As early as 1849 whites joined forces to clear the Indians from the diggings. In the words of Kevin Starr, California’s most acclaimed historian, “Native Americans were hunted down like so much vermin.” Whites pillaged Indian villages; Indians stole cattle from whites; raids and counterraids followed one another in endless succession. Each theft or killing called for retaliation.
Israel Lord, a humane man by the standards of the day, wrote in his journal that “the Indians are much sinned against as well as sinning,” but he also predicted, without much emotion, that “these ‘Diggers’ are bound to be exterminated.” On April 9, 1850, he noted laconically, “A large number of armed men went up today to shoot the Diggers.”
Alonzo Delano took a similar tack. “Nine-tenths of the troubles between the whites and Indians” could be set at the feet of the whites, he wrote, but “the two races cannot exist in contact.” This was more measured than many judgments—“There will be safety only in a war of extermination raged with relentless fury far and near,” the Daily Alta California declared in May, 1850—but the message was the same.
From early on, some whites had shaken their heads sorrowfully as they called for the removal of the Indians, and some had shaken angry fists. Whether the threats came in sorrow or in anger made little difference. In a speech to the state legislature on January 7, 1851, California’s first elected governor, Peter Burnett, spelled out the prevailing view: “A war of extermination would continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct.” Although this was dismaying news and a source of “painful regret,” Burnett continued, “the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power and wisdom of man to avert.”
California’s violence took its most gruesome form when it pitted race against race, but the gold-seekers happily did in one another even when they lacked any excuse at all. Hollywood has done its best to defang the image of life in the diggings; Mark Twain captured the truth when he called gold rush California “a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society.” Without the constraints of law or family or women, one miner wrote, “Men assumed their natural shape, and showed what they really were, following their unchecked impulses and inclinations.” It did not make a pretty picture.
Nearly everyone in California was young, and the emigrants had left home fit and healthy. But in the diggings as on the battlefield, youth and strength proved no safeguards. Shootings and stabbings were routine, and broken bones, bashed-in skulls, and bouts of dysentery and pneumonia scarcely worth remarking. So dangerous was life in California that, beginning in January, 1849, life insurance companies refused to sell policies to anyone hunting gold.
One gold-seeker, who had turned from mining to storekeeping, cringed at first at the violence all around him. He quickly grew blasé. “Sonora is very dull compared to what it used to be,” he complained in March, 1852. “We have now no fights, no murders, no rapes, no robberies to amuse us!” That tone of studied nonchalance came to be almost universal. “Nothing fatal has taken place since my last letter,” wrote another miner, in September, 1852, “but there have been some awfully close shaves. One man has been shot through the cravat, one through the hat and one in the arm.”
Always in the background at every camp in gold country, scarcely more noteworthy than the swinging of hammers or the thudding of picks, was the sight of someone fighting, someone falling, someone dying. “Yesterday one American shot another in the street,” a miner from Pennsylvania wrote in his journal, in August, 1850, “and the occurrence was not noticed as much as a dog fight at home.”
California’s boosters tried to cast this every-man-for-himself isolation as a virtue. The land of opportunity was also the land of self-reliance, they declared; no shirkers need apply. “This is the worst country in the world for men of no occupation,” one minister told his San Francisco congregation, in 1850, “and thank Heaven.” This was as it should be, for “ ‘if a man will not work, neither shall he eat.’ This is the scriptural doctrine, and it is the California doctrine too. It is death to stand still. A man must keep moving, and that to some purpose; for there are none to help a man who will not help himself.”
Such harsh creeds held no appeal for Luzena Wilson, but even she found herself unmoved by the death and mayhem all around her. Not so much inured to the violence as too exhausted to deal with it, she expended all her strength in keeping her boardinghouse afloat. “It has been a life-long source of regret to me that I grew hard-hearted like the rest,” she recalled in her old age. “I was hard-worked, hurried all day, and tired out, but I might have stopped sometimes for a minute to heed the moans which caught my ears from the canvas house next to me.”
This was in 1849, shortly after Wilson’s arrival in Sacramento. In time she would prosper and have a chance to breathe, but in the early days she had no time for anything but work. Certainly she had no time to dally with her neighbors. “I knew a young man lived [next door], for he had often stopped to say ‘Good morning,’ but I thought he had friends in the town; and when I heard his weak calls for water I never thought but some one gave it.
“One day the moans ceased, and, on looking in, I found him lying dead with not even a friendly hand to close his eyes. Many a time since, when my own boys have been wandering in new countries have I wept for the sore heart of that poor boy’s mother, and I have prayed that if ever want and sickness came to mine, some other woman would be more tender than I had been, and give them at least a glass of cold water.”
The violence that marked California was hideous, but every aspect of gold rush life—the danger, the reward, the exhilaration, the suffering, the self-indulgence, the toil, the loneliness—was over the top. California in the mid-1800s was a vast experiment, in one miner’s words “a picture of universal human nature boiling over.”
That picture captivated enthusiasts like Jennie Megquier and Louise Clappe (who found herself unfazed by witnessing, in less than a single month, “murders, fearful accidents, bloody deaths, a mob, whippings, a hanging, an attempt at suicide, and a fatal duel”). Others saw a nightmare worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. “A residence here at present is a pilgrimage in a strange land, a banishment from good society, a living death, and a punishment of the worst kind,” a gold-seeker from Illinois lamented, “and the time spent here ought to be considered as a blank period in existence, and accordingly struck from the record of one’s days.”
What caught every eye, both the enthralled and the appalled, was the frantic energy everywhere on display. Everyone in California craved action and distraction. Nearly anything would do. “If a terrier catches a rat or if a big turnip is brought to market, the people cluster together and scramble for a sight,” marveled a miner from North Carolina. Let one man accidentally step on somebody’s foot, he went on, and “it only requires one minute for the injured party to shoot the offender, two minutes for somebody else to stab the shooter, and three minutes for the whole crowd to hang the stabber.”
In the diggings, the pace was just as crazed as in town. Miners lived in fear that, while they labored here, the real action was going on over the next hill, around the next bend, on the next river. This desperation to be up and moving reflected not the vitality of the athlete but the itch of the addict. “Our countrymen are the most discontented of mortals,” Louise Clappe observed. “They are always longing for big strikes. If a claim is paying them a steady income, by which, if they pleased, they could lay up more in a month than they could accommodate in a year at home, still they are dissatisfied.” Off they marched, in search of more. “There are hundreds now pursuing this foolish course, who, if they had stopped where they first camped, would now have been rich men.”
Few gold-seekers saw it that way. One miner conceded that the Sierra foothills boasted all that nature could provide “to make pleasant man’s stay on earth.” Here was “a mild climate… soil that would raise almost any vegetable… grapes or figs, apples or potatoes; land to be had for the asking; water for irrigation accessible on eve
ry hand.” And the upshot? “We were all anxious to get away. Our heaven was not at Red Mountain.” Gold was the only game, and the gold was always brighter somewhere else.
As a consequence, California had ruins and abandoned towns almost from the start. “The whole population of the mining country,” one newcomer observed, “is as fluctuating and unstable as the waves of the sea.” In their restlessness, the miners tended to slosh hither and thither without any pattern. But at times the same rumors took hold everywhere. Then the buzz of “Have you heard?” and “Will you go?” grew from a murmur to a roar. The psychology replayed the gold rush saga in miniature. To stay put when a few men moved on was routine. But to miss out on what was about to make everyone else rich was impossible.
And so, in the summer of 1850, when word came of the greatest find of all—a golden lake, high in the mountains, immense and hidden and unimaginably rich!—men swarmed into the foothills by the thousands. Large, eager battalions abandoned their claims, even good, steady ones, and headed to the backcountry. Why settle for a bird in the hand when the birds in the bush had golden plumage that shone like the sun?
Joseph Bruff heard the story of the incredible golden lake from a young man named Gibbs, who swore he had seen it with his own eyes. Gibbs had been exploring high in the Sierra with his uncle and a group of other men. At a remote spot somewhere near the headwaters of the Feather River and the Yuba, the company happened on a lake straight out of fable. Over the years other expeditions had glimpsed it, too. At this secret lake, miners swore, sheets of gold dotted the water’s surface like leaves in autumn, and Indians fished with hooks of solid gold.
In the course of a few hours, Gibbs reported, he had gathered gold nuggets ranging in size from marbles to walnuts. With no labor except bending down, just as a beachcomber might gather shells, he had collected gold worth $5,000 (in today’s money, $100,000). At Gold Lake, the only question was whether the mules would collapse under the load of gold heaved onto their backs.
But the lake came with drawbacks and dangers, and they, too, smacked of fable. It was nearly inaccessible, for one thing. Not until you crested the last, high mountains, Gibbs warned, could you even see the lake nestled down below. The descent to the lake was so steep that the mules had to be lowered down by rope. And this country was home to fierce, hostile Indians who feared and resented the gold-seekers. Indians had attacked the Gibbs party and wounded several of them before the rest managed to flee.
One obstacle outweighed all the others: no one knew just how to find the lake again. Gibbs’s uncle, a surveyor, had drawn a rough map, but someone had lost it. The geographic clues—the lake was five miles long, and three buttes rose up along it on one side—served more to tantalize than to inform.
That shaky story, in countless variant forms, sufficed to lure hordes of gold-seekers into the far corners of the Sierra. Bruff didn’t believe the chatter, but a few months had gone by since he had stumbled, half dead, into Lassen’s camp. He itched to be out and exploring. Bruff had a boyish streak almost impossible to tamp down—he could turn a search for firewood into an adventure—and who was to say they wouldn’t find gold, even without a treasure map? Bruff set out cheerily on what he called “the great Gold Lake hunt” as part of a company that numbered twenty-three men and thirty horses and mules.
Nearly everyone else took to the hills, too. Alonzo Delano ventured out in search of “a wonderful lake… a hundred miles back among the mountains, towards the head of the Middle Fork of Feather River.” (Israel Lord, who scoffed at nearly everything, was one of the few to dismiss the “Gold Lake humbug.”)
In fabulously rich Downieville, on the North Fork of the Yuba River, miners nearly drooled over the stories of Gold Lake passed along by one half-crazed old-timer. Captain Thomas Stoddard claimed he had been the first white man to find the lake. Before he could gather up his fortune, Indians had driven him away. At Downieville the captain took every opportunity to roll up his pants and show where an arrow had plunged into his knee. “He would often say,” another miner recalled, “when we struck anything particularly rich, ‘At Gold Lake we would not consider this worth picking up.’ ”
Precisely where Gold Lake could be found, Stoddard refused to say. Perhaps he had learned his lesson. Shortly before he turned up in Downieville, he had offered to lead a small group to the lake. On their way, they happened to pass within range of a prospector who had climbed a hill to look around. He had assumed he was all alone. Then the wandering prospector looked around and found, to his “utmost surprise, [the valley] alive with at least three thousand people.” These were Stoddard’s few followers now grown into an army. The prospector joined the throng.
They climbed on, day after day. At last someone spotted a lake. “That is it!” said Stoddard. “You can see now the lake with the blue water, which I have described; the three peaks and the log yonder, where I camped. There are tons of gold there.”
The men stampeded, racing to find their fortune. The fleetest reached the lake’s edge first, gasping for breath. Nothing! Up close, the log turned into a boulder. The three peaks turned into five. The army turned into a lynch mob. “Hang him!” “I have a rope that will hold him!” “Here’s a branch that will carry him!” Stoddard escaped the mob and did not venture off on any further explorations.
By the time Bruff set off for Gold Lake, the stories about this magical spot had mostly lost their luster. Bruff happily recorded the stories in his journal anyway, lingering over the most far-fetched bits and wondering how “a person of common sense, who knows anything about the rugged country” could believe them. (He had harbored doubts about Gibbs from the start, in good measure because the young man was “wearing earrings.”)
But wanderlust had caught hold of Bruff years before, and it gripped him still. For him, though not for many other gold-seekers, the chance to be out and exploring was lure enough. Gold was a welcome bonus, not the sole point of the exercise. While searching for his lake, Bruff happened to see a crane and a pelican one day, he noted cheerily, and a pair of bald eagles the next.
Everything caught his eye. Lava, obsidian, and “beautiful white botyroidal crystals of chalcedony” delighted him. So did the colors on a crisp morning. “The earth is tinted with the warm and rich hues of autumn. Orange and bright yellow (of plum bushes) predominate in the plains, and on the lower slopes. Dark cedars are scattered about.”
Bruff took careful notes on how Indians started fires by twirling one fire-stick in a hole cut in a second stick, and how they sent smoke signals. He basked in vistas of snow-capped mountains with “light floculent clouds passing by them” and a river glinting in the distance. Even bad health could be framed as if it were a bit of fun. “This afternoon I am amused with chills fever and headache,” Bruff noted on September 20, two months into his wild goose chase.
He continued unfazed even when he and a companion found themselves under attack from unseen Indians. Arrows struck within a few feet of the two men, who retreated safely to camp. Bruff brushed off the encounter except to make fun of the accent of another man in search of the lake, a Dane, who suggested that the two wanderers should “tank our Got we escaped so luckily.”
On October 1, Bruff ducked out of a dispute about what route the company should follow. “I told them it was all the same to me, as every mile produced some new scenery.” But perhaps even levelheaded Joseph Bruff had bigger dreams than he dared admit. He had crossed the continent and nearly starved to death, after all, and his hopes when he’d set out had soared to more than a notebook full of drawings.
The weather had turned cold and wet. Bruff was still weak, and sick again, and no one had much of a plan about where to search next. On the night of October 11, he “laid down with considerable fever, slept uncomfortably, and dreamt that I was abandoned by my family, my friends, and the whole world, because I had not found a gold mine.”
Every miner shared that fear. The gold-seekers had started out for California as the objects of universal en
vy. Brass bands sent them on their way, and everyone pictured that their return home would be even grander. Few could bear the thought of limping home, broke and pitiable. Men stayed in California year after year, digging their youth away and waiting for the payoff that would let them go home in style. They told themselves, and anyone foolish enough to ask, that all was going smoothly.
“It’s hard work writing home,” the New York miner Prentice Mulford confessed. “I put it off for weeks and months. It lays a load on my mind. I receive at times letters from people complaining of my neglect. I know I ought to write, but what is there to write? Nothing but the same old story: ‘Hope soon to do well.’
“I have written in this strain for the last six years until I am tired and sick of it,” Mulford went on. “It is of no use telling any more about the country. All that has been told. If my people only knew how much I suffered in this endeavor to be dutiful, perhaps they would not insist on my writing more than the line, ‘I am still alive; yours truly.’ ” To live with humiliation was bad enough; to proclaim it was unbearable.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE PRINCESS AND THE MANGLED HAND
WHEN THE DOORS OF history swing open, the hinges may not make a sound. When Columbus pulled ashore in the New World, Europe continued on its accustomed way for months, unaware that the globe had shifted. When Edward Matteson looked at a California hillside and imagined the power of a water cannon blasting a wall of rock, he transformed gold mining forever.
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