by Fred Rosen
The mule path snaked around a mountain. If one of the mules stumbled, or the rider made a mistake, there was nothing to stop his descent over the edge and down thousands of feet, to be smashed on the rocks below. While McNeil had no fear in riding up and down the precipices, Stambaugh did, to such an extent that he told McNeil to quit “showing off.” McNeil, who was riding a rented mule replied:
“Stambaugh, I will ride any way that I want to. I have given $1 per day for the privilege of driving a mule up hill and down, for the privilege of riding whenever it suited my convenience, and that is all the time.”
They were traveling over high mountains. At one spot they passed over many acres of lava, which had been thrown out by a neighboring volcano, “which proved very troublesome to the feet of our mules. We visited a warm spring, apparently hot enough to scald a chicken or boil an egg, showing that the internal fires were burning beneath. But volcanoes are great blessings instead of curses, and should excite our gratitude instead of our fears. If a man has a colic, and applies no physic to remove the cause, he dies. So has the earth the colic at times, but those volcanoes remove the origin of it, or otherwise the globe would burst.”
On the fifth day out from Durango, they reached the summit of the highest mountain, “where I thought I was nearer to the good world than I would ever be again. We enjoyed a glorious prospect of mountains and plains, and, towards the west, a glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, which seemed to be pacifically inviting us to its borders.
“As we progressed, we had ice and snow on the mountains, where we encamped at night. By day in threading the valleys we enjoyed a delicious climate: watermelons, peaches, grapes, cocoa nuts, oranges, lemons, bananas and plantains. This truly romantic and solemn scenery affected us considerably.
Previously, we had almost constantly passed through scrubby chapparel [sic], and frequently could not find enough of wood to cook our meals. But here, almost for the first time since leaving the Brazos, we were traversing primeval forests. Some of the trees had witnessed, trees have eyes, the exploits of the soldiers of Cortez and Pizzaro, centuries earlier.”
On May 10, they arrived at Mazatlán, on the Pacific Ocean. There was a dispute among the party about taking passage to San Francisco, with the crooked lawyer in their party arranging the passage, and in return, traveling for nothing. McNeil had had enough of such shenanigans and decided to quit his party and travel north to the gold fields alone. It was a fateful decision.
“Before leaving, Stambaugh told me that I could do nothing without the company, and that I would certainly be murdered in California without its protection. I observed that I would rather die than travel any further with such a swindling company. This greatly enraged him, and the Lancaster lawyer picked up a gun to shoot me.”
The lawyer took a closer look at McNeil the shoemaker. In the months since they’d left Ohio, the shoemaker had grown a waist-length beard. He wore buckskins and a stained, creased Stetson hat. Across his silver saddle, picked up in Mexico, was a Sharps buffalo rifle that spit out a large caliber bullet and could stop a buffalo at a distance of one mile. Casually, he moved the weapon in the shyster’s direction in a decidedly unshoemanlike posture.
“I do not wish wilfully to kill any body or to be killed in an ordinary brawl,” said McNeil coolly, “but I am stout and stout-hearted, and either with rifle, pistol, or bowie knife, I am honorably willing to fight you on the spot.”
The lawyer quickly retracted his statement and McNeil, alone for the first time since leaving Ohio, boarded a ship for San Francisco.
“I took passage on a Danish schooner, named Joanna Analuffa, commanded by a gentlemanly German, paying $75, the distance from Mazatlán to San Francisco being 1500 miles. There were 200 passengers on board. I left $100 worth of articles with the company which went in a French vessel [instead] for which I never received a cent.
“After getting far out into the ocean, we ran a northeast course towards the destined port. When a week from land, we were supplied with wormy bread, putrid jerked beef, musty rice, and miserable tea. There not being enough tea to color the water, we were too wide awake for the captain, and, being 200 in number, we determined to have the worth of our money, as the Yankee boys are number one on sea as well as on land.”
The Yankees threw the putrid beef and other “vittles” overboard and told the German captain they must have better. Infuriated, the German swore that if they did not become satisfied with the food he gave them, he would take them back to Mazatlán, and have them tried and imprisoned for mutiny.
“Hunger knows no law,” McNeil told him. “We will shoot you, and moreover, you must not only keep on the proper course to San Francisco, you must give us proper food, or we will take all the ship matters into our own hands.”
McNeil had once again found force in numbers, this time the two hundred passengers who agreed wholeheartedly with his pronouncements. The German, for his part, “became as cool as a cowed rooster, kept on his course, and afterwards gave us the best he had. We caught and ate a few sharks on the passage and I saw for the first time in my life, whales every day, and porpoises darting about in every direction, like artful politicians, turning summersaults [sic] occasionally to suit their respective views, and show the other fish their superiority.
“On the 30th I arrived at San Francisco, not knowing a single person there.”
That first night in San Francisco, McNeil experienced his first rain since leaving Ohio. He turned his face up to the cool water flowing from the sky, the first rain he’d seen and felt since leaving home. Looking out at the harbor filled with ships flying flags from all over the world, McNeil knew he was anyplace but home.
9.
THE DIGGINGS
San Francisco in 1849 was still a tent city amid scattered wooden buildings high on the bluffs overlooking San Francisco Harbor. But its harbor had begun to look like a big city’s.
“I saw anchored in the harbor about five hundred vessels belonging to different nations,” Samuel McNeil wrote. “The sailors had all ran off to the mines, averaging at that time but one man to a vessel to take care of them. Some of the vessels were rotting, and I suppose the majority of them would be destroyed by the N.W. hurricanes.”
The men on those ships, the ones that streamed into the tent city, whose money would help eventually build it into one of the foremost in the world, those men wanted one thing and one thing alone: California gold. Gold had caused rooms to become scarce and food expensive. Even the earthen floor of a tent became prime real estate.
“On arriving, I went into a tent asking the proprietor what would be his charge for permitting me to sleep on the bare ground that night,” McNeil continues. “He replied ‘fifty cents,’ to which I instantly agreed.”
In walking around town, McNeil saw evidence of little or no crime. “There is no law there and no need of it at present.” He was right.
During 1849, robbery in San Francisco and the Gold Rush boomtowns was rare. Boxes and bales of goods were left open and exposed, with impunity, in the crowded streets. There was no law to coerce anyone into honesty, yet stealing from miners was rarely heard of. Gold did not seem to tempt the darker side of men. As for rustling, cattle, horses, and mules remained safe on ranchos. People writing home from the gold fields usually remarked that property was safer in California than in the older states at home.
The popular explanation was that the recent migrants came from “good stock,” and had not so soon forgotten the principles under which they had been educated. Those principles included respect for others’ rights, including property rights. Sutter’s attempt to get the U.S. government to legitimize his claim to the sawmill and other interests, all of which he had improved on what was there before, supports this belief.
True, if you were found guilty of something less than murder, such as stealing a horse, you could face a miner’s court and a hangman’s rope. But that was for the worst of crimes. The real reason why crime was so low was just pure numbers. It
wasn’t until 1850 that people started streaming en masse to California.
In walking through town, McNeil saw people from all quarters of the globe; San Francisco had already become the landing of the world. There were “Americans, Englishmen, Hibernians, Scotch folks, Chinese, Sandwich Islanders, South Americans, New Granadians, Mexicans, Polanders, and Sonorians.”
In the morning, he quickly vacated his earthen bed and went to another tent to get breakfast, for which he paid $2.50. The owner of that tent offered him $8 per day if he would aid in erecting a muslin house. As he had never earned more than $1 per day, McNeil thought that high wages, “But, rejecting his offer, I started for the mines that day.” Paying $20 for passage on a schooner up the Sacramento River to Sacramento City, 160 miles from San Francisco, McNeil soon encountered another problem.
McNeil and sea captains just didn’t mix. This time, about 50 miles upriver, the captain got drunk and ran his schooner aground. It took a few hours before the rising tide rescued the vessel and carried it back out into the river channel.
“The captain being still intoxicated, and, being fearful that he might delay us to our loss, five or six of the stoutest passengers (I being one of the number) attacked the little Irish captain, knocked him down, and tied him with ropes. By our orders, the vessel was safely and rapidly steered to our port of destination.”
McNeil once again seems to be showing the popular taste in attacking the captain not just for his drinking and poor judgment but also for his Irish lineage. Regardless, it was clear that whatever he may become, McNeil would not soon fit in as a sailor.
When he got to Sacramento, “I entered a tent, kept by Mrs. Moore, the first American woman I had seen since leaving the States. She swore her brandy was better than any other man’s in that renowned city. Her price was fifty cents a drink. I soon found she had a great deal of the masculine gender about her, and that she permitted other things (more expensive) in her tent than drinking brandy, considering one of her sweetest smiles worth an ounce of gold or $16.”
After refreshing himself at the well of Mrs. Moore’s brandy and “smiles,” McNeil began the final part of his transcontinental trek.
“I proceeded immediately to the gold mines or diggings on the North Fork of the American river, which empties into the Sacramento river, being 45 miles from Sacramento city. That distance I walked, paying $20 for the conveyance of my baggage on pack mules. The next day, about 10 o’clock after leaving Sacramento city, I reached the mines.”
McNeil doesn’t mean mines literally. Mines refer to the actual sites on the river where the prospectors panned for gold, or dug directly into and sifted the “pay dirt.” Actual mines sunk into the ground would come later, as the true worth of the find became known.
“I passed the first day in observing how five hundred persons dug and washed the gold. This place is called Smith’s Bar, because a man named Smith has a store there, where he sells provisions and mining implements. There I paid 10 dollars for a small pan for washing gold, 7 dollars for a pick, and 8 dollars for a small crow bar, renting a cradle for 6 dollars per day. I had then but seventy-five cents left.”
In the brief year and a half since Marshall’s find, a modern phenomenon had begun in and around Coloma. Mining camps sprang up overnight as men converged on the river, seeking El Dorado. Prentice Mulford, an early miner, later wrote, “The California mining camp was ephemeral. Often it was founded, built up, flourished, decayed, and had weeds and herbage growing over its site and hiding all of man’s work inside of ten years from its inception.”
From 1848 to the mid-1850s, hundreds of these camps sprung up and, as Mulford says, disappeared over a short time span. They would have the most colorful names: Rough and Ready, Crimea House, Chinese Camp, Jackass Hill, and Rich Bar, to name just a few. Rich Bar had been founded by a man from Georgia who struck it rich at the diggings on the Middle Fork of the Feather River, about twenty-five miles from Sacramento.
When Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp, a doctor’s wife and aspiring writer, arrived at Rich Bar with her husband, who was seeking mountain air for his health, she observed, “Part of the adventurers camped there, but many went a few miles farther down the river. The next morning, two men turned over a large stone, beneath which they found quite a sizable piece of gold. They washed a small panful of the dirt, and obtained from it two hundred and fifty-six dollars.”
Writing under the nom de plume, “Dame Shirley,” she continues:
“Encouraged by this success, they commenced staking off the legal amount of ground allowed to each person for mining purposes, and, the remainder of the party having descended the hill, before night the entire bar was ‘claimed.’ In a fortnight from that time, the two men who found the first bit of gold had each taken out six thousand dollars. Two others took out thirty-three pounds of gold in eight hours, which is the best day’s work that has been done on this branch of the river.
“The largest amount ever taken from one panful of dirt was fifteen hundred dollars. In a little more than a week after its discovery, five hundred men had settled upon the Bar for the summer. Such is the wonderful alacrity with which a mining town is built.
“Soon after was discovered, on the same side of the river, about half a mile apart, and at nearly the same distance from this place, the two bars, Smith and Indian, both very rich.”
Smith’s Bar, where McNeil finally found himself, was at the base of the Sierra foothills.
“I slept at night on a rock, between two high mountains, with a blanket over and one under me, reflecting in wakeful time that I was 3,500 miles from home, my mind running back to my boyhood and my playmates, remembering the delicious seasons I had enjoyed with my father and mother, and particularly with my bosom friend and wife, Ellen, and my children in Lancaster, Ohio.”
McNeil was a man on the brink of something fateful.
“The next morning, I commenced working in earnest, and laboring incessantly for four weeks, finding, after deducting expenses, that I had cleared ten dollars per day, that is $280. I then sold my mining implements and returned to San Francisco, expecting to get a letter there from my family. I received one, being the first I had got. After blessing the steamer that brought it, I addressed a letter to my wife, inclosing $200 and a sample of the gold dust. I then went to the gold mines at another point, on a river called the Stanish Lou, 200 miles south of the mines I had previously visited.
“I found the miners generally making, on an average, $16 per day. I saw three men dig out $9000 in seven days, and two men dig $2500 in two days. But these are rare circumstances. I saw a Spaniard having a lump of gold he had found weighing one pound and a half. Finding gold digging too hard labor for me, I returned to Sacramento city.”
When James Marshall made his find, it had been pure accident; he didn’t have to work for it. All the publicity it had received worldwide made it appear that all you had to do to get rich was reach down and pick up a chunk of gold from the water or the land. It was actually much harder than that.
Gold wasn’t found just anyplace. Little gold was found on the sides and tops of mountains nor on the plains. “But dig wherever you may think proper in that country, you will find some,” McNeil asserts. “You will hit pay dirt.
“The explorer, if passing along a river when the water is high, may correctly judge that gold may be found at the foot of a fall or eddy, where he will or may be very successful when the water is low, the swiftness of the eddy having accumulated the gold scales in piles, in places called ‘pockets.’ In such places, the diggers should not be discouraged if at first they find none, but dig on until they get to the rock where they will find it the most, as gold, being the heaviest, passes through the sand and gravel, and settles on the rock.
“In those pockets, formed by the current of the river, some not aware of what I said, will dig down one, two, or three feet, and finding none will leave the spot, while an old miner, coming afterwards, will dig deeper in the same hole, and find thousands of
dollars safely deposited on the rock. In the slate rock it is only found in the crevices, as if it had been melted and poured into them by the hands of the Almighty.”
While McNeil was at the mines, companies of miners from New York and Massachusetts arrived, bringing with them patented gold washers. This was a newfangled invention that promised to mine gold even faster than anything that came before it. But they had been manufactured so quickly, they were no more than a prototype; they worked infrequently. The Easterners were compelled to throw them away and use the simple, common cradle.
The cradle was the popular implement for extracting placer gold. Resembling a common baby cradle, it was about four and a half feet long, made of white pine, having bottomed sides and headboard, but none at the foot. On the bottom, three cleats, an inch wide and eighteen inches apart, were nailed. A kind of hopper, the bottom of which is sheet iron perforated with half-inch holes having a low raised board around the edge, is fastened across the top of the cradle.
To mine for gold, the sand and gravel in which the gold is hidden, are poured into this hopper. Then, while water is poured on these with one hand, the cradle is rocked with the other, by which motion the gold, sand, and gravel are forced into the body of the cradle. There, the gold, being the heaviest, lodges against the wooden cleats. The sand and gravel pass onward and out by the foot of it. Then the gold along those cleats, and the little sand and gravel still mingled with it, are taken out, put into a pan, and washed at the edge of the river as clean as the miner can get it without wasting any of the gold.
“After that, the sand left is placed on a handkerchief spread in the sun. When it is dry, the remaining sand is blown from it as one blows the dust from beans. This sand is as black as powder. The fact is that gold is only found in black sand. The pure gold is then put into a double-sewed buckskin bag or purse and is then ready for preservation or exportation.”
While McNeil was lucky to borrow enough to buy a cradle, many of the 49ers were not so lucky. Instead, they used the most common method of extracting placer gold from sand: a simple pan with a round depression in the middle. This method of extracting the gold depends more heavily on the element’s specific gravity—the ratio of the weight or mass of a given volume of a substance to that of another substance. For solids, water is usually the other substance used for comparison. For example, gold has a specific gravity of 19.3, making it nineteen times heavier than water.