The Age of Gold

by H. W. Brands

  Perhaps family life wasn’t everything Swain had hoped. Perhaps, having lived his entire twenty-six years almost within the spray of Niagara Falls, he felt his horizons contracting prematurely. Swain had read the romances of Walter Scott and the truer but no less romantic tales of John (and Jessie) Frémont. At one point he considered a military career. But then his father died, and with his mother, Patience, and bachelor brother, George, he inherited the family farm. His share in the farm was his sole capital, which under the circumstances of multiple shareholding was essentially illiquid. Nor, on a teacher’s salary, and supporting a wife and child, could he hope to save more than pocket money. Between the farm and his two families, his life appeared bleakly predictable.

  Then came word of the gold strike. As everywhere else, staid voices tried to keep the young men home. “We are quite sure that it is the duty of newspapers to use all the means in their power to repress rather than stimulate the prevailing excitement,” intoned the Buffalo Morning Express. But, again as everywhere else, the naysaying often fell on ears attuned to a sweeter siren, in this case rendered by a California correspondent to the same paper, who wrote, “Many men who began last June to dig for gold with capital of $50 can now show $5,000 to $15,000.”

  Such statements supplied the moral cover Swain needed to bolt the farm, abandon Sabrina and Eliza, and embark on the great adventure of his heretofore adventureless life. Sabrina pleaded with him to stay; Eliza seconded her mother, at least by Sabrina’s interpretation of the baby’s cries. Sabrina’s plea doubtless reflected her love for her husband; it may also have reflected the fact that with William gone, she would be stuck in the house of her in-laws. But William wouldn’t be deterred. Here was the chance of a lifetime—of their lifetime, he explained. He wouldn’t be gone long: a year, two at the most, only long enough to make a few thousand dollars, which would allow them to buy a place of their own, away from Patience and George.

  Swain had no trouble finding companions for the journey west. Frederick Bailey’s story was similar to Swain’s; at thirty he had a wife, son, and few prospects. John Root was nineteen and unattached. Michael Hutchinson, forty-three, was a childless widower.

  The foursome embarked in mid-April 1849 from Buffalo. By steamboat they traversed Lake Erie to Detroit, planning to proceed by train across Michigan. “But after learning that the fare to Niles [Michigan], 180 miles to the west, was $6,” Swain explained to brother George, “that we would have to travel from there by stage forty miles to New Buffalo and thence from there by steamboat to Chicago for $6 more; that it would take three days on that route; and that the cars and boats did not run on Sunday, we concluded to take the lake route on account of its cheapness.” The lake steamer Michigan would carry them up Lake Huron, through the Straits of Mackinac, and down Lake Michigan to Chicago, in four days for $6. “We concluded that $6 or $8 saved in one day was better than gold-digging, and we took our passage on the steamer.”

  As with many for whom the journey to California was the first long trip of any kind, Swain’s adventure began as soon as he left home. The Great Lakes astonished him. “The waters of Lake Huron and the Straits are the clearest and most transparent waters I have ever seen. In the bay a sixpence can be distinctly seen at a depth of twenty feet. And the fish, which are here in great abundance, are as good as the waters are clear. This I know experimentally, for the steward brought a full barrel of fresh whitefish and trout—large, fat, and sweet!” April wasn’t still winter in the north, but neither was it spring. Swain’s ship encountered floating ice and a driving snowstorm that forced the captain to seek shelter behind Beaver Island. “We cast anchor within a stone’s throw of the shore, secure from everything but the falling snow. Here we lay the rest of the day and all night, living on whitefish and trout and good potatoes and plenty of other necessities.”

  Chicago was a bustling town, full of itself and its future. Swain looked up a family friend who had moved there. “When I told him I was going to California for gold, he laughed and asked me if I had enough money to get back with. He advised me—and urged me—to put the money I had into land in Chicago and go home again.”

  From Chicago the Illinois Canal led south to the Illinois River, and the Illinois to the Mississippi. The mule-drawn canal boat was crowded; the long, narrow cabin served as parlor, dining room, and bedroom for the passengers, who slept in berths along the walls and on the floor. At Peru, Illinois, Swain and the others switched to the steamboat Avalanche for St. Louis, which they reached on April 24. “The public buildings here are the most splendid specimens of architecture I have ever witnessed, and many of the private buildings are splendid habitations. But the business part of the city is dirty, with black, narrow streets filled with carts drawn by mules. It is a bare heap of stone and brick, covered with coal smoke, with which the air of the city is black all the time.”

  St. Louis was an education in another sense. “This is, as you know, a slaveholding state,” Swain told George. Swain had heard and read about the peculiar institution; he was curious to observe it in the flesh. He saw notices of a slave auction to take place that day at the courthouse, and hoped to attend. But the demands of travel left his curiosity unsatisfied. “We had not time to witness the spectacle.”

  At St. Louis the Swain party—less John Root, who had forgotten his rifle at Detroit and now waited for it to overtake him—boarded the Amelia for the run up the Missouri to Independence. Another emigrant, J. Golds- borough Bruff of Washington, who made the same trip just nine days ahead of Swain, left a vivid picture of this stretch:

  We were on board amid such a dense medley of Hoosiers, Wolverines, Buckeyes, Yankees and Yorkers, including black legs and swindlers of every grade of proficiency and celebrity, as is seldom to be found, even on our western rivers. The decks, above and below, exhibited an equally stupendous assortment of wagons, horses, mules, tents, bales, boxes, sacks, barrels and camp kettles; while every cabin and state room was an arsenal of rifles, fowling- pieces, bowie-knives, hatchets, pouches, powder-horns and belts.

  A heavy headwind, added to the snowmelt current, forced the Amelia ashore. Swain and the others helped the crew gather wood to stoke the boilers. Swain appreciated the exercise but fretted at the lost time. “The slow progress of our boat is discouraging to all on board,” he wrote. Impatience cast a pall over both scenery and company. “The sandy deposits of river banks, the unbroken cottonwood forests on the river flats, the dirty water, and the confinement on board with so many persons have become completely disgusting.” Just below Independence the Amelia ran onto one of the innumerable shifting bars that vexed navigation on the Missouri. “How long we shall lay here I cannot say, but certainly the prospect is anything but encouraging.” After six hours, though, the captain managed to free the boat, and at eight o’clock in the evening of May 2, Swain’s small company reached Independence.

  MOST OF THOSE WHO headed for California read about the gold strike in their local newspapers. Lewis Manly had no such opportunity, for on his part of the Wisconsin frontier there were no newspapers. But when talk at the taverns and trading posts turned to the word from the West, he quickly decided he was as well suited to gold-digging as the next man, and he determined to make the journey to California.

  In fact Manly was far better suited than most gold-seekers to both the rigors of the journey and the trials of the goldfields. By inheritance he was a rolling stone, a chip off some wandering blocks. His father’s father had migrated from England to Connecticut, where Manly’s father was born; the family then relocated to Vermont, where Lewis’s father met his mother, an orphan of Welsh parents and a veteran of multiple moves herself. The couple remained in Vermont, hard by the Canadian border, long enough to have four boys, of which Lewis (christened William Lewis) was the first. But then the wanderlust resurfaced. Good things were heard about Michigan; with his uncle, Lewis was sent ahead with a horse and a wagon, which the nine-year-old drove across New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and half of Michigan dur
ing the winter of 1829–30.

  Upon being reunited with his parents and brothers, Lewis received a rifle and instructions to go hunting and not return without a deer. As it happened, he downed dinner on his first shot, thereby earning a reputation locally as a budding Nimrod, and regular responsibility for stocking the family larder.

  Michigan was a decided improvement over Vermont. The fields grew crops of wheat and flax rather than rye and rocks; the winters were shorter and less severe. But the land between the lakes harbored that annoying “fever’n agur”—in the local dialect—and Manly caught it. Quinine and calomel failed to relieve his symptoms, and he decided to seek a healthier neighborhood.

  He built a boat from boards he found, and paddled west along Michigan’s rivers, halting occasionally to work for cash. He split logs for fences and cut timber for railroad ties (for the Michigan Central Railroad, the line William Swain would deem too expensive). He crossed Lake Michigan on a lumber schooner, getting thoroughly seasick—but, by his own assessment, defeating his malaria in the bargain. (A later generation of physicians might have said the malaria was falling into remission on its own, even as the motion sickness made its symptoms seem mild by comparison.) In Wisconsin he found work as a lead miner among immigrants from England’s Cornwall district, who contributed their geological expertise to Manly’s growing stock of practical skills. But lead mining, besides being hard and dirty, paid poorly; during the winter Manly supplemented his income by hunting and trapping. In the process he learned still more about surviving in the wilderness and among its denizens, including various Indian tribes.

  In long summers scratching the dirt for lead, and in longer winters chasing pelts across the snow, he dreamed of a better life, or at least an easier one. Acquaintances had moved to Oregon and found the climate there mild, the fish and game abundant, and the land cheap. Manly started saving to purchase the necessary kit to join the trek to the Willamette Valley.

  But before he acquired the requisite capital, the news from California altered his plans. For a lead miner, gold mining was a signal promotion; as Manly laconically recalled, “I felt a change in my Oregon desires and had dreams at night of digging up the yellow dust.” A friend named Bennett felt a similar compulsion. “Nothing would cure us then but a trip,” Manly wrote, “and this was quickly decided upon.”

  Because Bennett would be driving a wagon and team (to carry his family), he had to wait for the spring grass to grow. The two agreed that Manly should leave first and make preparations. They would rendezvous on the road. But between high water, which disrupted travel, and an undated letter, which left Manly unsure whether Bennett was ahead or behind him, the two missed their connection. Manly pondered whether to go on or back. Because Bennett had Manly’s rifle and some provisions they had jointly purchased (leaving Manly with almost no money), for him to proceed without Bennett would be very difficult. Manly had nearly decided to go back when a passing party, led by Charles Dallas of Iowa, offered him work driving a team of oxen to California. Manly accepted.

  Like Manly and the Bennetts (and many other emigrants from the upper Mississippi Valley), the Dallas party hoped to jump off for the West at Council Bluffs, Iowa. But Council Bluffs was new to the business of provisioning overlanders, and the first few hundred emigrants drained the town’s merchants of their small store of travel supplies. Manly and the Dallas company were compelled to proceed south to St. Joseph.

  It was one of the ironies of the Gold Rush that in going west, many thousands of northern emigrants—including William Swain and Lewis Manly—were forced to go south: to slave-state Missouri. Under other circumstances, probably no more than a relative handful of these northerners would have visited the South and personally encountered the slave system. Missouri opened their eyes and forced them to reflect on the difference between slave labor and free. One emigrant, Eleazar Ingalls of Illinois, asked himself why Missouri, which was blessed with bountiful resources, was so sparsely settled compared to its neighbors. “Is it not owing to, and one of the fruits of, the blighting curse of slavery?—the driving of free men of the northern states to emigrate to more uncongenial soil and climate, rather than settle in a slave state.” Lewis Manly, after witnessing the auction of a young slave in St. Joseph, wrote that the auctioneer “rattled away as if he were selling a steer.” The bidding started at $500 and ended at $800, with the unfortunate chattel being dragged off in chains. “With my New England notions,” Manly remarked, “it made quite an impression on me.”

  SARAH ROYCE’S NOTIONS didn’t come from New England, although some of them would wind up there when her son Josiah became a famous Harvard professor and one of the most distinguished philosophers of his day. If Sarah Royce’s notions originated anywhere other than her own determined mind, they probably were born in old England, in the hometown she shared—at two centuries’ remove—with William Shakespeare. From Stratford-on-Avon, Sarah emigrated with her parents to Rochester, New York, not far from where William Swain grew up. She married Josiah Royce, who, like Lewis Manly’s father—and generations of other Americans—believed that the future lay in the West. In the case of the Royces, this meant Iowa, just beyond the Mississippi River. Sarah prepared to make a home there, but Josiah, like many others on the frontier, kept his eye out for better prospects still farther west. Upon news of the gold discovery, he thought he spied them in California, and announced that the family, which now included daughter Mary, should move again.

  Sarah lacked her husband’s enthusiasm for the uprooting, but she accepted the decision with quiet confidence and resolve. Recollecting the spring day in 1849 when they set out across Iowa, she wrote, “The morning of that 30th of April was not very bright; but neither was it very gloomy. Rain might come within an hour, but then the sun might come out—I would not consent to delay our departure for fear of the weather. Had I not made up my mind to encounter many storms? If we were going, let us go, and meet what we were to meet, bravely.”

  In fact the first day proved pleasant enough, with a warm sun beating back the clouds. The first night was another matter, at least in Sarah’s mind. She had grown up in towns, and as evening fell she found herself scanning the horizon for a house or other habitation.

  Why did I look for one? I knew we were to camp; but surely there would be a few trees or a sheltering hillside against which to place our wagon. No, only the level prairie stretched on each side of the way. Nothing indicated a place for us—a cozy nook, in which for the night we might be guarded, at least by banks and boughs.

  I had for months anticipated this hour, yet, not till it came, did I realize the blank dreariness of seeing night come on without house or home to shelter us and our baby-girl. And this was to be the same for many weeks, perhaps months. It was a chilling prospect, and there was a terrible shrinking from it in my heart; but I kept it all to myself and soon we were busy making things as comfortable as we could for the night.

  Our wagon was large, we were provided with straw and plenty of bed clothes, and soon a very tolerable resting place was ready for us. Our little Mary had been happy as a lark all day, and now sank to sleep in her straw and blanket bed, as serenely as though she were in a palace, on a downy pillow.

  At first the oppressive sense of homelessness, and an instinct of watchfulness, kept me awake. Perhaps it was not to be wondered at in one whose life had so far been spent in city or town, surrounded by the accompaniments of civilization and who was now, for the first time in her life, “camping out.”

  However, quiet sleep came at last, and in the morning there was a mildly exultant feeling which comes from having kept silent through a cowardly fit, and finding the fit gone off.

  More than the fit had gone off in the night. The six oxen that pulled the wagon wandered away, as did the family’s two milk cows. Not till noon were all retrieved. Sarah absorbed the lesson: “The hard facts of the pilgrimage would require patience, energy, and courage fully equal to what I had anticipated when I had tried to stretch my imag
ination to the utmost.”

  The end of April was late to be leaving eastern Iowa, and delays on the road caused them to fall further behind schedule. Spring rains raised the creeks and required detours; mud mired the wheels and compelled repeated unloading and reloading of the wagon; thunderstorms battered the travelers—but occasionally, in the aftermath, raised their spirits. Sarah wrote in her diary on May 21: “Were overtaken during the afternoon by two tremendous storms of thunder, lightning and wind. Encamped just as the last one burst upon us, on the lee side of a beautiful grove; and at the close of the storm, as the clouds broke, the most brilliant and perfect rainbow I ever saw completely arched the lovely scene.”

  THE MISSOURI RIVER was where the journey west began in earnest. It was also where the emigrants learned the economics of overland travel. The Emigrants’ Guide to California led travelers to expect to purchase supplies at Independence, St. Joseph, and the other river towns “on nearly as low terms as at St. Louis.” This proved hopelessly optimistic, as Hugh Heiskell, among thousands of others, discovered to his dismay. “It ought to be generally known that at St. Joseph emigrants for California are most shamefully imposed upon,” Heiskell recorded. “They are required to pay exorbitant prices for all they need.” He illustrated: six to seven dollars per hundredweight of flour (the Emigrants’ Guide quoted two dollars), five to six cents per pound of bacon, fifty to eighty-five dollars per yoke of oxen. Mules old enough to travel well were unavailable at any price, while immature animals of two to three years went for seventy-five to one hundred dollars each. “But such are considered to be too young to endure the journey.” Yet there was little the emigrants could do. “This being the last point at which any thing can be procured for the trip, they are obliged to give whatever is asked.”