*Wilson did not tell us how much the oxen had cost back in Missouri, but presumably she made a handsome profit. Another newly arrived emigrant, who had reached California at about the same time as Wilson, wrote home that “all kinds of animals have risen from 500 to 5000 percent. I have this day sold a mule which I purchased last July for $8, for $360.”
*Con men knew these stories, too. In front of the Parker House, in San Francisco, one man sneaked out at night and spilled a few ounces of gold dust into the muddy street at a spot he could locate again. The next day, he “found” the gold, while a gawking crowd of forty or fifty gathered. The crook’s partner happened to have on hand a stock of tin pans for the crowd to buy, at two dollars each rather than the usual ten cents.
*A miner named Vicente Pérez Rosales told of watching a stranger, completely silent and expressionless, placing such all-or-nothing bets. The gambler put his sack of gold down next to one of the two face-up cards on the table. (You won if a match for your card—a ten to match your ten, say—came up before a match for the other.) The gold weighed about a pound. The stranger lost. Still silently, still intently, he took another sack the same size and bet again. And lost again. Without changing expression or uttering a word, he unwrapped a long, thin bag of gold from around his waist—this one weighed about six pounds—and placed it beside the card he wanted. Then he took out his pistol, cocked it, pointed it at the dealer, and gestured for him to deal. This time he won.
*Perhaps the entrepreneurs deserved their windfall. The chickens had arrived with them on shipboard, the descendants of three hens who had flown the coop ten days out from Salem, Massachusetts. The passengers of the Lagrange had insisted on sending out a lifeboat to retrieve the escapees, and the rescue was a success.
*Hence the term “prospector,” for a miner who tested the prospects of a new site by digging down to paydirt and washing a pan of gravel to see how rich it was.
*Plain as they were, pans were valuable. At the end of a working day, miners flung their picks and shovels to the ground and left them to mark their claims, but they carried their pans home. “It is no uncommon thing,” one miner noted, “to see the same pan used for washing gold, washing clothes, mixing flour cakes, and feeding the mule.”
*Mercury binds to gold, but it is poisonous and its fumes are especially dangerous. Californians quickly grew to recognize the “pale, cadaverous faces” of those who worked with it. Miners poured mercury into the sluices where they rinsed their gold, and used it as a kind of gold-seeking magnet. Water passing down the sluice carried away mud and gravel but the gold/mercury amalgam was so heavy that it got caught by the wooden ridges along the sluice’s bottom side. The mercury could be boiled away, leaving the gold.
*It is significant that the image that popped into Lord’s mind, when he wanted to convey that a sight was completely routine, was of flour gone bad.
*“Lousy” had long since come to mean “contemptible and miserable” as well as “filthy and lice-ridden.” Both definitions applied.
*An explorer on one of the first Spanish expeditions to California, in 1602, wrote a shocked description of his shipmates’ agony when scurvy struck. “The sensitiveness of the bodies of these sick people is so great that the best aid which can be rendered them is not even to touch the bedclothes.… The teeth become so loose and without support that they move while moving the head.”
*Somehow Packer anticipated Raymond Chandler’s famous line about “a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.”
*This was a remarkable assertion. Married women in the first half of the 1800s had scarcely any economic rights—“The husband and the wife are one, and the husband is that one,” the law declared—though change was coming. Around midcentury many states passed laws declaring that husbands did not have the right to dispose of their wives’ property as if it were their own. The notion that a wife could be an equal partner was new and bold; the notion that, like Luzena Wilson, she might be the lead partner was almost out of the question.
*According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “racism” was first used in the 1930s.
*Israel Lord, though less inclined than most to pigeonhole whole groups, disliked the French for their indulgent ways. “This evening, some Frenchmen, a few doors off, are drinking champagne and rowdying largely,” he complained a few days after Christmas 1850. Next day, a Saturday, “The Frenchmen are at it again.” Not only did they sing—“and make enough noise for a nail factory”—but they made matters worse by insisting on singing in French.
*The miner was Antonio Coronel, a one-time schoolteacher who had lived in California since 1834. In his first three days in the diggings, Coronel and two companions found 12½ pounds of gold. Suddenly wealthy, Coronel would go on to become mayor of Los Angeles and one of California’s most prominent citizens.
*The law did not mention the Chinese, which made for a vexing case in 1854 when the state supreme court reviewed a murder conviction. A white man had been found guilty of killing a Chinese man. All the testimony had come from Chinese witnesses. In the court’s eyes, this posed a riddle. Did the law rule out testimony from “all inferior races” or only from the specific inferior races it listed? Noting that the Chinese were a people “whose mendacity is proverbial,” the judge quickly found his answer. Chinese witnesses didn’t count. Conviction overturned.
*The emigrants called the Indians Diggers because they grubbed a meager living from the soil.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
PART I: HOPE
CHAPTER ONE: A Crack in Time
CHAPTER TWO: “I Believe I Have Found a Gold Mine!”
CHAPTER THREE: Headlong into History
PART II: JOURNEY
CHAPTER FOUR: Swarming from All Over
CHAPTER FIVE: A Day at the Circus
CHAPTER SIX: An Army on the March
CHAPTER SEVEN: Let Us Glory in Our Magnificence
CHAPTER EIGHT: A Rope of Sand
CHAPTER NINE: Gone!
CHAPTER TEN: Marooned
PART III: REALITY
CHAPTER ELEVEN: First Peeks at the Golden Land
CHAPTER TWELVE: Hard Times
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: At Ease in a Barbarous Land
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Taking the Bread from American Miners
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Princess and the Mangled Hand
Epilogue
Photographs
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Edward Dolnick
Notes
Bibliography
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Edward Dolnick
Cover design by Ben Wiseman; cover texture © Dimec / Shutterstock
Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Author photography by Lynn Golden
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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The author is grateful for permission to reprint illustrations as follows:
Here, Henry W. Bigler Diary, Jan. 24, 1848. The Society of California Pioneers.
Here, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Here, Rufus Porter, Aerial Navigation (New York: H. Smith, 1849).
Here, Le Petit Journal, Dec. 1, 1912.
Here and here, Joseph Goldsborough Bruff, Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks, Western Americana Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Map illustration by the author.
ISBN 978-0-316-28055-6
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