Maybe I’ll Stay
Others decided to settle in California. This was easier said than done, for some.
Biddy Mason and her three young daughters wanted to stay. Unfortunately for them, Robert Smith was determined to leave. Smith held the Mason family as slaves—even though California had joined the Union as a free state in 1850.
By 1855 Smith realized that Biddy Mason knew slavery was illegal in California. That’s when he announced it was time to move to Texas (where slavery was legal). Mason had no intention of going. She contacted free black friends in Los Angeles and told them her story. The friends went to a local judge, who agreed to hear her case.
In a courthouse packed with curious spectators, Robert Smith tried to claim that Mason and her daughters weren’t really slaves. He treated them just like family, he insisted.
Mason saw things differently, as she told the judge:
“I always feared this trip to Texas, since I first heard of it. Mr. Smith told me I would be just as free in Texas as here.”
She didn’t believe that. Neither did the judge, who ruled that Mason and her daughters were free and could live wherever they wanted. They joined the growing black community in Los Angeles.
Biddy Mason
But Wait, There’s More!
Biddy Mason was one of thousands who chose to stay and build a future in California. By 1860 the state population would zoom toward 400,000.
California’s quick growth was one major effect of the gold rush. Another effect: many of the miners who caught gold fever were never really cured. As they headed back home, they couldn’t help themselves—they kept looking for gold.
That’s what George Jackson was doing in the Rocky Mountains in January 1859. It was much too late in winter to be out in these snowy mountains, but Jackson had heard rumors of gold being spotted in the area. He decided to search for one more day before heading back to Denver (which then had a total of twenty buildings).
He found a promising-looking spot along Clear Creek. The dirt was frozen so solid, he had to build a fire on top of it before he could scoop some into his drinking cup. He swirled the cup around, slowly splashing out the dirt and water. Soon all that remained in the bottom of his cup was about an ounce of gold flakes.
“I went to bed and dreamed of riches galore,” Jackson said. “I had struck it rich! There were millions in it!” News of Jackson’s find set off a whole new gold rush, as more than 100,000 people raced to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. And Jackson was right, there were millions of dollars of gold in those hills. Actually, there were hundreds of millions (though Jackson sold his mine for just a few thousand).
From Colorado, hopeful miners fanned out all over the West. It was “a mad, furious race for wealth,” one miner said. In June 1859 the furious race led a miner named Henry “Old Pancake” Comstock to a rocky hillside in the desert of western Nevada.
Comstock got his nickname because he was too lazy to bake bread and always used his flour to fry piles of pancakes. But Old Pancake was feeling energetic on this day. It paid off—he stumbled onto one of the biggest mineral strikes in world history. Or, more precisely, he stumbled onto two Irish immigrants who had already found the spot. Comstock liked the looks of it, so he started shouting that the land was his. He was so loud and annoying that the Irish guys finally agreed to make him a partner.
The men spent a few weeks digging, finding several ounces of gold a day. They could have gotten even more if it weren’t for the heavy bluish sand that kept caking to their boots and shovels. They were constantly stopping to scrape the stuff off and toss it aside.
Finally someone decided to bring a bit of this irritating sand to a nearby town to find out what it was. The answer: nearly pure silver. This sparked yet another rush, this time to the desert of Nevada. Miners founded the booming town of Virginia City. And Old Pancake’s mine, which became known as the Comstock Lode, produced four hundred million dollars in silver and gold over the next thirty years.
The Ten-Day Millionaire
One of the thousands racing to Nevada was a young man from Missouri named Samuel Clemens.
Clemens traveled by stagecoach, which was by far the fastest way to cross the West. By stopping often at stations to trade tired horses for fresh ones, stagecoaches could get you from St. Louis to San Francisco in just twenty-five days (compared to the four months it took people who traveled in their own wagons).
Clemens did point out some drawbacks, however. Passengers were quickly coated with dust and bugs. And Clemens and the other passengers sat facing each other on benches, packed so tightly that knees bumped. This was only a little painful on smooth sections of road. But when they hit holes and rocks (which were everywhere), passengers smashed together and sent each other flying.
“First we would all be down in a pile at the forward end of the stage, nearly in a sitting posture, and in a second we would shoot to the other end, and stand on our heads.”
Samuel Clemens
Bags of mail, luggage, loose books, pipes, canteens, even pistols, went flying around the car. People shouted:
“Can’t you quit crowding?”
“Take your elbow out of my ribs!”
This continued day and night for more than three weeks. Passengers could get out for only about twenty minutes at a time, when the coach stopped at a station to change animals.
Clemens survived the journey and immediately started searching for silver and gold. And as he later wrote in his book Roughing It (full of great stories and great exaggerations) he and two friends really did find a rich mine. So rich, in fact, that one of the partners was offered $200,000 (about $3 million in today’s money) for his share—and he refused it!
Much too excited to sleep, Clemens and his partner Calvin Higbie spent the night dreaming of how to spend their fortunes.
Clemens: Cal, what kind of house are you going to build?
Higbie: I was thinking about that. Three-story and an attic.
Clemens: But what kind?
Higbie: Well, I don’t hardly know. Brick, I suppose.
Clemens: Brick—bosh.
Higbie: Why? What is your idea?
Clemens: Brownstone front—French plate glass—billiard room off the dining room—statuary and paintings …
Higbie: By George!
According to the law, the finder of a mine had ten days to start working at the site. If he didn’t do any work in that time, he lost his claim. Higbie had to help on another job for a few days, but he left a note for Clemens: “Don’t fail to do the work before the ten days expire.”
Clemens never saw the note. The next morning he heard a friend was very sick and hurried off to help. He left a note for Higbie, telling Higbie to start the work without him.
The third partner, meanwhile, thought the other two were starting the work.
When Clemens got back to their cabin ten days later, he saw Higbie inside, slumped in a chair, looking stunned.
“Higbie, what—what is it?”
“We’re ruined,” Higbie said. “We didn’t do the work.”
The ten days had passed. The land was now open to the public again. Other miners were already digging there.
“I was absolutely and unquestionably worth a million dollars, once, for ten days,” Clemens later said.
What Next?
“What to do next?” Clemens wondered. Like so many failed miners, he was ashamed to go back home with nothing to show for his efforts. He thought about the jobs he had done since he was thirteen.
“I had once been a grocery clerk, for one day,” he remembered, “but had consumed so much sugar in that time that I was relieved from further duty.”
He had worked in a bookstore, but didn’t like it. Customers kept bothering him while he was trying to read. He had been a blacksmith, law student, drugstore clerk, printer, riverboat pilot …
The one thing he actually enjoyed was writing funny stories. Since coming west he had sent some stories to Nevada newspapers. Mu
ch to his shock, they printed them. Just as Clemens was thinking this over, he got a letter from a Virginia City paper offering him work as a reporter. He took the job. Just for fun, he started signing his articles with the name Mark Twain.
This kind of thing was happening a lot—people kept coming west to search for gold, failing, and deciding to stay anyway. They found new jobs, started new businesses, built new towns.
That didn’t mean life was easy in the West. One of westerners’ main complaints was that they felt cut off from the rest of the United States. It took months for mail and news to travel from the East to the West. Whenever a ship with mail finally arrived in San Francisco, thousands rushed to the post office—often with blankets under their arms. They knew they could be waiting outside for days while post office clerks sorted through the mail. Merchants came along selling coffee and sandwiches. Others earned extra cash by waiting in line until they got close to the post office entrance, then selling their spot to the highest bidder.
Things were getting ridiculous. There had to be a faster way to get letters and news across the country. Someone in the government had the idea of importing camels from Saudi Arabia, loading them with mail sacks, and leading them across the deserts of the West. The camels were not pleased. First the rocky roads ripped up their hooves. Then mail carriers tried tying leather boots on the camels’ feet.
Soon after this unfortunate experiment, a group of stagecoach owners introduced a better mail delivery service. They called it Russell, Majors & Waddell’s Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express Company.
Luckily for them, customers came up with a catchier name: the Pony Express.
Out of the Way of the Big Engine
“I was just eighteen, and boy-like, craved such excitement,” remembered a Pony Express rider named William Campbell. But as Campbell quickly realized, galloping across the West was, as he put it, “more hard work than fun.” During one run Campbell nearly crashed into a pack of bloody-faced wolves that were ripping flesh from some big dead thing. “They refused to move when I rode at them,” he said, “and my horse shied at the smell of blood and animals.” Campbell swerved around the wolves and raced on.
The Rise and Fall of the Pony Express
The Pony Express started doing business in April 1860. For five dollars a letter, you could have Express riders carry your mail from Missouri (where the eastern railroads ended) 1,950 miles to California in just ten days—by far the fastest mail service available at the time.
The whole thing worked like a giant relay race. Each rider was assigned a section of the route, usually about eighty miles. The rider’s job was to speed across his section, stopping at stations every ten or fifteen miles to change horses. At the end of his route, the rider handed the mailbags to the next guy. Then he could collapse onto a cot for a few hours before jumping up, grabbing new mail sacks, and racing back the other way.
The company liked to hire young men, tough teenagers who had grown up riding horses. When Elijah Wilson took the job, he was told the most important rule: “When we started out we were not to turn back, no matter what happened.” This made life dangerous for riders, especially as they crossed Native American territory. Indians didn’t welcome riders cutting through their hunting grounds, using their scarce water resources.
One day Wilson was stopped by an Indian warrior and given a warning. “He said I had no right to cross their country,” Wilson remembered. “The land belonged to the Indians, and they were going to drive the white men out of it.” But turning around was not an option.
While resting at a station in Nevada a while later, Wilson and a few other riders were attacked. “One of the Indians shot me in the head with a flint-tipped arrow,” he said. His friends tried to pull out the arrow, but the pointed stone stuck fast in his skull. “Thinking that I would surely die, they rolled me under a tree and started for the next station as fast as they could go. “They got a few men and came back the next morning to bury me; but when they got to me and found that I was still alive, they thought they would not bury me just then.”
Wilson lay unconscious for the next eighteen days. “Then I began to get better fast,” he remembered. “It was not long before I was riding again.”
The Pony Express failed—but obviously not because the riders weren’t tough enough. The real problem was, it was just too expensive to maintain all those stations, horses, and riders. The company lost money steadily. Then, in October 1861, American engineers finished building the first transcontinental telegraph—a telegraph line all the way across the country. Suddenly short messages could be sent over wires from east to west. That put the Pony Express out of business once and for all.
The telegraph was the perfect technology for quick communication. But was there any way to move people and goods across the country more quickly? Yes: build a transcontinental railroad.
The only problem? No one had ever built a railroad that long. Most Americans were pretty sure it was impossible.
Here Comes Crazy Judah
Theodore Judah disagreed. Growing up in New York, Judah had enrolled in college engineering classes when he was eleven. He began designing railroads when he was still a teenager. By 1861 Judah was in California, thinking about building a transcontinental railroad. “It will be built,” he said over and over, “and I am going to have something to do with it.”
Judah’s wife, Anna, said that her husband talked so much about the railroad, he was beginning to annoy the entire city of Sacramento. He would corner people on the street and start describing his plans.
Anna would nudge him and whisper, “Theodore, those people don’t care.”
“But we must keep the ball rolling,” he would insist.
And Californians really did want a railroad to connect them to the rest of the country. They just didn’t think it could be done. For starters, how could anyone build tracks up and over the sharp slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range? Judah kept insisting he could do it. That’s when people started calling him “Crazy Judah.”
Never one to be easily discouraged, Judah made more than twenty trips into the Sierra Nevada, carefully mapping out the route a railroad could take. Anna often came along to make drawings and paintings of the route. All this work finally began to pay off when a group of local business owners agreed to invest some money to start building the railroad east out of Sacramento.
Theodore rushed to his wife with the news:
“Anna, if you want to see the first work done on the Pacific railroad, look out your bedroom window. I am going to work there this morning and I am going to have these men pay for it!”
“It’s about time that someone else helped!” Anna said.
It was a good start, but Judah knew that a project this massive would require thousands of workers and millions of dollars. So he packed up his maps and Anna’s paintings and sailed to Washington to persuade government leaders to support the transcontinental railroad. Judah showed up in the capital in October 1861—just as the Civil War was ripping the United States in two. In a weird way, his timing was pretty good.
The Race for Miles—and Money
The new president of the United States was Abraham Lincoln (turns out his opposition to the U.S.-Mexican War didn’t end his career in politics after all). Lincoln was all for the transcontinental railroad, saying it was “demanded in the interests of the whole country.” Or, what was left of the whole country. Eleven states had just dropped out of the Union. Lincoln was desperate not to lose any more—especially not California (and its gold). His hope was that a rail line from the East to the West would help bind California to the rest of the United States.
In the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, Congress declared that two companies would basically race to build the transcontinental railroad. Theodore Judah and his Central Pacific Railroad would start in Sacramento and build east. At the same time, the Union Pacific Railroad would build west from Nebraska, where the current westbound rail lines ended. The governme
nt would pay each company for every mile of track completed. Both companies could continue building, and collecting money, until they ran into each other—wherever that happened to be.
The race was on.
How to Steal Millions: Part I
“This is the grandest enterprise under God!” declared one Union Pacific investor when the work began in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1863. Turns out it was also a grand opportunity to rip off the American taxpayer. The Union Pacific vice president Thomas Durant was honest about this (in private, that is). He outlined his plan:
“Grab a wad of money from the construction fees—and get out.”
Durant’s scheme was pretty confusing, but here’s the basic idea. He set up a construction company, keeping it secret that he actually controlled it. Then he had the Union Pacific hire his construction company to build the railroad. His company starting building on the flat land along the Platte River. Construction cost about $30,000 a mile. But he had his company claim that the work was costing $50,000 a mile. The Union Pacific collected money from investors and the government, then used that money to pay Durant’s construction company $50,000 per mile. Durant’s company pocketed the extra $20,000. (Members of Congress didn’t complain, possibly because Durant had quietly handed many of them stock in his company.)
Thomas Durant
Which Way to the Wild West? Page 7
