Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  Witt had a twenty-minute spiel that he gave to the mine’s neighbors and opponents that demystified large-scale gold mining by framing it in homely analogies. The furnace where gold was baked into bars was like a microwave, he explained. He showed me some chalky lumps of cyanide in a Mason jar. The cyanide was used to extract gold from ore, he said, but people were afraid of it. They didn’t understand its place in everyday life. Caterpillars gave off cyanide, and so did lima beans as they cooked. Anybody who smoked cigarettes inhaled massive amounts of it.

  “I’d rather sleep with this jar than next to a propane tank,” Witt revealed, and I pictured the two of them in bed.

  After the instructional talk, we piled into a Blazer to look over the mine. The three open pits were very deep and wide, and bulldozers were gnawing at them. In the north pit, there were thousands of numbered blast holes with ash and debris around them. The subsoil had been sent to a lab for analysis. The forty-niners had prospected by eye, Witt said, and they’d been pretty damn good at it. The gold that remained was buried deep.

  To get at it, Royal King had to move the earth. That robbed it of all vegetation, and the mildest breeze raised dust clouds. Dust turned up in your pockets and in your shoes. Water trucks circled and sprayed about five hundred gallons of water a day.

  A loader and a hauler were working the pit. Gruen let it drop that the machines were not cheap. The loader was made by Hitachi and had cost about $1.3 million. That was a lot of money to sink into a speculative venture, Gruen implied.

  It took four scoops of a big, toothy shovel for the loader to fill the hauler with dirt, sand, pebbles, and stones. Some loads were delivered right to the primary crusher at a fully automated gold mill. Although the mill was huge, it could be operated by as few as three men. One of them sat in a dark, cool computer room before TV monitors and a computer screen that informed him about everything that was going on at Royal King, from the blasting schedule to the crushing of ore.

  We stood on a catwalk to watch a conveyor belt ferry some ore into the mill, where a series of progressively smaller grinding balls pulverized it. The residue would be sifted through, in one way or another, for gold. A good, rich, mineral smell accompanied the grinding. At times, a pungent, acidy smell of cyanide cut through it, and you could feel a scratchiness in you throat and your nose. Up to four thousand tons of earth cycled through the mill every day.

  The doré bars from the furnace were stored in a vault. Each bar was about the size of a large loaf of bread and contained unrefined material—70 percent of it gold, 20 percent silver, and 10 percent other minerals. Behind the vault’s many locks, a fortune of untold proportions might be slumbering.

  According to John Gruen, miners in the Mother Lode had left about two-thirds of the gold in the ground—scientific studies had determined as much. But since the mill had started grinding and sifting about four months ago, Royal Mountain King had not recovered as much gold as projected. There were layers of copper blanketing the better deposits.

  In spite of the chanciness of mining, Gruen seemed to be weathering his gamble well. Sometimes his face had the hopeful energy of somebody working a slot machine that might still pay off with three cherries. As we left his office, we ran into a solid wall of Mother Lode heat, and he offered to treat us to cold sodas. A vending machine nearby foiled him, though, and Jonathan had to take over and align George Washington’s head with the secret motors scanning dollar bills.

  We walked to our cars, sodas in hand, and Gruen remembered something.

  “Hey, Jonathan? Did you get the change?” he asked.

  Jonathan stared at his old man as if to say that fifty cents, plus or minus, was a meager sum to worry about when you’d already invested a share of the family’s fortune in a gold mine. So Gruen himself went back to the vending machine, dipped two fingers into the coin-return slot, and came up with two quarters.

  “Look,” he said, smiling and displaying the coins on the palm of a hand. “Silver.”

  AT PARDEE RESERVOIR OFF HIGHWAY 49, outside Jackson, I thought to extend my camping streak, but the land around the lake was a gritty slice of Oklahoma. The trees were scrubby, sapless things trying to stay alive on the driest earth.

  Pardee Dam impounded the Mokelumne River. There were many other rivers in the foothills, not only the Sacramento and the American but also the Mokelumne, the Stanislaus, the Yuba, the Tuolumne, and the Merced, and they were all dammed, too, forming a series of pools on the western fringe of the mountains.

  The pools were needed to feed the growing cities of the Central Valley, places such as Lodi, Stockton, Modesto, and Merced. Subdivisions had also cropped up around them. They had names like Jackrabbit Ridge and El Dorado Flat and were pitched to pensioners on cable TV channels late at night and early on Sunday mornings, gold being mined from the Golden Years.

  A verse from another song came into my mind, this one by the Gatlin Brothers:

  All the gold in California

  Is in the middle of a vault

  In the middle of a bank

  In Beverly Hills.

  I decided to go on to Sacramento and splurge on a hotel, like Twain at the Occidental.

  SACRAMENTO WAS ANOTHER GOLD RUSH CHILD. Settlers had cobbled it together between 1848 and 1850 from logs, bricks, glass, canvas, and sheet iron. At an embarcadero on the Sacramento River, ships from all over the world disgorged their motley passengers, who were often malnourished, lousy, filthy, sick at heart, and infected with various diseases that would fester and bloom in the opportunistic atmosphere of a California boomtown.

  The ships that came up from San Francisco carried a less traumatized human cargo because cabin passage was expensive, about thirty dollars. There was no guarantee of a return trip, however, because gold-smitten crews sometimes made their own way into the Sierra Nevada to see the elephant themselves.

  Store owners in town raked in their profits in little sacks of gold dust. Prices changed by the hour, reflecting an economy whose outer limits had yet to be set. A hammer could cost you $10 and a pickax $20. Butter was $3 a pound. A quart of milk and a shot of whiskey were both a dollar—woe to the man who had to choose. A nice hotel might run to $50 a night, but some miners cut deals that let them toss their bedroll on a bench, or on the floor to bunk with the roaches.

  Bugs were a bane in unhygienic Sacramento, and remedies were traded freely. One household manual of the period advised that you could get rid of flies by mixing black pepper, brown sugar, and cream, and leaving it out on a plate. So awful, infested, and foul-smelling was the city’s first gambling emporium that it became known as the Stinking Tent. Inside it, miners drank, played poker and euchre, and bet on anything that moved. The Stinking Tent’s success bred imitators such as The Gem, Mansion, The Empire, and, of course, The El Dorado.

  For more genteel entertainment, the miners queued up at The Eagle, California’s first theater. A repertory company put on such plays as The Bandit Chief; or, the Spectre of the Forest and Love in the Humble Life. The men seemed not to care very much about the caliber of the productions. They came to look at the female members of the cast and applauded boisterously at the rare sight of any woman. They were an antic crowd, and when the river flooded the theater in winter, they were apt to shove each other in.

  By 1850, the year California was admitted to the Union, Sacramento loyalists were pushing for their city to be the state capital, but that January an exceptional storm washed away many of the buildings on the embarcadero. Citizen volunteers dammed the sloughs and made some levees as the water retreated, but then a fire raged through the city and devoured the structures of canvas and wood.

  In the autumn, a boat called the New World arrived bearing the seeds of a cholera epidemic that sent most people scurrying into the hills for safety, and the new legislature chose to convene its initial sessions in San Jose, the former Mexican capital of Alta California.

  The legislators were not happy with the choice. They couldn’t find any decent places to li
ve. They felt that their lackluster adobe capitol was beneath them and sometimes repaired to the parlor of a nearby house for meetings. They dressed in denim and flannel and India rubber coats against the rain, echoing the style of their constituency. At their desks, they chewed tobacco, spat, and whittled. Liquor was dispensed liberally.

  Still, the politicians earned high marks from Hubert Bancroft, the historian, who commented, “All were honest—there was nothing to steal.”

  Don Mariano Vallejo, who was the wealthiest person in the state, asked the legislators to consider moving to a site on San Francisco Bay and promised to put up $370,000 for a new government complex. He hoped to name the town Eureka, but the recipients of his generosity were so overcome that they insisted he name it after himself instead. General Vallejo failed them, though, and did not complete the project to their satisfaction. At their first meeting, in 1852, the men had to sit on nail kegs and console themselves with frequent trips to a saloon and a bowling alley in the basement.

  They moved yet again the next year, selecting Benicia as the new site for their deliberations. Benicia was on Carquinez Strait, a channel between San Pablo and Suisun bays. Gossip had it that the legislators picked it because the Young Ladies Seminary was located there, a fact of prime importance in California, where men still outnumbered women by about ten to one.

  In 1854, Sacramentans launched a sneaky campaign to wrest away the capital. About two hundred of them rolled into Benicia before the first congressional session and rented all the available rooms in hotels and boardinghouses. The stunt worked, but what really swayed the legislators to vote for still another move was simple bribery. Votes were always for sale, and there was a rumor that fifty thousand dollars had been paid for a vote at least once.

  For a time, the legislature met in the courthouse in Sacramento, but in 1856 a bill was passed to fund construction of a new capitol, Corinthian in style. Labor disputes dragged on for years, and the first session was not held in the building until 1869—an event that was graced by the presence of Emperor Joshua Norton of San Francisco, the self-appointed Ruler of the United States and the Protector of Mexico.

  Emperor Norton’s grasp of reality was slight. He had gone bankrupt trying to corner the rice market and had snapped after that, donning a vaguely military uniform to perform the duties of the offices to which he’d assigned himself. He wore a hat with a plume, and his two dogs, Bummer and Lazarus, always went with him on his rounds.

  In Sacramento, the emperor decreed that the new capitol was just fine, but he was angered by the dirty streets and ordered that they be cleaned. There is no record of how he felt about the gilded copper ball that was hoisted into the capitol’s dome two years later.

  “Our fair state,” read an inscription on it, “may its bright name and reputation remain as bright and untarnished as this golden ball.”

  FROM MY ROOM AT THE MARRIOTT HOTEL, I could see the capitol dome through some leafy trees. Tour groups were milling on the lawn, and after breakfast I shuffled with them through the corridors of power and admired the restored chambers of the treasurer and the secretary of state. The furniture and the fittings in ivory, brass, marble, and mahogany suggested a lost grandeur, even a time when society had been orderly and reasonable instead of unruly and daft.

  Sacramento had the steady, sluggish moods of its namesake river. Nothing seemed to move expeditiously through its channels, not legislative bills or traffic. Some of the downtown streets were blocked to form a mall for pedestrians, but at night the mall was empty save for the homeless who camped there, often drugged or drunk. Government clerks and petty bureaucrats used the mall by day to pick up sundries or to grab some lunch. They were people on a budget and sat on benches or on the lawns around the capitol to eat.

  Adam was a congressional aide in his late twenties, who’d been working in government since college. He had been a true believer at first, but now he subscribed to the familiar theory that politics was the art of the possible and came to work in cheap suits from Mervyn’s and talked about buying a Harley-Davidson and riding around the West.

  “Half the time, things get boiled down to their lowest common denominator,” he told me on the afternoon that we met, while standing in line at a sandwich shop.

  In the evening, over a beer, Adam gave me his view of politics in California. The state was so big, he said, that a politician needed to be a personality in order to survive. Issues counted, but only a handful, like water, were pertinent everywhere. The north and south were really two different countries. At the capitol, you still heard jokes about drawing a dividing line at the Tehachapi Mountains, a plan first concocted during the Civil War.

  Adam saw four major constituencies at the nucleus of the political scene—the San Francisco Bay Area, including Oakland and Berkeley; metropolitan Los Angeles; the southern sunbelt that revolved around Orange and San Diego counties; and the Central Valley. Mrs. Albaugh was correct, I saw, in saying that the Far North played a minimal part in the affairs of the state.

  The most populous area was the southern sunbelt, where almost half of all Californians lived. They tended to be conservative and middle-class. San Francisco stood for liberalism, activism, and a flakiness that could be totally unpredictable. But in Los Angeles, you had an explosive melange of rich and poor. Voters there were often divided by race and by class. Agriculture and the Central Valley were synonymous, although the new suburbs were altering that pattern a little, pushing it in the direction of sunbelt values.

  “What do they think of Jerry Brown in Sacramento?” I asked.

  “They try not to think about him,” Adam said.

  Jerry Brown, our Governor Moonbeam, was the person that most Americans singled out as the symbol of a California politician. He was not very popular on Capitol Hill or among his fellow Democrats. What people disliked about him, Adam felt, was his arrogance. He wanted to play the insider’s game while appearing to be above the fray. Yet Brown was contrary enough to be intriguing. He had an honest passion for his causes and a hint of genuine idealism. The same blend of Buddhism and seminary logic that infuriated the veteran pols knocking back bourbons at Frank Fat’s held some appeal for the wide-eyed young.

  In his days as governor, Brown had wrapped himself in self-denial. He had shunned limos for an old Plymouth and had slept on a mattress in a small apartment rather than in the gubernatorial mansion, cribbing his political style from his earlier life as a seminarian.

  His father, Pat Brown, a former governor himself, had once sketched a fascinating psychological portrait of his son for an interviewer. He mentioned three factors that motivated Jerry—failing the bar exam on his first try, being dumped by a college girl friend, and his time in the novitiate. Jerry was essentially a loner, he said, who might never get hitched.

  “It would be tough on the dame if he got married,” Pat Brown had speculated. “He certainly has no inferiority complex. If the door opens, he’ll grasp it and go through it.”

  With his contradictions, Brown seemed to embody the vicissitudes of the state, but he belonged only to the north. The south had its own symbol in Ronald Reagan. Old Dutch was the Ultimate Californian—tall, tanned, handsome, and sunny, a fine swimmer and a former lifeguard, an accentuator of the positive, somebody who ignored bad news, who was fit, narcissistic, and so unwilling to show his age that he still dyed his hair to mask the snowy white.

  Reagan had Golden State charisma. He could take an assassin’s bullet, rise from his hospital bed, and soon be back chopping wood at his ranch above Santa Barbara. Like his predecessor, former U.S. senator George Murphy, the first modern California actor-politician, he had used the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild to propel himself to the top. He was a red-baiter and an arch conservative who had learned to moderate his stance in public. As governor, he had railed against wasteful spending and ranted about the lefties in Berkeley. On the environment, he sided with the miners and the lumberjacks.

  “If you’ve seen one redwood,” he said
once, “you’ve seen them all.”

  During my time as a Californian, a ballot initiative and not a politician had affected the most change, however. On June 6, 1978, the state’s voters had passed Proposition Thirteen, a measure that amended the constitution to limit severely the amount of property taxes that local governments could collect. If you had bought a house before 1978, your tax bill was fixed at that level and could never be increased.

  Cities, counties, and special districts had suffered an immediate loss of about $7 billion annually. Proposition Thirteen was so drastic that such corporate giants as Atlantic-Richfield, Bank of America, and Southern California Edison had opposed it, fearing the effects on the business economy. Some people were convinced the proposition was at the root of the bankruptcy California might be headed toward.

  The closed libraries, the shuttered clinics for the mentally ill, the outdated textbooks in the public schools, even the homeless around the capitol—Proposition Thirteen was a contributary cause of them all, at least to some degree.

  One afternoon as I stretched out on the capitol lawn talking with Adam, I looked around at the assembled faces of government workers, black, Asian, and Hispanic, and realized how much change was still in store for the state when these new faces began to have an impact on the electorate.

  “What’s in the political future, Adam?” I asked.

  “The future?” He laughed and plucked at a blade of grass. “Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

  GOING HOME. The Fourth of July weekend lay ahead, and I was returning to San Francisco for my break before heading south to the San Joaquin, Los Angeles, San Diego, and the Mexican border.

  I took the scenic route along Highway 160. It followed the Sacramento River through the peach and pear orchards of Freeport, Clarksburg, and Hood. Set back from the floodplain were some handsome old Victorian houses that had a quality of permanence denied to the tracts that were spreading inexorably from Sacramento to Silicon Valley, linking towns and villages together into a new megalopolis whose projected population was expected to top 9 millon by 2010.