The Bonanza King

by Gregory Crouch

  The men lived under canvas or in bricolage cabins constructed of scrounged materials. They buried their dust in bags, jars, and tins, often under flat stones hidden beneath the ashes of their cook fires. Dogs yowled. A rough plank laid across the tops of empty barrels or two tree stumps often served as a camp’s first saloon. Before long, canvas snugged in the walls and roof to make a room, it acquired a rough floor, and a plank door swung on leather hinges.

  In many camps, prostitutes offered the only “female society” available. Absent female companionship, men gambled strictly for the pleasure of sitting in the presence of a woman—having one deal a game practically guaranteed its success, and crafty gambling houses imported women for that express purpose. As one chronicler noted, “Mining camps always wear their worst side out.”

  To those attempting to cleave to their hometown morality, California seemed like the devil’s playground. The Sabbath, considered a cornerstone of healthy religious observance in the eastern states, died a quick death in the mining camps. Come Sundays, men working outlying claims flocked to the larger camps to settle debts and buy provisions. Merchants presented miners with “villainous looking paper[s] charged with figures.” Miners returned “long, greasy bag[s] charged with gold.” Accounts resolved, mining camp Sundays devolved into massive community ventings of accumulated steam heated by rotgut whisky, cut-rate wine, and stovetop brandy. Groggeries went full blast in perfect pandemonium, selling booze by the gold-dust “pinch.” (Successful saloon-tenders had notoriously fat fingers.) “Cat-gut scrapers” sawed out music on battered fiddles that had somehow survived the journey “the plains across.” Touts staged bear, dog, or cock fights, horse races, boxing contests, and coarse, makeshift theatricals. Bewhiskered miners roamed the streets, pistols and bowie knives dangling from their belts. Gentleman sports in spotless boiled shirts and broadcloth suits manned the faro tables. Clouds of flies rose above garbage and offal in the dirt streets. Fights erupted. Pack mules staggered under preposterous loads. A tattered stars and stripes fluttered from a makeshift liberty pole. As one gold rusher wrote, “Drinking has become very prevalent, swearing a habitual custom, and gambling has no equal in the annals of history.”

  The thing was, amid the California welter, a man got to choose, absent the tyranny of moralizers who had ever plagued the American nation. As one Gold Rush trader described it, “We come and we go and nobody wonders and no Mrs. Grundy talks about it.” A man did as he pleased. If he chose to cleave to his religious traditions and keep the Sabbath, that was his business and that was fine, nobody much cared. Conversely, a man could gamble, smoke, blaspheme, buy the services of a prostitute, and paralyze himself with ardent spirits and nobody much cared about that, either. Mining camp philosophy held that “every man has the right to go to hell in the manner of his own choosing.”

  That had a downside, too. California was a heartless place. Nobody much bothered when things went wrong. Test pits in the camps filled with water. Drunks fell in and drowned and nobody raised an eyebrow. The fool shouldn’t have drunk so much. Men fell ill and died thousands of miles from the hand of the closest person who loved them. The person who scraped his shallow grave might not trouble to learn his name. Men found California’s anonymity depressing and lonely, sentiments that may have catalyzed much Gold Rush debauchery.

  The shoddy social fabric held nobody in place. People came and went unnoticed. Men disappeared into the camps, swallowed whole by the dangers and dissipation of life on the mining frontier. Many were never heard from again. Camps thrived while the local placers produced good returns. Men drifted away from faltering diggings and wandered the Sierra foothills in an endless, restless search for the next big thing, hoping to be first to skim the cream from a new strike. Few miners were content with what they had. The merest whisper stampeded frustrated miners to some new flat or gulch, a steady, unspectacular claim having nothing on the hope of “new diggings.” For many, for most, California’s promised fortune proved as elusive as every other. The frustrated restlessness worsened as the years passed.

  • • •

  In California, immigrants discovered a geography swollen to immense size. Stands of enormous trees covered hills and mountains and ran off beyond the limits of vision. At lower elevations, the emerald grasses of winter glowed like Irish vistas, then sprouted spring carpets of wildflowers that tinted the landscape impossible yellows and oranges. As each year aged, the verdure seared into the tans and duns of summer and fall, which somehow managed to glow vibrant gold in the lingering Pacific sunsets. Abundant wildlife patrolled the hills and valleys. Hawks, vultures, eagles, and enormous condors pinwheeled overhead. Oaks, pines, and coarse chaparral climbed the hills and canyons of the Sierra foothills and away eastward, the gray white peaks of the high Sierra towered into a cobalt sky. Coastward, the immigrants marveled along shores pounded by the swells of a different ocean. No one could gaze on San Francisco Bay without sensing the power it held to unlock the Pacific slope of the continent. Nothing previously known rivaled the majestic grandeur of California. The state excelled even in monotony. California’s Central Valley was simply the flattest place anybody had ever seen.

  But for all of California’s heart-stopping beauty, the gold rushers felt no obligation to care for that which the vagaries of history had dropped in their laps. Since no one planned to stay in California longer than it took to make his “pile,” nobody bothered to take care of the land. The gold rushers attacked California with the fury of an invading army, elbowing aside the native cultures that had thrived in California for thousands of years. Although Spanish and Mexican soldiers, missionaries, and ranchers had done their fair share of harm to California’s coastal Indian cultures during the preceding eighty years, California’s native population collapsed during the 1850s, hounded unto death by the horsemen of the white man’s apocalypse—disease, murder, and the wanton annihilation of the natural resources on which the Indians depended. In-flooding Americans claimed the best natural resources on a first-come, first-served basis, “posting” mining ground, timber, and water and calling them their own. In a decade of unrestrained pillage, the mining frenzy turned the Sierra foothills into a wasteland, a grubbed-over landscape of caved hillsides, barren holes, heaped tailings, garbage, tree stumps, and polluted rivers. Worst damage of all came with the invention of “hydraulic mining.” Miners learned to direct high-pressure water cannons at gold-bearing sediments and wash entire hillsides through enormous sluice boxes. “Hydraulicking” produced large returns, but also choked streams and rivers with mining debris, called “tailings,” causing floods that buried some of California’s most fertile bottom lands under sterile gravel.IV

  The Mexican Californianos fared nearly as badly as the native Indians. The United States had promised to uphold the sanctity of their land grants in the treaty that ceded California to the United States, but they quickly found themselves overrun by an army of gringo ruffians, huge tracts of their lands occupied by squatters claiming “rights,” and their fates gripped by a legal system that seemed rigged to dispossess them of land their families may have owned for generations

  California changed a man. It broke him of his illusions. A Gold Rush axiom held that “a man in California either grows better or worse.” The state either sent him home in tatters, ruined him in place, leaving a shell of the former man, or he rose to meet its challenges. In that case, even if California never made him rich, the state filled him with sure, steady confidence and a good measure of pride—if a man could handle California, he could handle anything.

  John Mackay lived in that world for seven years, mining gold in the gulches and bars around Downieville at camps and locales with names like Cut-Throat Bar, Allegheny, Forest City, Cut Eye Foster’s Bar, The City of Six, Secret Diggings, Poker Flat, Deadwood, Pardner’s Pint, the Hardscrabble District, Hell’s Half Acre, Shenanigan Flat, Whisky Diggings, Fair Play, Portwine, Potosi, Brandy City, Puppytown, and Poverty Hill. Whether ironic, playful, personal, or realis
tic, the place names conveyed much of gold mining’s essential truths, and as the decade wore on, the mining life grew increasingly precarious. According to Joseph T. Goodman, then a thick-bearded typesetter working for the Golden Era, San Francisco’s most prestigious literary magazine, by 1858, “the palmy days of placer mining were past.”

  • • •

  News from the Pacific Northwest that told of major gold strikes on the Fraser and Thompson rivers in Canada, 950 miles north of San Francisco (east and northeast of modern Vancouver) triggered California anxieties in the spring of 1858. San Francisco headlines howled about “Miners Making $8 to $50 per day!” On April 4, the Daily Alta California quoted “a gentleman of reliability” with Fraser River experience. “Tell your friends to come soon,” he said.

  And come they did. The “Fraser fever” raged with “unabated ardor” and “wild, ungovernable excitement” through May and June 1858, with “every steamer fit to send to sea” and “innumerable” sailing vessels pressed into service to carry passengers and freight to the new goldfield. The value of mining claims in the Sierra foothills plummeted as men sold out, wanting just enough money to make the trip north. Some went by sea; others made the hard and dangerous overland journey. The exodus shriveled the populations of the interior mining districts, injured the commerce of Stockton, Sacramento, and Marysville, towns that survived by supplying the miners’ needs, and panicked San Francisco, where property owners rushed to sell “while there was yet a chance to save something from the general wreck.” In early July, the Daily Alta California estimated that twenty-five thousand men had stampeded north. “For sale” placards swung from hundreds of San Francisco buildings. The Stockton Independent described California as “a cholera patient in the collapsed state, when stimulants and narcotics are of immediate necessity to check the exhausting disease.”

  The disappearance of so many men crushed commerce and trade throughout the state. The assessed value of San Francisco real estate dropped nearly 15 percent. As Joseph T. Goodman wrote more than thirty years later, “The extent to which San Francisco suffered from this disaster would not be credible to those who have known the city only in later and more prosperous years. It is within bounds to say that a quarter of the houses stood tenantless. Confidence was gone, trade was killed, and San Francisco sat in sack-cloth and bewailed her hopeless fate.”

  Disaster hit the men who’d gone north, too. Up north, the rivers refused to lower in the late summer and autumn, the best placer deposits remained submerged, and the men mined little gold. Immense water volumes prevented use of the river-turning techniques developed in California. Of the thousands who rushed north, few made grub. Measurable quantities of gold did exist in the Fraser River drainage—most of it submerged beneath large, swift-flowing rivers from which profitable extraction proved impossible. By early October, the gold dust received at the San Francisco Mint from the Fraser River totaled a mere 3,532 ounces, a fraction of an ounce per man, and the California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences said, “The Fraser swindle overtops all other[s] in its gigantic proportions, and puts to the blush all humbugs that have preceded it.”

  The majority of men who rushed to the Fraser River went broke. Hundreds, then thousands of disappointed miners straggled back into California. They’d lost all the money they’d invested in the trip, which in most cases was all the money they’d made in California. Only the shipping lines had flourished, which gave rise to the persistent rumor that most of the gold exhibited in San Francisco that had supposedly been mined on the Fraser River had made a round trip from California.

  • • •

  With the bitter sectional tensions over the future of slavery and a painful economic depression harrying the eastern part of the nation and the Fraser River rush walloping California, among the few pieces of good news loose in the summer of 1858 was the announcement that Cyrus Field and his Atlantic Telegraph Company had successfully laid a submarine telegraph cable from England to Ireland and another across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean nearly two thousand miles to Newfoundland. A third leg of submarine cable connected Newfoundland into the land telegraph network of Nova Scotia. Transmission rates limited messages to a few words per hour, but that speed seemed miraculous compared to the weeks-long duration of the sea voyage. The first official message started westward from England on August 16: “Europe and America are united by telegraphy. Glory to God in the highest; on earth, peace and good will toward men.” Queen Victoria followed with a telegram of congratulations to President Buchanan, a ninety-eight-word missive that took eighteen hours to transmit. Through the much faster overland telegraph network, news of the transatlantic telegraph communication flashed around the United States. The joyful peel of church bells and the scream of steam whistles heralded the achievement to an awe-struck populace. In an era of wonders, the Atlantic cable seemed “the event of the age.”

  Since no tendril of the telegraph network touched California, rumors of the successful intercontinental connection didn’t begin trickling into San Francisco until late August. California’s fastest communications with “the States” arrived and departed on the dusty, bumpy stagecoaches of the overland mail, either via South Pass (in modern Wyoming) and Salt Lake City, or on the recently opened southern, snow-free route between San Francisco and the railheads on the Mississippi River at Memphis or St. Louis that traveled via 139 relay stations in Southern California, the New Mexico Territory, Texas, and Arkansas. Dangers, difficulties, and delays plagued both routes. Not until mid-September could the San Francisco newspapers confirm the transatlantic telegraph triumph and describe the enormous celebrations with which virtually every town and city in the Union had greeted the world-changing innovation. The Daily Alta California opined that beside the “magnitude and importance of this result . . . all former human accomplishments fade into Lilliputian dimensions.” California businessmen worried that lack of integration with the newly connected world would marginalize the Pacific Slope economy.

  To demonstrate to the people of the Atlantic states that California possessed “a full sense of the importance of the work,” California scheduled celebrations for Monday, September 27, 1858. Sacramento, Stockton, Marysville, and Placerville all manifested great civic rejoicings, but none of their efforts matched that put forth by San Francisco to gin up cheer—and business—in that dark autumn of 1858.

  San Franciscans festooned their city with flags, banners, and “acres of many-hued bunting,” and launched a parade so enormous that it took ninety minutes to pass any fixed location. After sunset, the warm glow of gaslights, candles burning in nearly every one of the city’s windows, and bonfires blazing in the public squares gradually replaced the gloaming. To an observer in the harbor, San Francisco appeared “one vast crystal palace.” The festivities climaxed with a fireworks display above Portsmouth Square. To everyone’s great relief, nowhere in the city had the thousands of naked flames leaped to a wooden structure and touched off a conflagration. Die-hard revelers carried intemperate festivities into the wee hours of the morning.

  The Daily Alta California missed its issue the next morning, the staff having spent the previous night in “unrestrained rejoicing.” When the newspaper returned to print on Wednesday, it hailed the celebration as “the most magnificent affair that has ever taken place upon the Pacific coast.” Unbeknownst to the thousands of San Franciscans recovering from the revelries, the transatlantic cable had ceased functioning ten days before, for reasons its engineers didn’t yet understand. News of the failure hadn’t yet reached California. Service wouldn’t resume for another eight years.

  • • •

  John Mackay stayed rooted in the Sierra foothills around Downieville through all of it. He resisted the temptations of the Fraser River rush and an earlier “duffers rush” to the Kern River and, so far as is known, didn’t attend the cable rejoicing in San Francisco. Although he’d never made a big strike, with hard work and diligence, he’d earned enough to support himself with money le
ft over to remit to his mother and sister. (At some point, his sister took religious vows and joined a convent.) Mackay loved the outdoor, physical life, the camaraderie, and the chaotic excitement and menace of the camps. Nobody worked harder than he did, and he often cooked for himself and his partners, a universally despised chore. A man who knew him in those days claimed with a wink that Mackay could “throw a slap jack up a chimney and catch it at the door.”

  For the rest of his life, John Mackay looked back on those years of hard labor in the narrow, pine- and oak-clad canyons echoing with the rush of cold Sierra waters as his best times, when he was free to enjoy his friendships without the complications and responsibilities of later years. Mackay was popular with his peers, and Robert Gracey, a friend of his during his Downieville years and for many years thereafter, remembered Mackay as “lighter hearted in those days than ever afterward.” In 1858, while so many “old Californians”—who were almost exclusively very young men—rushed to the Fraser River, the Masonic Lodge at Forrest City, a mining camp in the hills south of Downieville, admitted John Mackay to its membership. (The Independent Order of the Odd Fellows, the Freemasons, and other benevolent societies and fraternal orders played important roles in Gold Rush society. They organized social events, gave members a sense of belonging somewhere on the chaotic, anonymous California frontier, served a crucial role as mutual aid societies to help sick or injured members in an age devoid of government social safety nets, and in the event of a member’s death, typically funded and held a funeral and passed the hat for his widow, if he left one.)