The Bonanza King

by Gregory Crouch

  In other words, everything about gold in California was true. Newspapers carried transcripts of the president’s twenty-one-thousand-word address in its entirety. Simultaneously, the whole nation caught gold fever. “The gold of California . . . may strengthen and benefit, or it may deprave and destroy,” opined the Tribune.

  To men and women, the gold would do all four. The rush of people hungry to cross a continent and make their fortunes would visit apocalyptic devastation on the Edenic landscapes of California—and give rise to a whole new civilization on the Pacific Coast.

  • • •

  John Mackay had these questions and others to ponder after the “Mechanics’ Bell” tolled the end of the ten-hour workday on December 6, 1848. (Shipyard employees erected the bell on a street corner near the shipyards in the 1830s after strikes won them the right to a ten-hour workday—few working-class men owned pocket watches; fewer trusted owners’ timekeeping.) Aided by the yellow glow of the city’s gas lamps, Mackay navigated home through what that day’s issue of the Tribune described as a “wilderness of filth”—the “uncovered sewers” and “putrid pollution” of the New York streets.

  Such filth had suddenly become an object of serious concern. On December 1, the packet ship New York reached New York Harbor from France with seventeen or eighteen of its more than three hundred passengers infected with a disease that had already killed seven of those afflicted. The Board of Health quarantined the arrivals at Staten Island. The disease “resemble[d] Asiatic Cholera in all its symptoms.”

  Although the dreaded scourge had been blessedly absent from North America for the preceding fourteen years, few words provoked as much terror as “cholera.” The sickness’s 1832–34 visitation had killed more than thirty-five hundred in New York City. Nationwide, tens of thousands had died. From one stride to the next, an apparently healthy person could be felled by explosive, uncontrollable diarrhea, vomiting, and agonizing cramps. Half of the stricken died, many within a day. Some died within hours. Since few people possessed the courage to minister to the afflicted, and most of those who did contracted the disease themselves, the majority of cholera victims died a horrid death, alone and caked in excrement. The plague had ravaged Europe through the summer and fall of 1848, seemingly shackled to the violent popular uprisings shaking the despotic governments of the continent, until it jumped to England in October. Few doubted its power to vault the Atlantic.

  Among the quarantined passengers of the New York, four new cases—and three deaths—occurred the day the president’s address appeared in the Tribune. From the Battery to Murray Hill and from West Street to Kips Bay, “the three C’s”—Congress, cholera, and California—dominated conversation.

  A letter from California’s military governor, Colonel Richard Barnes Mason, ran in the Tribune on December 8. Colonel Mason told of the goldfield tour he’d made in company with an obscure army lieutenant named William Tecumseh Sherman. They’d found the vanished population of California’s coastal strip in the Sierra foothills, where Colonel Mason estimated that four thousand people were digging and washing gold from the beds of the Feather, Yuba, Bear, American Fork, and Cosumnes rivers, averaging one to three ounces of gold per person, per day. He mentioned one spot where two men had raised $17,000 in two days, another location that had produced $12,500, and a third where $2,000 came out in three weeks. “I might tell of hundreds of similar occurrences,” he added. One man showed him fourteen pounds of clean-washed gold. Another returned to Monterey with thirty-seven pounds—the fruit of seven weeks of labor. A soldier on twenty-day furlough from the Monterey garrison earned $1,500, even though he’d spent half his time traveling. The value of the gold that that soldier mined exceeded the total of the rations, pay, and clothing he’d receive during his entire five-year enlistment.

  The gold was on land belonging to the United States government. Colonel Mason mused about trying to extract a tax, but “considering the large extent of country, the character of the people engaged, and the small scattered force at my command, I resolved not to interfere, but to permit all to work freely.

  “No capital is required to obtain this gold,” he added. “The laboring man wants nothing but his pick and shovel and tin pan with which to dig and wash the gold, and many frequently pick gold out of the crevices of rocks with their butcher knives, in pieces from 1 to 6 ounces.”

  The courier who brought the initial dispatches from California had also arrived with a tea caddy filled with gold—233 ounces of it. A Mr. David Carter, apparently a private citizen who had traveled with the courier, brought 1,980 ounces, a whopping 123.75 pounds of gold. Both samples went to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia for assay.

  The Mint silenced the “sneers of the unbelievers” when it telegraphed the War Department a summary of its findings: “Genuine.”

  • • •

  Suddenly, there was a place to go. No longer the slow, plodding creep of a rough frontier edging away from the settled eastern states, the West had taken an almighty bound, overstepping a continent, to a land of glittering promise lining the shores of a distant ocean where a man might pick up more wealth in a morning than he could earn in a lifetime of eastern drudgery.

  A flood of California-themed advertisements filled the newspapers. More ominously, another advertisement touted an “Infallible Remedy for the Asiatic Cholera.” Many passengers sequestered at Staten Island had fled quarantine, and the cholera already had a foothold in the city, at a German boardinghouse at the corner of Cedar and Greenwich. The disease seemed unlikely to confine itself to the location.

  By December 14, just eight days after the publication of the president’s address, in New York Harbor alone, forty-five vessels were outfitting for Panama or California direct, through the Straits of Magellan or around Cape Horn. The gold mania built through the Christmas season, the New Year, and the first months of 1849. Names of men departing for California filled column after column of the New York newspapers. Reporters made much of teary-eyed departures on the city’s docks and piers. Men unwilling to chance the storms of Cape Horn or the pestilential jungles of Panama—or unable to pay the passage fees—headed to the frontier towns of the Missouri River from which they could undertake the two-thousand-mile overland crossing to California.

  “The spirit of emigration, which is carrying off thousands to California, so far from dying away increases and expands every day,” said the Herald on January 11, 1849. “All classes of our citizens seem to be under the influence of this extraordinary mania.”

  The rush to California was the biggest event in the history of the young Republic. John Mackay stayed at the shipyard through all of it. His time was yet to come.

  * * *

  I. Described in terms of modern New York City neighborhoods, the Irish concentration comprised most of Chinatown and Tribeca as well as the southern portions of SoHo, the Bowery, Little Italy, and the Lower East Side.

  II. Ireland’s population fell by nearly 50 percent between 1841 and 1926, from 8.18 million to 4.23 million. Ireland still hasn’t recovered—its population today is about 2 million less than it was before the potato famine.

  III. Sam Brannan owned the Star. A few months later, the remnants of the Californian and the Star consolidated into a new newspaper—the Daily Alta California.

  IV. Calculating based on the 2017 gold value of about $1,250 per ounce, each one of those rockers was earning between $15,000 and $20,000 per day—or between $3,750 and $5,000 per man, per day, sums for which many of us would walk across a continent and risk death.

  CHAPTER 2

  Gilded Dreams—and the Hard Fist of California Reality

  Booming San Francisco in 1851, with elaborate multistory buildings crammed against the downtown waterfront, tall ships crowded into the anchorage, and Yerba Buena Island in the background.

  * * *

  The civilized world is now half mad about California. Like children with a new plaything, they cannot take their attention from it.

  —N
ew York Herald, March 19, 1849

  The California gold discovery put spurs to the entire world. In the eastern states, most men earned a living, nothing more. For farmers, laborers, clerks, and others in the emerging middle classes, it took years of drudgery to gain a yard of advantage. Poor Americans couldn’t ever seem to win an inch. California promised more. California offered a man the opportunity to enlarge himself, to escape the pigeonhole of his eastern existence, to aim for heights beyond his previous imaginings.

  Mothers, fathers, wives, and newspaper editors railed against the “unhallowed crusade for gold,” but no shrill warning could suppress the pull of the Sierra foothills. Churchmen extolled the virtues of home and family and honest toil and deplored the depravity of “Mammon,” warning against the moral quicksand sure to collect around the pursuit of instant wealth. To no avail. California emptied their congregations of young men. Most saw California as, quite literally, the chance of a lifetime, and although it took courage to leave everything behind, the United States had no shortage of restless, energetic, industrious men unsatisfied with their lives. Tens of thousands bolted for the new El Dorado. The pull of California proved equally powerful in Central and South America, Australia, China, and Europe. In the late spring of 1849, a New York Tribune writer claimed gold fever raged “worse than the cholera”—strong commentary considering the terrors of the disease.

  Only a few cholera cases appeared in New York City during the cold months, but ships from Europe lodged the disease in warmer New Orleans that winter. River traffic spread the sickness up the Mississippi River Valley. Cholera decimated the populations of New Orleans, St. Louis, the South, and the trans-Appalachian West. On the Missouri frontier, the sickness ravaged wagon trains of California-bound ’49ers. In New York, the cholera blossomed with the spring weather and raged through the hot summer. The president, Zachary Taylor, declared Friday, August 3, a national day of “fasting, humiliation, and prayer” in the hopes the Almighty would remove cholera’s ravages. He did not. Affluent citizens fled New York City en masse. Among those left behind, the disease killed five thousand before fading in the autumn. Forty percent of the dead had been born in Ireland—stark commentary on the grotesque sanitary conditions of New York’s immigrant neighborhoods.

  • • •

  John Mackay survived the cholera epidemic, as did his mother and sister, but 1849 can’t have been an easy year for him. The prospect of adventurous experience tugs hard on many young men, and stories of what a man could make of himself on the Pacific Coast propelled the largest voluntary migration in world history. Mackay must have wanted to test himself in the new country, but responsible for helping support his mother and sister, just barely of age, obligated to the employer sponsoring his apprenticeship, and not having the means to finance the expensive trip, he remained rooted in New York for the next two and a half years, while day after day, thrilling California stories filled the newspapers.

  He did benefit—the California excitement created a huge boom in shipbuilding. Demand for vessels to transport men and materials to the West Coast and to enter the California coastal trade kept Yankee shipwrights furiously busy. During Mackay’s time at the shipyard, William H. Webb completed ten packet ships, eight sidewheel steamships, and six spectacular sailing vessels—the clipper ships Celestial, Gazelle, Challenge, Comet, Invincible, and Swordfish. Although the work surely felt dull in comparison to the wonders of California, the shipyard provided steady, if unspectacular pay, an important consideration for a man trying to claw his way out of immigrant poverty. However, if he stuck with shipbuilding, he’d do so for the rest of his life. John Mackay wasn’t quite ready to surrender to that existence.

  What combination of factors gave Mackay the final shove remains unknown. He finished his apprenticeship in the latter half of 1851, quit Webb, took ship for the Pacific Coast, and joined the gold rush.

  Just nineteen, Mackay might not have appreciated the plethora of useful skills he’d acquired at the shipyard, even as a low man on the totem pole. He’d learned carpentry and how to handle tools both large and small. He’d gained an appreciation for the logistical management of large physical projects, and he’d internalized the importance of doing tasks the right way. He’d experienced good and bad leadership firsthand, and he knew what it felt like to be a cog in a complex operation that required the contributions of men of varied skills and experience. He’d learned how to rig a derrick and gain a mechanical advantage to ease the work of hoisting heavy timbers. He knew how to stay vigilant and safe around large-scale, dangerous constructions, and he’d learned to value the efficiencies gained by adopting new techniques and technologies. Every one of those abilities and attitudes would prove valuable in the decades ahead.

  Reliable sources don’t record whether Mackay went to California around South America or crossed to the Pacific through Central America, although by 1851, most passengers opted for the routes across Panama or Nicaragua, since those took six predictable weeks in lieu of the four to six months doubling Cape Horn sometimes required. (About half of the gold rushers went to California by sea; the other great mass of immigrants made an epic two-thousand-mile overland crossing, westering from the Missouri frontier across the waist of the continent on the Oregon and California trail network.) Considering the number of Webb-built vessels plying both sea routes, Mackay may have voyaged in a ship he’d helped construct.

  In either case, Mackay made the journey in the light of full knowledge—California news had been constant fodder in East Coast newspapers for nearly three years, and many thousands of people had already returned from the Sierra foothills. Some came home loaded with gold. Many more returned bearing modest sums, disillusioned by California difficulties and eager to return to the lives they’d left behind. And quite a significant number weren’t coming home at all—as many as one gold rusher in five died of disease, hardship, violence, or accident.

  Nobody heading for the Pacific Coast in the last half of 1851 held illusions about the easy wealth they’d find in California. The first arrivals had skimmed the best pickings in 1848 and 1849, and although California still offered broad economic opportunities and high earnings, the difficulties and dangers, as well as astronomical cost of living, also afforded a man a gigantic opportunity to fail.

  By the time John Mackay debarked from the ship that brought him to California in late 1851, the sleepy eight-hundred-person bayside village had vanished, replaced by the roaring city of San Francisco, the newest and most exciting town in the world. No city in history had ever experienced such explosive growth. On June 25, 1849, the city had been “composed chiefly of tents.” Two years later, San Francisco had acquired almost thirty-five thousand inhabitants, making it the only urban place on the American frontier and one of the twenty-five biggest cities in the country. A journalist on scene remarked that San Francisco “accomplished in a day the growth of half a century.” Even so, San Francisco presented an improvised appearance. Slap-dash shacks, shanties, and crudely rigged canvas tents sprawled across the hills, dunes, and flats that ringed the wooden and brick structures of the city’s core, which crowded against the commercial waterfront. Ramshackle wharves stretched across tidal mudflats to reach deep water through the hulls of hundreds of abandoned ships, deserted since the frantic early days of the gold rush. Bay water seeped into the bilges of the derelicts. Many listed at obscene angles, their masts, spars, and rotting rigging tangled overhead. As the gold rushers said, “Nothing is strange in California,” because, of course, everything was.

  Opportunistic businessmen had winched dozens of hulks to firm high-tide groundings, connected them to the wharves with planks and piers, sawed openings in their hulls, and pressed them into service as warehouses, restaurants, stores, saloons, and hotels, even banks. As fixed points, the hulks served to solidify the landfills extending the city’s business district into the bay.

  Ashore, amidst the mud, the ooze, the garbage, and the hustling crowds, San Francisco’s shocking dearth
of women and the near total absence of children struck newcomers as the city’s most instantly noticeable characteristics. The population was more than 80 percent male, a figure that represented a doubling of distaff representation in the past twelve months—the year before, women composed just 10 percent of the California population. No place in the world was more male.I

  San Francisco amalgamated all the world’s cultures. Persons abroad in the streets commonly heard English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Malay, and Hawaiian spoken on the same city block. A grasping mania infected the populace, everyone obsessed with making money as fast as possible. Everybody came from somewhere else; hardly anyone wanted to stay. A man’s past meant nothing in San Francisco. The city simply had no past. A man’s worth depended on who he was today, and what he might do tomorrow.

  The city’s extraordinary extended even unto the weather. San Francisco’s could be both the best and the worst most people had ever experienced. Sunshine predominated, but cold northwest winds blowing in from the Pacific drove thick blankets of fog over the hills and dunes and through the Golden Gate—the narrow strait connecting San Francisco Bay to the open ocean—named in 1846 by “The Pathfinder,” western explorer and Army officer John C. Frémont, who had led several expeditions to Alta California when it belonged to Mexico. (Frémont’s naming had nothing to do with the mineral for which California would soon become famous. He’d originally named the strait “Chrysopylae,” the “Golden Gate” in loose translation from the Greek, after the Golden Horn of the Bosporus, another renowned harbor, because the beautiful opening onto the Pacific suggested a golden gate to the trade of the Orient.)