The Rush

by Edward Dolnick

  Many travelers bound for the goldfields confronted similar conditions, though rarely with such equanimity. A gold-seeker named Mary Ballou, who would later prove feisty enough to run a boardinghouse in a rowdy mining camp in the diggings, found herself nearly undone by Panama. At a stopover much like the Megquiers’, she tried to sleep, but “the monkies were howling, the Nighthawks were singing, the Natives were watching.” Exhausted and miserable, “I laid myself down on the ground a weeping,” Ballou wrote, “and I thought if I had wings how swiftly I would fly to my Home.”

  Bold, swashbuckling men fared no better. Heinrich Schliemann, who would later win fame as the archeologist who discovered the site of ancient Troy, made his way across Panama to California’s goldfields in 1851. The very image of the archeologist-as-adventurer—he was one of the real-life models for Indiana Jones—Schliemann blanched where Jennie Megquier exulted. His woes began with his first glimpse of Panama. “Among all the miserable places I have met with, and it happened to me to see many in different parts of the world,” he wrote, “I must give the palm to Chagres.”

  This terrible spot was “the most horrible imaginable,” and even a brief stay was a torment scarcely to be endured. In Chagres, Schliemann wrote, “our sufferings increased every moment.” Drenching rain poured down endlessly, mosquitoes descended in swarms, and meals consisted of nothing but “the raw meat of lizzards, monkeys, turtles, mules, and crocodiles.” At these dismal meals, the only consolation was that portions were ample, because the wild creatures in Panama grew to Jurassic proportions. “The lizzards called here ‘Iguanas’ exceed the ordinary size of the alligators and crocodiles,” Schliemann informed his readers, “and I have seen the former to the length of 40 feet.”

  Premature death was the all-but-universal fate of visitors to Chagres, Schliemann went on, and the only question was just what form it would take. “Many of my fellow-passengers were killed by the bite of scorpions and snakes (particularly rattlesnakes) which abound in these regions.” Schliemann soon grew inured to such grim scenes. “In this horrible situation all human feeling forsook us and we sunk below the beast. We became so familiarized with death that it lost for us all its terror.… Thus it came that we laughed and amused ourselves at the convulsions of the dying and that crimes were perpetrated among us; crimes so terrible! that now at a later date I cannot think of it without cold and trembling horror.”

  Once out of Chagres and headed toward Gorgona, matters improved ever so slightly. But even here the “poisonous climate” left Schliemann as weak and miserable as if he were “lying in a Russian steambath.” Temperatures during the day soared to 110 degrees, and at night grunting pigs and restless children made too much noise for him to sleep. So humble a pleasure as a cool glass of water was unattainable. “The water is as warm as the air,” Schliemann wrote, and full of insects besides.

  In passage after passage Schliemann’s narrative takes on the tone of a Gothic thriller. Though no travelers in Panama would dare venture out without pistol and dagger, he tells us, they are at risk even so. What, he wondered, was that horrible, rotting smell that is all-pervasive in Panama? Could it be the stink of a dead mule, fallen on the trail, or a giant lizard lying mangled in the jungle? Perhaps, “but alas, [the stench came] much more frequently from the decomposition of travellers murdered on the road by the hand of the natives.”

  One of the locals’ favorite tricks was to capsize their boats on purpose, Schliemann warned; the unprepared passengers would drown, and the crew would help themselves to their belongings. “Often,” he continued glumly, “when they are unsuccessful in their attempts to drown their passengers, they stab or shoot them to death and throw them over the banks of the river in the thicket, where the corpses are consumed by insects and by buzzards, which can be seen in myriads on the way from Chagres here.”

  Nothing with any resemblance to Schliemann’s overheated nightmares turns up in Jennie Megquier’s journal. Panama was not quite heaven on the half shell, but Megquier found it a grand adventure. The view upriver was “the most delightful in the world,” with “most splendid trees” all the way to the water’s edge in every shade of green, and beautiful flowers in bright red and “the most brilliant hues that could be imagined.” Murdered travelers indeed!

  Gorgona, the town that marked the end of the river leg of the cross-Panama route, was “a scene for a painter.” Here, too, Megquier basked in the spotlight. “I had a great number of callers. The natives would come and stand in the door and look at me with perfect astonishment.” She toured the town, which consisted of little more than a few huts (for the locals) and some shabby hotels (for the outsiders). Gorgona did boast a church, though it was so run-down that animals wandered inside during the hymns and prayers. “A mule took the liberty to depart this life within its walls while we were there,” Megquier noted, “which was looked upon by the natives as of no consequence.”

  The last leg of the trip, from Gorgona to Panama City, was a journey of some twenty miles overland. Travelers proceeded on muleback on a narrow trail that wound across the mountains, with “just room for the beast to put his feet,” Megquier wrote, “which if he should make a mistep, we should be tumbled down in a lagoon an hundred feet deep.”*

  Megquier reached Panama City unharmed except for a headache from the bright sun. The city was not much to look at—“there are a great number of churches each having quite a number of bells which they contrive to keep someone thumping most of the time”—and Jennie and Thomas found a hotel. The walls were riddled with holes, but Jennie had grown hard to faze. “Cats, dogs, and rats trooped through our room every night,” she wrote to her daughter, “but they take a bee line from one hole to another not stopping to make our acquaintance.”

  For Heinrich Schliemann, Panama was hell incarnate, an infernal region where “hundreds of us were attacked by the isthmus-fever, diarrhoea, dissentry & ague and died after a day or two of cruel suffering.” Jennie found it all a thrill. “I presume you will hear a great many stories” about the horrors of Panama, she warned her daughter, but pay no attention. “We have not suffered for any thing,” Jennie wrote, “and if we were rich, I should not grudge the expense at all, if we did not make one cent, to see what we have seen and heard.”

  On the Pacific coast at last, Jennie and Thomas Megquier waited for a ship to carry them to California and riches. Along with two thousand others from around the world, they spent their days gazing anxiously out to sea. Most days passed with nothing but false sightings and dashed hopes, and in the meantime, Chagres and Gorgona spilled out, every day, a new batch of dirty, exhausted gold-seekers. At rare intervals a ship did arrive, and a thousand emigrants fought for a hundred spots. Some waved tickets they had purchased in New York or New Orleans. Others, who had anticipated ships in abundance, tried to fight their way aboard. Most failed.

  “The town was overrun,” Jennie wrote, its beaches converted to shantytowns, its few hotels crammed with angry, restless men with little to do but quarrel and exchange rumors. Where was the California? When was the Oregon due? Who was sick with yellow fever? Who had died of cholera? “Every nook and corner is filled,” Jennie wrote, “and many of them I think would not be recognized by their friends.” Grubby and unshaven, in filthy shirts and muddy pants, the wretched men who spent their days forlornly staring at the empty ocean “looked less like civilization than the natives.”

  Hope both tortured and seduced the stranded travelers. When ships from California came in, the gold-seekers peppered the returning adventurers with questions. “The news from the gold fields far exceeds our expectations,” Megquier wrote, in an agony of expectation. “Every man that goes to the mines picks up a fortune.” Cabin boys had grown rich, Megquier marveled, and she herself had held “a lump of pure gold, weighing two pounds, in my hand, just as it was dug.”

  Megquier did not envision herself swinging a pick, but she might cook or nurse the sick or run a boardinghouse. Who could tell? “Without joking,” Megquier a
ssured her daughter on May 12, 1849, “gold is very plenty.” There was no need to worry. “In about one year, you will see your Mother come trudging home with an apron full.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A ROPE OF SAND

  FOR SHIPBOARD TRAVELERS LIKE the Megquiers, the frustration was that treasure sat waiting for them, if only they could get under way. For overland travelers, the end of the trail had come to seem elusive and fanciful. Months before, they had set off at a sprint, eager and carefree. Now it took all the energy and willpower they could muster to picture the golden reward at the end of their wandering.

  Even the strongest spirits reeled under the strain of “our incessant journeying,” as Alonzo Delano put it. They had come a long way, but that was little consolation. All they had achieved, the emigrants realized with sinking hearts, was to put themselves in limbo, with the finish line still nowhere in sight but home now so far behind that to turn around would be pointless.

  “Day after day, week after week,” Luzena Wilson recalled, “we went through the same weary routine of breaking camp at daybreak, yoking the oxen, cooking our meagre rations over a fire of sage-brush and scrub-oak; packing up again, coffee-pot and camp kettle; washing our scanty wardrobe in the little streams we crossed; striking camp again at sunset, or later if wood and water were scarce. Tired, dusty, tried in temper, worn out in patience, we had to go over the weary experience tomorrow.” Sisyphus in a bonnet.

  Wilson’s lot was even harder than she made out, because women on the trail had it worse than men. The year 1848 marked the first women’s rights convention, in Seneca Falls, New York, but American culture as a whole scarcely took notice of such odd gatherings.* The natural order was plain. “Home is the palace of the husband and the father,” one 1852 book of inspirational essays decreed, spelling out the all-but-universal view. “He is the monarch of that little empire, wearing a crown that is the gift of Heaven, swaying a scepter put into his hands by the father of all, acknowledging no superior, fearing no rival, and dreading no usurper.”

  A cramped and lurching wagon on the Great Plains was no palace, but the rules from home held on the road, too. “The Victorian structure of domestic power was carried westward along with bedsteads and porcelain teacups,” the trail historian Elliot West observed, and the division of labor was strict. Men took charge of driving the animals by day and guarding them by night. Women’s province was “home” or what passed for home, and all the tasks that came with it.

  In life as in the adage, that work was never done. Making matters worse, women on the trail seldom had anyone to commiserate with. (“My health at present is rather feeble & I find it difficult to keep up a usual amount of cheerfulness,” one Oregon-bound missionary’s wife wrote in her diary in 1838. “If I were to yield to inclination, I should cry half the time without knowing what for.”)*

  Rarely but memorably, a put-upon woman would protest. In 1847, after laboring hundreds of miles across the plains, one exhausted emigrant declared that she’d had enough. The trip was folly, she told her husband. They would never reach the Pacific; they should return home; she would not proceed another step. When he refused to listen, she set their wagon on fire.

  Good-natured Alonzo Delano was not one to challenge society’s rules, but it dawned on him eventually that either he would do his own household chores or no one would. After several weeks on the trail, he and a few companions tried washing their own shirts “for the first time in our lives.” They struggled for an hour or two, bent over their scrub-boards. By the time they gave up, their backs were sore, their hands red, and their clothes as grimy as ever. “We thought of our wives and sweethearts at home… [and resolved that] we should heartily have asked their pardon.”

  Onward they marched. Bone-tired and no longer quite so sure they had been wise to throw away their old lives, men squabbled and companies broke apart. Men who had left home swearing vows of lifelong friendship now stood toe to toe screaming over whose turn it was to collect buffalo dung for the fire or to fetch water for coffee. Fights started with insults and shoves and quickly escalated. Alonzo Delano gaped with horror at a “cruel and fiendish murder” fought over a bar of soap. (The victim had been building a fire, to cook dinner. A man named Brown asked the cook to fetch him a bar of soap. Get it yourself; I’m busy. Without another word, Brown plunged his knife into the cook’s back and fled. A search party set out in a fury but came back stymied; presumably Brown had melted into another wagon train.)

  Murder was rare, but fights and threats were an everyday affair. “The Devil seems to take full possession of three-fourths of all that come on to the ‘route,’ ” Israel Lord complained. Lord, who spewed adjectives like confetti at a parade, detailed his companions’ shortcomings. They were “cross, peevish, sullen, boisterous, giddy, profane, dirty, vulgar, ragged, mustachioed, bewhiskered, idle, petulant, quarrelsome, unfaithful, disobedient, refractory, careless, contrary, stubborn, hungry, and without the fear of God and hardly of man before their eyes.”

  Two days after his diatribe, Lord watched one man flail at another with a knife. When he missed, both men grabbed their rifles. “It all ended as it began, in nothing,” Lord noted wearily. “This quarreling is almost universal.”

  On those occasions when it did end in something, the emigrants improvised a response. With no laws in place and no sheriffs or judges or other authorities on hand, justice was slapdash and often brutal. The men in one wagon train saw that a member of their group was hurrying off alone. Where was the companion he had been traveling with? After a short hunt, they found the missing man shot to death, partly hidden under a few shovelfuls of dirt. A search party chased down the escapee. The trial took almost no time: Charge—murder. Verdict—guilty. Sentence—death.

  A more troubling problem on the treeless plains was finding a gallows. The solution, which was the only time-consuming aspect of the whole affair, was to bring three wagons together, raise the tongues into a tripod, and attach a noose. One eyewitness described the story’s final scene. The condemned man was forced atop a horse, someone jabbed a knife into the horse’s rump, and “the wretch was swung into eternity.”

  Company after company fell apart, one emigrant noted sadly, like “a rope of sand.” Joseph Bruff had vowed from the start that his men would not split up, no matter the obstacles in their way. Charismatic and capable, Bruff was a natural leader, but the Washington City and California Mining Association did not share his belief that they were enlisted men and he was their commander.

  On the night of July 9, 1849, one Washington City man punched another in the face. Bruff raced into action. “I immediately convened the Company into a drum-head court, tried the offender, broke him of his office, and inflicted 4 extra-guards on him.”

  In Bruff’s mind, a sentence of four extra rounds of guard duty was a fitting punishment. The men went along this time, but they had already begun to mutter and snarl. Only two weeks later, on July 24, Bruff noted “great dissension in the company.… All the bad traits of the men are now well-developed. Their true character is shown untrammeled, unvarnished. Selfishness, hypocricy, &c. Some, whom at home were thought gentlemen, are now totally unprincipled.” And home was far, far away.

  So was California. For weeks the weary travelers had looked forward to reaching South Pass, in the Rockies in present-day Wyoming, which marked the halfway point in their long journey. Many of the emigrants had pictured the spot as an impossible-to-miss feature of the landscape. Crossing the Continental Divide, they had imagined, would be roughly akin to clambering up one side of a steep roof and starting down the other.

  It proved far less dramatic. “No one would ever suspect this to be the summit,” one emigrant wrote, “the country is so level, and the aspect of the whole distance is so gradual.” But better a smooth rise than a vicious crest. An easy passage through formidable mountains—South Pass sits 7,550 feet above sea level—was a welcome and unlikely gift, and western boosters cited it as yet more evidence that God meant
for Americans to move west across the continent. (John C. Frémont had told an eager audience in Congress a few years before that the climb across the Rockies was no more strenuous than the “ascent of the Capitol hill.”)

  Joseph Bruff had been sick and grumpy for a few days—“some of my men seem to be perfectly stupid and childish, and it is with difficulty I can make them attend to certain duties for their own welfare”—but he cheered up a bit at this milestone. On August 1 his company took its midday break at South Pass and hung a flag in the breeze, to honor “this elevated and noble back-bone of Uncle Sam’s.”

  Alonzo Delano found himself more inclined to mope than celebrate. South Pass marked not only a division in the landscape but a division in his life. “In a musing mood,” he wrote, “I climbed a high hill to take a parting look at the Atlantic waters, which flowed towards all I held most dear on earth.… As I turned my eye eastward, home, wife, and children rushed to my mind with uncontrolled feelings, and in the full yearnings of my heart, I involuntarily stretched out my arms as if I would clasp them to my bosom.”

  No embrace came in response. “In its place,” Delano continued, “there lay extended before me barren reaches of table land,” and bare hills, and desert plains, and long trains of covered wagons creeping across the empty landscape.

  The emigrants funneled through South Pass in enormous numbers. “The road, from morning til night, is crowded like Pearl Street or Broadway,” one man wrote, in amazement, and the swarm of travelers briefly turned the vast Wyoming emptiness into a sprawling city. By now they had traveled a thousand miles, with another thousand to go.

  One imperative took precedence over all the others—as they moved west, the gold-seekers had to stay close to water. So far nature had cooperated with that scheme. No longer. From here on, all the way to the goldfields, rivers tended to run north–south rather than east–west. For the emigrants, that meant that the days of following smooth, grassy river valleys had ended. Now they would be crawling across deserts or scrambling up and down a seemingly endless series of sharp-sided canyons and ravines, staggering their way from one unsatisfactory river to the next.