The Age of Gold

by H. W. Brands

  Maybe it was all the familiar faces and accents, or perhaps it was that the land they came from was as rough and raw, in its own way, as California, but most of the Australians had few complaints about the lack of civic life and amenities in San Francisco. As Tom Archer wandered the city, he concluded that San Francisco’s shortcomings simply gave scope to what he called “the true and very enviable Yankee philosophy” that characterized the American approach to adversity. Archer was walking about one day, after some heavy rain.

  I saw a mule wagon sunk beyond its axle in one of the streets, and remarked to an American standing by that the streets seemed rather soft. “Reckon you’re right,” was the answer, “but they ain’t so bad here as at the other side of town, where I was walking along and saw a hat lying in the middle of the street, went and picked it up, and there was a man’s head below it. ‘Waal,’ says I to him, ‘How in tarnation did you get there?’ ‘Oh, that ain’t nothin’,’ says he. ‘I’ve got a mule under me.’” This was told with the utmost gravity, and the man moved on without further explanation as to the fate of the hat, the mule, or the rider.

  Archer and Hawkins had reached California financially sound, and, having learned that the most convenient route to Sacramento and the northern mines was the Sacramento River, they purchased a ship’s longboat (these sold cheap, with so many ships abandoned). They piled their provisions aboard and headed northeast across San Francisco Bay, accompanied by a man named Mackenzie, another named Hicks, the two Chinese and the two aborigine boys Hawkins had brought over from Australia, and the two aborigines who came with Archer.

  Between the provisions and the ten persons, the boat rode low in the water. But the breeze was fair, filling the boat’s small sail, and they made the crossing of the northern arm of San Francisco Bay to the Strait of Beni- cia in fine shape. They landed at the town of Benicia, whose promoters proclaimed that it would supplant San Francisco as the hub of the region. So far it hadn’t, and the Australians spent no more time there than they required to purchase a few additional supplies. They sailed and rowed east across Suisun Bay toward the mouth of the Sacramento. But night fell and the tide ebbed while they were still several miles from the river, and they decided to drop anchor till dawn. All bundled themselves against the cold wind, shut their ears to the honking of the waterfowl that made the Sacramento delta their home, and tried to sleep.

  They were shocked awake when they felt the boat listing sharply and the bay water rushing in. The anchor had got stuck in the mud of the bay floor as the tide changed, and the flood tipped them over. All were tumbled into the watery blackness—freezing, disoriented, and uncertain where the nearest land lay, or how far. Mackenzie managed to clamber atop the capsized boat, as did one of Hawkins’s aborigine boys and both of Archer’s. Hicks was nowhere to be seen, which wasn’t surprising in that he was a known nonswimmer. But Hawkins, a strong swimmer, was missing, too. Archer could also swim, and made it onto the boat’s bottom. (The two Chinese apparently had debarked at Benicia.)

  Look and call as they might, the survivors found no trace of Hawkins, Hicks, or the missing boy. Archer hardly knew Hicks or the aborigine boy, but the loss of Hawkins, his companion from the outback, hit him with tragic force. And it was all the more tragic for the mystery it entailed. “I have never been able to understand his having disappeared without attempting to reach us, or making any reply to our calls. But so it was, and thus ended the life of one of the most manly, most generous, and most kindhearted friends I ever had.”

  Soaking wet, splashed by wave and cut by winter wind, the survivors faced imminent death by exposure. Fortunately, the night was nearly spent; at first light Archer and Mackenzie determined that they must swim for land. “Telling the black-boys, who could all swim, to follow us, we struck out for the shore, agreeing to keep low down in the water, and swim very slowly, so as to save our strength as long as possible. The friction of the water, and the shelter it gave us from the icy, bitter wind, and the exercise of swimming, restored our circulation to some extent, and we had progressed three or four hundred yards when it occurred to me that, though not very tired, I might as well put my feet down and try for the bottom. I did so, and to my amazement and joy, found that I could touch it with my toes and still keep my chin above water.” Mackenzie, shorter than Archer, had to swim farther, but soon he too could stand up. The pair then looked back for the boys, only to discover that they had disappeared. Archer and Mackenzie shouted and scanned the surface of the water, but saw nothing. (As Archer learned later, the boys, despairing of reaching shore, had swum back to the boat to await rescue. Two of them hung on there till a passing craft found them. The third, frozen and exhausted, was washed overboard by the waves and drowned.)

  All that Archer owned was lost in the boat, even the clothes on his back, jettisoned before the swim to shore. Making his way to Benicia, he begged two suits of clothing from a merciful merchant, one for himself and one for Mackenzie. The two decided Sacramento wasn’t the place for them—a decision fate seemed already to have made—and they determined on Stockton instead. A man with a whaleboat was going that direction; in exchange for their labor rowing he let them come along.

  Stockton had pretensions but little substance. The streets were quagmires, the buildings flimsy and miserable. Yet it offered work to willing hands, and Archer and Mackenzie took up the building trade. For a half ounce of gold per day they hammered and sawed, and saved. They also observed. One day they encountered a group of about fifty Chinese marching, or rather jogging, into the town from the west. Each one carried a pole over his shoulder; from the poles hung what appeared to be their entire possessions. Inquiring, Archer learned that they had been expelled from the diggings by whites who “jumped” their claims. “This, I thought at the time, was somewhat odd in a ‘free country,’ but I got more used to such things by and by.”

  Archer and Mackenzie eventually gathered the wherewithal to purchase a minimal kit of mining tools. They ascended the Stanislaus River to a region crowded with miners. For two weeks they panned here and there, with no success. All the good stretches of streambed had been taken; what was left hardly repaid the effort. Their resources were dwindling, and their future once more looked grim. But then the clouds parted.

  One morning a report spread abroad that payable gold had been found in a small gulch which came down from a hill close behind our tent, and after breaking through a low rocky plateau, disappeared in a sandy flat which skirted the Stanislaus River. A rush at once set in, scores of people appeared from all quarters, and in a few hours the whole upper part of the gulch was claimed and marked off, before we “new chums” were aware of what was going on.

  It occurred to me, however, that although the gulch was now dry, it must be a perfect torrent during the heavy rains and the melting of the mountain snows, and I could not see why the gold should not have been washed down through the rocky gorge, and deposited in the sandy flat below. We therefore marked out a claim just below the gorge, and dozens of others followed our example.

  We then set to work and dug down about three feet, to the bed rock, without discovering a speck of gold. Nothing daunted, however, we continued for days working on, encouraged by the success of some few of our fellow diggers around us, when—joy of joys!— after our claim was more than half worked out, we came upon a lead [pronounced leed, a vein] of the most beautiful, “nuggety” gold, extending in patches from the roots of the grass down to the bed rock, and varying in size from dust and pinhead specks up to quarter-ounce nuggets.

  ARCHER’S INSIGHT WAS characteristic of the empirical science practiced in the goldfields. The first miners correctly inferred that the gold found its way to the stream bottoms by the erosive action of water, and the first digging was done along current watercourses. Subsequent arrivals, including those forced to look elsewhere after all the good beaches and bars were taken, reckoned that where rivers had formerly flowed, gold might remain. These dry streambeds, of ancient or recent vintage, attract
ed the second set of miners, men like Tom Archer. The digging they required was typically difficult and extensive, as the overburden of nonpaying dirt had to be removed before the pay dirt was struck.

  Sometimes the pay dirt was very rich, as in Archer’s case. Sometimes it was less so. Jean-Nicolas Perlot eventually managed to amass enough capital to prospect for himself. But getting started required deciding where to dig. “I saw many places, but I was always faced by the same difficulty: How to distinguish the good from the bad? And in a good claim, how to know where the rich vein is? How, under six or ten feet of earth, to foresee where to find the most auriferous dirt, the balux?” With other miners, Per- lot carefully observed those who seemed to be doing well. In the case of the Mariposa, the best miners were the Sonorans, of whom three worked nearby. “They were miners in their own country; they should know the secrets of the craft; they had not established themselves by chance on the claim they were occupying. They had examined the rock at each turn of the river, had sounded it, had consulted among themselves; then by way of conclusion had started to dig a pit on the flat, at the foot of the hillside, and fairly far from the riverbed. They had come to a good conclusion, it seemed, for they were finding gold.” How did they know what they knew? Perlot tried to ask them. But his Spanish was no better than their French. “Whether they did not understand me or did not want to understand me, I could draw nothing from them.” He returned to his observations.

  After a time he and a partner named Bérenger—the last of La Fortune—attempted to employ what Perlot had learned. Perlot proposed digging a test hole “at the bottom of a big flat where I thought I had observed that the river, in times past, must have deposited the same alluvium as where the three Mexicans were working; there was, in fact, the same lay of the land.” Bérenger agreed that this was a sound plan. They began digging the test hole. To their chagrin, fellow miners and passersby, including some former partners, laughed at their efforts and derided their choice of claim. “However, we continued to dig without paying attention to these remarks and, at the depth of six feet, we observed that the gravel contained gold.” Two feet farther down they hit bedrock.

  They tested the gravel. The first pan yielded a quarter ounce. “What a windfall!” Their fortune seemed to be made. “We washed what we had extracted from the gold bed, counting on a marvelous result.”

  Alas, reality was otherwise. Additional assays showed the ore to be only modestly endowed with the tantalizing yellow metal. “Farewell to our dream of a speedy fortune!” For three days Perlot and Bérenger dug a ditch connecting their test hole to the river; for four days they washed the gold- bearing gravel their ditch uncovered. They continued in this way: three days of ditching, four days of washing. Six weeks exhausted the claim—not to mention the claimants—and yielded the equivalent of somewhat less than a half ounce of gold per man per day. As they had earned more than this as wage-workers, they had reason to be disappointed. To make matters worse, by the time they finished, the area on all sides of them had been taken up. They were forced to move on, and start over again.

  DITCHING WAS THE ANSWER when pay dirt was covered by the detritus of old streams, but when present streams covered the golden sands, the solution was damming. William Swain, after entering the Sacramento Valley from the north, and late, not unnaturally decided to try his hand in the northern mining region. In mid-November a man couldn’t expect to do any serious mining before spring, so Swain and a small remnant of the Wolverine Rangers filled their days planning for when the rainfall diminished. Local experts, unobtrusively cultivated, guided them to a promising location. “We judged the South Fork of the Feather River to be the most likely to yield a pile another summer,” Swain wrote home, “for the following reasons: the main part of the Feather River and all the southern rivers have been overrun and consequently the best and richest placers found and worked. The South Fork of the Feather River was reported to be rich, and the gold on it coarse and not much worked. There is good timber for building (not the case on many of the streams of California), which with us is an important consideration as we believed our health next summer depended upon having dry, warm, and comfortable habitation during the rainy season.”

  This last point had been underscored for Swain by the recent death from disease of two of the Rangers, and he took no little pride in the dwelling he and his companions constructed, and the life they led therein.

  Our house is a log cabin, sixteen by twenty feet. It is covered with boughs of cedar and is made of nut pine logs from one to two feet in diameter, so that it is quite a blockhouse. It has a good door made of cedar boards hewn out of cedar logs, but no window. [Glass was a luxury beyond reach at this stage of Swain’s finances and California’s development.] It faces the south and is on the north side of the river. In the east end is a family fireplace, in which large logs are burning night and day. At the west end is a bedstead framed into the logs of the cabin and running from side to side. The cords of the bedstead are strips of rawhide, crossing at every three inches, thus forming a bottom tight enough to hold large armfuls of dry breaks gathered from the sides of the mountains, which make a substitute for feather beds. On these are blankets and buffalo skins. Altogether it makes a comfortable bed. Moore has a bunk in one of the other corners.

  Over the fireplace are our rifles, which are ever ready, cocked and primed, and frequently yield us good venison. In the other corner may be seen our cupboard with its contents, which consist of a few wooden and tin dishes, bottles, knives and forks and spoons, tin frying pan, boiler, and coffee pot.

  Around the sides of the cabin at various points are the few articles of clothing belonging to the different members of the company. Under the bed are five cakes of tallow, under the bunk are three or four large bags of flour. Along the point of the roof is a line of dried beef and sixty or seventy pounds of suet. And out at the corner of the house in a trough made of pine may be found salt beef in the pickle, in abundance.

  At ten in the evening you might see in this cabin, while everything is still, a fire blazing up from the mass of fuel in the large fireplace, myself and Hutchinson on one end of the bedstead, Lt. Cannon on the other, Mr. Bailey stretched before the fire in his blankets on the ground floor, and Moore in his bunk. On the roof the incessant rain keeps up its perpetual patter, while the foaming stream howls out a requiem of the rushing torrent as it dashes on its way to the valley.

  It was this rushing stream that Swain and the others planned to tackle when the rains let up. The logic of placer mining dictated digging at the lowest point of any streambed, where gravity concentrated the gold. Unfortunately, in the case of a currently active stream, this lowest point was almost always underwater. Yet if a person could build a dam and divert the flow, the streambed would be laid open to mining.

  In practice, nearly all dams were beyond the capacity of single individuals. California mining quickly evolved from an occupation that could be undertaken by individuals (the washpan stage) to one that required two or three persons (the ditching and long-tom stage) to one that required teams of several individuals (the damming stage). Nor was cooperation the only new requirement. Capital was also needed. A miner with a wash- pan—and decent luck—might start making money his first day in the diggings, but building a dam required the ability to work for weeks or months before the gold started coming in. The high prices of provisions in the mining camps made this an expensive affair.

  The high prices drove Swain and his partners out of their cabin and into the icy river even before the winter rains ceased. For weeks in January and early February 1850 they piled rocks for their dam and excavated a diversionary race for the overflow. Eventually they accomplished their preliminary goal. “Our dam is finished,” he wrote on February 17, “and the river, which is high and will probably be so for some months, is running through our race leaving its old channel bare.” At this point—after all this effort and expense—Swain found himself where Jean-Nicolas Perlot had been before digging his first t
est hole. “We have to remove some three feet of gravel and stone before we find the foundation rock where the gold always lies,” Swain observed. Actually, Swain was worse off than Perlot, for the dams were never watertight. “On account of the water which leaches from the race to the channel, we have not been able to test it.” But they hoped to do so shortly.

  The weather refused to cooperate. The rains lasted longer that winter than usual, preventing Swain and the others from discovering whether they were rich or ruined. “Four weeks ago we thought the rain over, but March has been the worst month of the season,” he wrote on March 17. “The waters are up, and our prospects for mining soon are dark, at least for two months to come.” The larder drew lower, and their wallets emptier, with each passing day.

  They decided they couldn’t wait two months. Splashing through the high, bone-numbing water, they retrieved sufficient samples for an assay. The results were disappointing. On April 15, Swain recorded, “We finished our job on the Feather River and tested it, although under great disadvantages. I am satisfied it will not pay to work it out.” They had moved a river and many tons of rock, only to discover that the yield was too poor to bother with.

  Perhaps it was his youth, perhaps a congenital optimism, but Swain refused to lose heart. “The job cost us a great deal and much hard work. Many a one has acquired a large fortune with half the exertion we have made, but we are not discouraged; on the contrary, we are confident of success.” Still, he couldn’t help admitting that it was “rather provoking to be disappointed in high hopes.”

  8

  A Millennium in a Day

  River mining—as the method that involved ditching, damming, and other manipulation of stream flows was called—became more elaborate with each passing season. The dams grew longer and higher and more specialized. Sometimes they diverted the river entirely, baring the bed from bank to bank; sometimes they shunted the flow to one side, baring half the bed at a time. Pumps were installed, powered by the diverted current to remove the water that invariably seeped through the rock-and-earthen dams.