teams of mules or oxen that would command top prices in California, where a substantial portion of the initial outlay might be recouped.

  The cash required at the start prevented the really poor from making the trek, but within a broad band of middle means, the overlanders were a diverse group. They hailed from the North and from the South, from the East and from the West (as the West was then understood, extending from the Appalachians to the Mississippi Valley). They were farmers and townsfolk, merchants and ministers, lawyers and doctors and teachers, slaveholders and slaves, freedmen and abolitionists, white and black and brown and occasionally red.

  All sought wealth; nearly all sought adventure too. The news from California was the most exciting most of them had ever heard; the rush to California promised to be the event of their lifetime. Like little boys hurrying to greet the circus, to catch a glimpse of the mighty elephant, the emigrants of 1849 couldn’t bear to miss out—and in fact the phrase “to see the elephant” became a cliché on the trail. To neglect this opportunity would be to guarantee future regret; to seize it would be to partake of something truly historic and wonderful.

  HUGH HEISKELL HEARD the news in Knoxville, Tennessee. Hugh’s father, Frederick Heiskell, was a mainstay of the East Tennessee community: former owner and editor of the Knoxville Register; present proprietor of Fruit Hill, a twelve-hundred-acre farm ten miles from town; senator in the Tennessee legislature. Hugh was one of ten children (and one of thirty- five first cousins living within a day’s drive of Knoxville). He showed promise as a gentleman farmer, and when Frederick went off to Nashville on government business during Hugh’s twenty-second year, Hugh took charge of Fruit Hill with his mother, Eliza. Interestingly, during the precise months in the autumn of 1847 when James Marshall was digging a millrace at Coloma, Hugh Heiskell was doing the same at Fruit Hill. When the autumn rains came, Heiskell’s luck was worse than Marshall’s, for a flood burst the mill dam at the Tennessee farm, forcing Heiskell to excavate a new channel. “Hugh is making a perfect slave of himself,” his mother reported to Hugh’s father.

  That was the problem, as Hugh saw it. In a state and a region that knew what slaves were, he had no desire to slave away at farming. “Farmers don’t often dream; their sleep is too sound,” he explained to his sister Margaret. He added, “Following a plough, staggering and stumbling over clods all day, is anything but poetry.”

  Hugh would have settled for prose: the prose of the lawyer. He studied law, evidently in the office of one of Frederick’s friends. By early 1849 he had completed his studies and was ready to hang out his shingle.

  But then came the news from California. In Tennessee as elsewhere, certain civic guardians tried to dampen the enthusiasm for the goldfields and thereby forestall the depopulation of their own communities. A newspaper in Franklin, Tennessee, reprinted a letter from a traveler to California: “I have seen those who started from the borders of Missouri hale and stalwart men, hobble down into the plains of California crippled for life. I have seen brothers, who in the madness of hunger have fought for the last bit of their father’s dead body.” The Western Star of Pulaski, Tennessee, lampooned the gold-seekers in verse, concluding:

  Yes, wise men will make your graves,

  And all your gold fall heir to,

  And say—“Poor fools, they’re broke and gone,

  We know not, care not, where to.”

  But others celebrated the golden promise. One paper ran a letter from a Tennesseean just arrived in California: “Men are here nearly crazed with the riches forced suddenly into their pockets…. The accounts you have seen of the gold region are not overcolored…. The gold is positively inexhaustible.” Various editors characterized the argonauts’ rush to California as part of the march of civilization and religion. In the words of the Memphis Daily Eagle: “They go as agents of social comfort, moral progress, expanding civilization and diffused thought, and (noblest of achievements) run high up into the heavens of strange lands, the cross-crowned spire, symbol of a true faith and prophecy of a sure eternity. Those who go to California may not know it, but they are society’s, or rather God’s, agents to these wonderful ends.”

  Naturally—again as elsewhere—much of the enthusiasm reflected an expectation that the rush to California would be good for business. A Memphis merchant advertised:

  For California

  Persons going to California would do well to call and examine our stock of the following articles, which we have received direct from England and the manufactories of the East, viz:

  Stub Twist and Damascus double and single bbl. Shot guns; Stub Twist Rifles and Shot Guns, combined; American Rifles, assorted sizes; Powder and Pistol Flasks and Shot Pouches; Every article of gun-trimmings; Shot and Lead; Long and short handled Fry Pans; Pick Axes, hand and chopping Axes and Hatchets; Curry Combs, Drawing Knives; Trace Chains and Harness; Stretcher, Stay, Tongue, and Fifth Chains; Shovels, Spades and Hoes; Pocket Knives, every variety.

  The co-owner of the Nashville Daily American advertised something of a different sort—his share of the paper.

  A valuable investment can be had in the American office, in the way of a lease, for three years, of all my interest in the establishment, consisting of one-half. It will be a good investment for anyone who has not got the “California fever” so bad as I have.

  Hugh Heiskell caught the fever. Despite the promise of his law practice, he opted for adventure and quick riches. Scores of emigrant groups were being organized in the area; Heiskell selected one headed by James Bicknell of Madisonville. Bicknell had been a farmer, a politician, a postmaster, a shopkeeper, and a soldier in the Fifth Tennessee Volunteers in the Mexican War. He was also the husband of Hugh Heiskell’s cousin Elizabeth Heiskell. Elizabeth’s brother Tyler Heiskell, a recent college graduate, was another member of the Bicknell company, as was Oliver White, a beginning doctor who decided that Madisonville, with four physicians already for its four hundred inhabitants, wasn’t the place to commence a practice. Oliver White’s brother Richard and four others rounded out the crew.

  Early in the planning, James Bicknell contacted Donald Campbell,
a former Tennesseean who had drifted down the Tennessee River into Alabama. Campbell had tried farming but found it unrewarding; consequently he welcomed the chance to dig for gold. Campbell organized a company consisting of himself, his three brothers, a slave youth named Alex, two young free blacks, and a handful of others. The Tennesseeans proposed to steam down the Tennessee to the Mississippi River; they would pick up Campbell’s Alabama company on the way.

  Hugh Heiskell and the others left Knoxville on April 16, 1849, aboard the shallow-draft steamer Cassandra. The boat carried them without incident to Decatur, Alabama, where the rapids of Muscle Shoals compelled the upper-river boats to turn around. Continuing passengers traveled overland via horse-drawn railcars to Tuscumbia. There the Bicknell company met their Alabama partners and embarked on a lower-river packet for Paducah, Kentucky. At Paducah they caught one of the steamboats on the Cincinnati–St. Louis run, vessels that for speed and style outstripped anything on the Tennessee. At St. Louis they switched to a Missouri River boat that carried them west up the Big Muddy to St. Joseph, Missouri, one of the principal jumping-off points for Oregon and California.

  WILLIAM SWAIN WAS a less likely argonaut than Hugh Heiskell, in that while Heiskell had neither wife nor child, Swain had both. Swain had just begun a career as a schoolteacher in upstate New York, north of Buffalo, when he met Sabrina Barrett at a spelling bee. Within a year they were married. A year after that—while the news from California was working its way east—Sabrina bore William a daughter, Eliza.