by John McPhee
This was the country of Iowa Hill, Lowell Hill, Poverty Hill, Poker Flat, Dutch Flat, Red Dog, You Bet, Yankee Jim’s, Gouge Eye, Michigan Bluff, and Humbug City. It was the country of five hundred camps that sprang up for many dozens of miles to the north and south of the present route of I-80. For a year or two, it had been a center of world news, and for some decades had clanged with industry. Now, in the dry air, nothing was stirring, not even a transcontinental freight. But looking down the two sides into the artificial valleys you could almost hear the water jets and the caving slide of gravel. Poverty Hill yielded four million dollars’ worth of gold. You Bet yielded three. Humbug City got its name from a lack of confidence in the claims there, but when five million dollars came out of forty million cubic yards of flushed-away ground the name was changed to North Bloomfield. The water-dug valleys below the ground where we stood had yielded six million dollars in gold.
Yankee Jim was an Australian. A red-dog bank was a savingsand-loan ahead of its time. It issued notes in excess of its ability to redeem them. Across most of the Sierra, Interstate 80 runs close by the line of two counties—Placer and Nevada—which together produced five hundred and sixty million dollars in gold. Translated into modern values, that would be five billion. Yankee Jim was hanged in his eponymous town.
The ancient riverbed beneath us evidently passed through Gold Run, picked up a fossil tributary coming in through Dutch Flat, and went off to the northwest via Red Dog and You Bet. Before human beings appeared on earth, glacial ice and modern streams and other geologic agents had obliterated large parts of the Eocene river system. People had come near eliminating the rest. “Man is a geologic agent,” Moores said, with a glance that swept the centennial valleys. Erosion occurs, for the most part, in what geologists call catastrophic events—hurricanes, rockslides, raging floods—and in that category full credentials belonged to hydraulic mining, for scouring out and taking away thirteen thousand million cubic yards of the Sierra.
I remember Moores rapping his geologic hammer on an outcrop of olivine in northern Greece. He was drawn to the rock for academic reasons, but he remarked that it might be gone before long, because of its use in a brick that is resistant to very high temperatures. I asked him how he felt about being in a profession that calls attention to the olivine that people tear up mountainsides to take away. He said, “Schizophrenic. I grew up in a mining family, a mining town, and when I got out of there I had had it with mining. Now I am a member of the Sierra Club. But you have to face the fact that if you are going to have an industrial society you must have places that will look terrible. Other places you set aside—to say, ‘This is the way it was.’”
I remember him referring to the same disease in response to my asking him, one day in Davis, what effect his professionally developed sense of geologic time had had upon him. He said, “It makes you schizophrenic. The two time scales—the one human and emotional, the other geologic—are so disparate. But a sense of geologic time is the most important thing to get across to the non-geologist: the slow rate of geologic processes—centimetres per year—with huge effects if continued for enough years. A million years is a small number on the geologic time scale, while human experience is truly fleeting—all human experience, from its beginning, not just one lifetime. Only occasionally do the two time scales coincide.”
When they do, the effects can be as lasting as they are pronounced. The human and the geologic time scales intersect each time an earthquake is felt by people. They intersect when mining, of any kind, begins. After 1848, when the two time scales intersected in the gold zone of the western Sierra, California was populated so rapidly that it became a state without ever being a territory. As the attraction diminished, newcomers ricocheted eastward, in sunburst pattern—to Idaho, to Arizona, to Nevada, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado—finding zinc, lead, copper, silver, and gold, and transmogrifying the West in a manner more pervasive than the storied transition from bison to cattle. The event of 1848 in California led directly to the discovery of gold in Australia (after an Australian miner who rushed to the Sierra saw auriferous facsimiles of New South Wales). By 1865, at the end of the American Civil War, seven hundred and eighty-five million dollars had come out of the ground in California, making a difference—possibly the difference—in the Civil War. The early Californian John Bidwell, an emigrant of 1841, expressed this in his memoirs:
It is a question whether the United States could have stood the shock of the great rebellion of 1861 had the California gold discovery not been made. Bankers and business men of New York in 1864 did not hesitate to admit that but for the gold of California, which monthly poured its five or six millions into that financial center, the bottom would have dropped out of everything. These timely arrivals so strengthened the nerves of trade and stimulated business as to enable the government to sell its bonds at a time when its credit was its life-blood and the main reliance by which to feed, clothe, and maintain its armies. Once our bonds went down to thirty-eight cents on the dollar. California gold averted a total collapse and enabled a preserved Union to come forth from the great conflict.
Moores and I returned to the shoulder of the interstate and walked along the auriferous escarpment. The stream-rounded gravels, asparkle with quartz, are so compactly assembled there that they suggest the pebbly surface of a wide-wide screen. One does not need a director, a film, or rear projection to look into the bright stones and see the miners in motion: the four thousand who are in the region by the end of ’ 48, the hundred and fifty thousand who follow in the years to 1884. With the obvious exception of the natives, no one is as sharply stricken by the convergences of time as Johann Augustus Sutter. He has come into a scene in which gold is unsuspected—this blue-eyed, blond and ruddy, bankrupt Swiss dry-goods merchant, with his broad-brimmed hat and his broader belly and his exceptionally creative dream. He is thirty-six years old. He envisions a wilderness fiefdom—less than a kingdom but more than a colony—with himself as a kind of duke. On a ship called Clementine, he arrives in Monterey in 1839, accompanied by ten Hawaiians and an Indian boy once owned by Kit Carson and sold to Sutter for a hundred dollars. The Mexican government, which seeks some sort of buffer between coastal California and the encroaching United States, grants him, on an incremental schedule, a hundred thousand acres of land. Sailing around San Francisco Bay, he spends a week hunting for the mouth of the Sacramento River. Soon after he finds it, there is a collection of Hawaiian grass huts on what is now Twenty-seventh Street, in a section of downtown Sacramento still called New Helvetia. He has cannons. He builds a fort, with walls three feet thick. He does not overlook a dungeon. A roof slopes in above peripheral chambers to frame a parade ground of two acres. Sutter’s goal is to develop an independent agricultural economy, and he prospers. He has a gristmill. He brings in cattle and builds a tannery. He hires weavers and makes textiles. He widens his fields of grain, and draws plans for a second gristmill. He attracts many people. He issues passports.
One of the attracted people is James Wilson Marshall, of Lambertville, New Jersey, a mechanic-carpenter-wheelwright-coachmaker who is experienced as a sawyer. Sutter sees possibilities in cutting lumber and floating it to San Francisco. Meanwhile, he needs boards for the new gristmill. He sends Marshall up the American River to a small valley framed in canyons and backed by a mountainside of sugar pines. Like many handsome moments in western scenery, this one is prized by the natives, who think it is theirs. A bend in the river touches the mountains. Marshall lays a millrace across the bend.
He sees “blossom” in the stream gravel and remarks that he suspects the presence of metal.
A sawyer asks him, “What do you mean by ‘blossom’?”
Marshall says, “Quartz.”
As the sawmill nears completion, its wheel is too low. Water is ponding around it. The best correction is to deepen the tailrace down through the gravel to bedrock. Yalesumni tribesmen help dig out the tailrace, where, early in the morning of January 24, 1848, Mars
hall picks up small light chips that may not be stone.
Having some general knowledge of minerals, I could not call to mind more than two which in any way resembled this—sulphuret of iron, very bright and brittle; and gold, bright, yet malleable; I then tried it between two rocks, and found that it could be beaten into a different shape, but not broken.
He sets it on glowing coals, and he boils it in lye. The substance shows no change.
Carrying a folded cloth containing flakes the size of lentils, Marshall journeys to New Helvetia, and insists that he and Sutter talk behind a locked door. Sutter pours aquafortis on the flakes. They are unaffected. Sutter gets out his Encyclopedia Americana and looks under G. Using an apothecary’s scales, he and Marshall are soon balancing the flakes with an equal weight of silver. Now they lower the scales into water. If the flakes are gold, their specific gravity will exceed the specific gravity of the silver. Underwater, the scales tip, and Marshall’s flakes go down.
Sutter at once can see the future and is dismayed by the look of it. Who will work in his sawmill if gold lies in the stream beside it? Who will complete the gristmill? What will become of his New Helvetia, his field-and-forest canton, his discrete world, his agrarian dream? He and Marshall agree to urge others to keep the discovery a local if not total secret until the mills are finished.
Coincidentally in Mexico (that is, only five days after Marshall’s visit to Sutter), Nicholas P. Trist, American special agent, who has defied orders recalling him to Washington and pressed on with negotiations, successfully concludes the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. For fifteen million dollars, Mexico, defeated in battle, turns over to the United States three hundred and thirty-four million acres of land, including California.
Sutter writes a twenty-year lease with the Yalesumni for the land around the sawmill. He agrees to grind their grain for them and to pay them, in clothing and tools, a hundred and fifty dollars a year. Seeking a validation of the lease, Sutter sends an envoy to Monterey—to Colonel Richard Mason, USA, military governor of California. The envoy sets on a table a number of yellow samples. Mason calls in Lieutenant William Sherman, West Point ’ 40, his acting assistant adjutant general.
Mason: “What is that?”
Sherman: “Is it gold?”
Mason: “Have you ever seen native gold?”
Sherman: “In Georgia.”
Sherman bites a sample. Then he asks a soldier to bring him an axe and a hatchet. With these he beats on another sample until —malleable, unbreakable—it is airy and thin. Sherman learned these tests in 1844, when he was twenty-four, on an investigative assignment in Georgia having to do with a military crime.
Mason sends a message to Sutter to the effect that the Indians, having no rights to the land, therefore have no right to lease it.
In an April memorandum, the editor of the California Star says, in large letters, “HUMBUG” to the idea that gold in any quantity lies in the Sierra. Six weeks later, the Star ceases publication, because there is no one left in the shop to print it. Thousands come through Sutter’s Mill and spread into the country. On the American River at the discovery site, Marshall tries to charge tithes, but the forty-eighters ignore him and overrun his claims. They stand hip to hip like trout fishermen, crowding the stream. Like fishermen, too, they move on, restlessly, from cavern to canyon to flat to ravine, always imagining something big lying in the next pool. Indians using willow baskets wash sixteen thousand dollars. People are finding nuggets the size of eggs. “There is a chance now for every white man now in the country to make a fortune,” says a letter written to the New York Herald on May 27, 1848. One white man, in some likelihood Scottish, is driven insane by the gold he finds, and wanders around shouting all day, “I am rich! I am rich!” Two miners in seven days take seventeen thousand dollars from a small gully.
In June, Colonel Mason travels from Monterey to San Francisco and on to New Helvetia to see for himself what is happening in the foothills. He takes Sherman with him. They find San Francisco “almost deserted,” its harbors full of abandoned ships. Ministers have abandoned their churches, teachers their students, lawyers their victims. Shops are closed. Jobs of all kinds have been left unfinished. As Mason and Sherman cross the Coast Ranges and the Great Central Valley, they see gristmills and sawmills standing idle, loose livestock grazing in fields of ripe untended grain, “houses vacant, and farms going to waste.” It is as if a devastating army had traversed a wide swath on its way to the foothills from the sea.
Sutter, in the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat—his silverheaded cane tucked under his arm—warmly greets the military officers. It is scarcely their fault that two thousand hides are rotting in the vats of his abandoned tannery, that forty thousand bushels of standing wheat are disintegrating on the stem, that work has ceased on the half-finished gristmill, that the weavers have abandoned their looms, that strangers without passports—here today, gone tomorrow—have turned his fort into a boarding house and taken his horses and killed his cattle. To short-term profit but longterm disaster his canton is doomed. His dream is drifting away like so much yellow smoke. We could follow him to his destitute farm on the Feather River and on to the East, where he dies insolvent in 1880, but better to leave him on July 4, 1848, sitting at the head of his table in the storehouse of his fort, host of a party he is giving to celebrate—for the first time in California—the independence of the United States. He has fifty guests. With toasts, entertainment, oratory, beef, fowl, champagne, Sauternes, sherry, Madeira, and brandy, he presents a dinner that costs him the equivalent of sixty thousand dollars (in the foothills’ suddenly inflated prices converted into modern figures). In no way has he shown resentment that rejection has met his appeal to secure his claims in a discovery of sufficient magnitude to pay for a civil war. Seated on his right is Richard Barnes Mason. Seated on his left is William Tecumseh Sherman.
By the end of 1848, a few thousand people, spread out over a hundred and fifty miles, have removed from modern stream placers ten million dollars in gold. The forty-eighters have the best of it in 1849, because the forty-niners are travelling most of that season, at the end of which fifty thousand miners are in the country. There are a hundred and twenty thousand by the end of 1855. The lone miner all but disappears. To stay abreast of the sophisticating technologies, individuals necessarily form groups. Groups are crowded out by corporations. More and more miners make less and less money, until many independents are living hand-to-mouth and their way of life is called subsistence mining. Watching companions die of disease in Central American jungles or drown in Cape storms, they have travelled thousands of miles in pursuit of a golden goal that has now turned into “mining for beans.” Always, though, there are fresh stories going east—stories that would cause almost anyone to start thinking about trying the overland route, the isthmus, the Horn.
In a deep remote canyon on the east branch of the north fork of the Feather River, two Germans roll a boulder aside and under it find lump gold. Another couple of arriving miners wash four hundred ounces there in eight hours. A single pan yields fifteen hundred dollars. The ground is so rich that claims are limited to forty-eight inches square. In one week, the population grows from two to five hundred. The place is named Rich Bar.
At Goodyears Bar, on the Yuba, one wheelbarrow-load of placer is worth two thousand dollars.
From hard rock above Carson Creek comes a single piece of gold weighing a hundred and twelve pounds. After black powder is packed in a nearby crack, the blast throws out a hundred and ten thousand dollars in gold.
A miner is buried in Rough and Ready. As shovels move, gold appears in his grave. Services continue while mourners stake claims. So goes the story, dust to dust.
From the auriferous gravels of Iowa Hill two men remove thirty thousand dollars in a single day.
A nugget weighing only a little less than Leland Stanford comes out of hard rock in Carson Hill. Size of a shoebox and nearly pure gold, it weighs just under two hundred pounds (troy)—th
e largest piece ever found in California. Carson Hill, in Calaveras County, is in the belt of the Mother Lode—an elongate swarm of gold-bearing quartz veins, running north-south for a hundred and fifty miles at about a thousand feet of altitude. There are Mother Lode quartz veins as much as fifty metres wide.
American miners come from every state, and virtually every county. Others have arrived from Mexico, India, France, Australia, Portugal, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, New Zealand, Canada, Hawaii, Peru. One bloc of several thousand is from Chile. The largest foreign group is from China. Over most other miners, the Chinese have an advantage even greater than their numbers: they don’t drink. They smoke opium, certainly, but not nearly as much as the others like to think. The Chinese miners wear outsized boots and blue cotton. Their packs are light. They live on rice and dried fish. Their brothels thrive. They are the greatest gamblers in the Sierra. They make Caucasian gambling look like penny ante.
Some of the early gold camps are so deep in ravines, gulches, caverns, and canyons that the light of the winter sun never reaches the miners’ tents. If you have no tent, you live in a hole in the ground. Your backpack includes a blanket roll, a pick, a shovel, a gold pan, maybe a small rocker in which to sift gravel, a coffeepot, a tobacco tin, saleratus bread, dried apples, and salt pork. You sleep beside your fire. When you get up, you “shake yourself and you are dressed.” You wear a flannel shirt, probably red. You wear wool trousers, heavy leather boots, and a soft hat with a wide and flexible brim. You carry a pistol. Not everyone resembles you. There are miners in top hats, miners in panama hats, miners in sombreros, and French miners in berets, who have raised the tricolor over their claims. There are miners working in formal topcoats. There are miners in fringed buckskin, miners in brocaded vests, miners working claims in dress pumps (because their boots have worn out). There are numerous Indians, who are essentially naked. There are many black miners, all of them free. As individual prospecting gives way to gang labor, this could be a place for slaves, but in the nascent State of California slavery is forbidden. On Sundays, while you drink your tanglefoot whiskey, you can watch a dog kill a dog, a chicken kill a chicken, a man kill a man, a bull kill a bear. You can watch Shakespeare. You can visit a “public woman.” The Hydraulic Press for October 30, 1858, says, “Nowhere do young men look so old as in California.” They build white wooden churches with steeples.
