The Bonanza King

by Gregory Crouch

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  Notes

  PROLOGUE: THE NEW CAMP

  “like gentlemen”: “Friends Tell of Kind Work for the Poor,” San Francisco Call, July 21, 1902.

  “That’s what Jack”: “The Ophir Bonanza in 1859,” Grant Smith Collection, UCB, Box 1, Folder 16, p. 48, citing a personal interview with H. L. Slosson, one of Mackay’s friends.

  CHAPTER 1: A ROUGH IRISH LAD

  with the family pig: Grant Smith, “The Mackay Family in San Francisco and in Paris,” Grant Smith Collection, UCB, Box 2, Folder 8, citing interviews with Alexander O’Grady.

  “in many districts”: Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845–1849 (New York: Old Town Books, 1962), p. 24.

  that number had bloated to: Jay P. Dolan, The Irish in America: A History (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), p. 55.

  “superstitious papists” and “illiterate ditch diggers”: Ibid., p. 42.

  “any color will”: Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001), p. 128.

  came from tiny Ireland: Historical Statistics of the United States, 1879–1945. United States Department of Commerce, 1949.

  New York’s population: “Population of the 100 largest urban places, 1840,” www.census.gov. https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab07.txt (accessed July 17, 2015).

  took quarters on Frankfort Street: “Mackay’s Good Fellowship,” New York Times, July 27, 1902.

  difficult for established Yankees to comprehend: Enrique Alonso and Ana Recarte, “Pigs in New York City: A Study on 19th-Century Urban ‘Sanitation.’ ” University of Alkali, Spain: Friends of Thoreau Environmental Program, Research Institute of North American Studies; Anbinder, Five Points; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Richard Henry Dana, “Visit to the Red Light District, 1843,” www.eyewitnesstohistory.com, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/redlight.htm (accessed July 14, 2015); Dolan, The Irish in America; Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994); Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Rebecca Yamin, “New York’s Mythic Slum: Digging Lower Manhattan’s Infamous Five Points,” Archeology, Vol. 50, No. 2, 1977; New York Daily Tribune, December 6, 1848.

  Only about half: Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863, p. 140.

  ardent spectators at prizefights and cockfights: “Newsboys,” New York Daily Times, 12/21/1854; Anbinder, Five Points, pp. 129–31.

  “Saint Patrick’s vermin”: Dolan, The Irish in America, p. 19.

  shipbuilders generally refused to employ: Anbinder, Five Points, 114; Tyler Anbinder personal email to the author, October 5, 2015.

  certain he’d found gold: John S. Hittell, “The Discovery of Gold in California,” and Charles B. Gillespie, “Marshall’s Own Account of the Gold Discovery,” both in Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, vol. 41, November 1890 to April 1891, pp. 525–31; John A. Sutter, “The Discovery of Gold in California,” Hutchings’ Illustrated California Magazine, Vol. II, No. 5, November 1857, pp. 193–98; Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California, Vol. 6 (San Francisco: History Company, 1888), 26–41.

  “GOLD MINE FOUND”: “The History of California Newspapers,” Sacramento Daily Union, December 25, 1858; Bancroft, History of California, Vol. 6, p. 54, footnote 2.

  “the gold fever”: “The History of California Newspapers,” Sacramento Daily Union, December 25, 1858.

  “Gold! Gold! Gold”: Bancroft, History of California, Vol. 6, p. 56.

  “The whole country”: Ibid., p. 60.

  The Star survived: “The History of California Newspapers,” Sacramento Daily Union, December 25, 1858.

  “the yellow fever”: The Polynesian, July 15, 1848.

  Only the prodigious efforts: New York Daily Tribune, April 10, 1848; John Harrison Morrison, History of New York Ship Yards (New York: William F. Sametz & Co., 1909), pp. 102–4.

  “gold mine discovered”: New York Herald, August 19, 1848. This article was likely cribbed from one of the 2,000 copies of a special edition of the Californian dated April 1, 1848, that Brannan sent overland from California back to the Missouri frontier.

  “gold for the gathering”: New York Herald, September 19, 1848.

  Those were astronomical sums: New York Daily Tribune, September 20, 1848.

  “The accounts of”: New York Daily Tribune, December 6, 1848; http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/historicspeeches/polk/stateoftheunion1848.html, accessed October 19, 2015.

  “The gold of”: New York Daily Tribune, December 6, 1848.

  “resemble[d] Asiatic Cholera”: New York Daily Tribune, December 6, 1848.

  four new cases: New York Daily Tribune, December 7, 1848.

  “the three C’s”: New York Daily Tribune, December 11, 1848.

  “pieces from 1 to 6 ounces”: New York Daily Tribune, December 8, 1848; William Tecumseh Sherman, Personal Memoirs of Gen. W. T. Sherman (New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1890), pp. 77–88.

  “sneers of the unbelievers”: New York Daily Tribune, December 14, 1848.

  “Genuine”: New York Daily Tribune, December 11, 1848.

  “Infallible Remedy”: New York Daily Tribune, December 14, 1848.

  Cedar and Greenwich: New York Daily Tribune, December 12, 1848.

  “The spirit of emigration”: New York Herald, January 11, 1849.

  CHAPTER 2: GILDED DREAMS—AND THE HARD FIST OF CALIFORNIA REALITY

  “unhallowed crusade for”: “The California Exodus,” New York Evening Post, February 3, 1849.

  “Mammon”: “California—Gold and Soil,” New York Tribune, July 4, 1849, reprinting a letter to the Jamestown Journal.

  “worse than the cholera”: Bayard Taylor, Eldorado, or Adventures in the Path of Empire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 1949, xi.

  the cholera blossomed: John Noble Wilford, “How Epidemics Helped Shape the Modern Metropolis,” New York Times, April 15, 2008.

  don’t record whether Mackay went: “Mackay’s Life and Career,” Salt Lake City Tribune, July 21, 1902, says he came via Panama (the paper was owned by two of Mackay’s old friends whom Mackay had helped set up in business); “Death of Millionaire John W. Mackay,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 21, 1902, and others say Mackay came to California around Cape Horn. That he came via Panama seems most likely to the author.

  “composed chiefly of”: Daniel Bates Woods, Sixteen Months at the Gold Diggings (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851), p. 46.

  “accomplished in a day”: Taylor, Eldorado, xvii; John Mackay was one of the 27,000-odd hopefuls who landed in San Francisco in 1851: Hittell, A History of San Francisco, p. 166.

  “Nothing is strange”: Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, The Shirley Letters from California Mines, 1851–1852 (San Francisco: Thomas C. Russell, 1922), p. 74.

  80 percent male: Robert M. Senkewicz,
Vigilantes in Gold Rush San Francisco (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), p. 12.

  “Chrysopylae,” the “Golden Gate”: John C. Frémont, Geographical Memoir Upon Upper California (Washington, D.C.: Wendell and Van Benthuysen, Printers, 1848), p. 32.

  “The sand-shoveler”: Hittell, A History of the City of San Francisco and Incidentally, of the State of California (San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft & Company, 1878), p. 461; also, “California Gossip, December 23, 1863,” New York Times, January 24, 1864.

  A population of about three thousand: “From the Exterior,” Sacramento Daily Union, June 23, 1852.

  five to eight grains: Woods, Sixteen Months at the Gold Diggings, p. 52.

  “There are but”: A letter from Virginia City written on November 26, 1859, published in Marysville Express, December 28, 1859.

  “a shadow of”: “The Post Office Department,” Placer Times, December 29, 1849.

  typically 5, 8, or 10 percent: “Sacramento and Its Tributaries,” Sacramento Daily Union, November 24, 1851; 10 percent: Holliday, Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 131.

  “When caught in”: Charles Ross Parke, September 18, 1848, quoted in Holliday, Rush for Riches, 122.

  “the sanctifying influence”: Shirley, The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851–1852, pp. 49–50.

  “The thoughts of”: Holliday, Rush for Riches, p. 337.

  “Mining camps always”: Grant Smith Collection, UCB, Box 2, Folder 10, “Mark Twain in Nevada—Final Ms,” p. 37.

  “charged with gold”: “Waifs of Travel, by ‘Chaos,’ to the Boise Mines, Sunday at Boise,” Daily Alta California, July 19, 1863.

  a makeshift liberty pole: Ibid.

  “Drinking has become”: J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), p. 336, quoting William Swain to his brother George Swain, March 17, 1850.

  “We come and”: Joann Levy, They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1941), p. 108, quoting Franklin A. Buck, A Yankee Trader in the Gold Rush.

  “every man has”: Grant Smith Collection, UCB, Box 2: Folder 6; “Comstock Characteristics,” 156.