The Age of Gold

by H. W. Brands

  THE AGE & GOLD

  Acclaim for H. W. Brands’

  “[H. W. Brands] will change the way you see history…. The Age of Gold brilliantly pans the historical record for nuggets of hardship and, in the process, hits upon a mother lode of a story.”

  —Austin American-Statesman

  “Gripping…. Thoroughly researched…. An eminently readable, detailfilled book.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “A serious, comprehensive study, filled with memorable visions and interesting observations…. A book that explores history, politics, geology, adventure and industry with omnibus enthusiasm…. Its author, like the miners of the gold rush themselves, leaves no stone unturned.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “A fine, robust telling of one of the greatest adventure stories in history.”

  —David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of John Adams

  “Brands assembles a colorful collection of people swept into this craze from around the world … in[to] a dazzling setting that conveys the worldchanging effects of this era…. [He is a] master storyteller.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Few historians can tell a tale better than Brands.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Populated with colorful California characters…. Brands makes a convincing case that the discovery of gold was a seminal event in American history.”

  —Boston Herald

  “Fascinating…. Brands brings the era and its characters to life in a remarkably entertaining narrative that is meticulously researched and crisply written…. The Age of Gold is historical reporting at its best.”

  —Arizona Daily Star

  H. W. Brands

  THE AGE & GOLD

  H. W. Brands is Distinguished Professor and Melbern G. Glasscock Chair of American History at Texas A&M University. He is the author of many books, among them The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and T. R.: The Last Romantic, a critically acclaimed biography of Theodore Roosevelt. He lives in Austin, Texas.

  Also by H. W. Brands

  The Strange Death of American Liberalism

  The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

  The Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (editor)

  Critical Reflections on the Cold War: Linking Rhetoric and History (editor, with Martin J. Medhurst)

  The Use of Force After the Cold War (editor)

  Beyond Vietnam: The Foreign Policies of Lyndon Johnson (editor)

  Masters of Enterprise: Giants of American Business from John Jacob Astor and J. P. Morgan to Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey

  What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy

  T.R.: The Last Romantic

  Since Vietnam: The United States in World Affairs, 1973–1995

  The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power

  The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s

  The United States in the World: A History of American Foreign Policy

  Into the Labyrinth: The United States and the Middle East, 1945–1993

  The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War

  Bound to Empire: The United States and the Philippines

  Inside the Cold War: Loy Henderson and the Rise of the American Empire, 1918–1961

  India and the United States: The Cold Peace

  The Specter of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 1947–1960

  Cold Warriors: Eisenhower’s Generation and American Foreign Policy

  Contents

  Prologue: The Baron and the Carpenter

  (Coloma: January 1848)

  PART ONE

  The Gathering of Peoples

  (From the World to California: 1848–1849)

  1. In the Footsteps of Father Serra

  2. Across the Pacific

  3. The Peaks of Darien

  4. To the Bottom of the World and Back

  5. To See the Elephant

  6. Where Rivers Die

  PART TWO

  From Vulcan’s Forge

  (The Goldfields: 1848–1850s)

  7. With a Washbowl on My Knee

  8. A Millennium in a Day

  PART THREE

  American Athena

  (California: 1849–1856)

  9. The Miracle of St. Francis

  10. Sutter’s Last Stand

  11. Shaking the Temple

  12. Children of the Mother Lode

  13. Reflections in an All-Seeing Eye

  PART FOUR

  The Gordian Knot and the Pacific Connection

  (California and the Union: 1856–1869)

  14. The Pathfinder’s Return

  15. South by West

  16. From Sea to Shining Sea

  PART FIVE

  The New El Dorado

  (America in the Age of Gold)

  17. Prometheus Unbound

  18. American Dreamers

  Sources

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  The Baron and the Carpenter

  (Coloma: January 1848)

  In the wilderness a man made do. Given any choice in the matter, James Marshall wouldn’t have retained Jennie Wimmer as cook and housekeeper for his construction gang. She was stubborn, surly, belligerently unimaginative in the kitchen—and fully aware she couldn’t be replaced. She cooked what she wanted, when she wanted. She served the best portions to her husband, Peter, and their seven children. The hired hands, who bunked in the opposite end of the double log cabin that sheltered the Wimmers, were left with the toughest beef, the stringiest mutton, the stalest peas, the driest biscuits, and without the pumpkin and apple pies that varied, ever so slightly, the monotonous diet. Meals were served at Jennie’s whim, yet she grew furious if the men weren’t seated and ready when she deigned to deliver the food.

  The men chafed under her arbitrary rule during the late autumn of 1847; their annoyance reached rebellion on Christmas Day, when Marshall happened to be down the river at Sutter’s Fort. Most of the men were Mormons, devout Christians after their Latter-day fashion, and they desired to savor their holiday and honor their Lord’s birth by grooming themselves more fastidiously than the normal work schedule allowed. But Jennie Wimmer would brook no change from her routine. She rang the bell, and when they didn’t appear at once, she vowed they could feed themselves.

  Henry Bigler was an elder of the Mormon Church and a military veteran; he had survived the anti-Mormon pogroms in Missouri and Illinois, and fought Mexicans in the war not quite officially ended. He had suffered Jennie Wimmer—till now. “On Christmas morning just at daylight we was called to breakfast,” he recorded. “We was washing our faces. We was called the second time before we was ready to obey. She told us plainly that she was Boss and that we must come at the first call, which we had always had done before…. This we did not like, and we revolted from under her government.”

  Marshall returned from the fort to discover the rebellion. As insurrections went, it wasn’t much. The Mormons simply insisted they could no longer abide Jennie Wimmer’s arbitrary rule. They must be allowed to build their own living quarters, where they would cook their own meals.

  Marshall was reluctant to grant the demand, for every hour devoted to building the new cabin would be an hour stolen from building the sawmill, which was the reason they were all wintering at this remote site, forty miles from Sutter’s settlement and many times that distance from anything that could be called civilization. But the Mormons were as irreplaceable as Jennie Wimmer. They intended to stay only till spring, when th
ey would trek east across the mountains to join their fellow Saints on the shores of the Great Salt Lake.

  Marshall could see no alternative. The Mormons must have their own cabin. He set aside the materials; they provided the labor—while Jennie Wimmer looked on with a mixture of disgust and good-riddance. After a week’s hard work the cabin was ready. Nineteen-year-old Azariah Smith, one of Bigler’s fellow insurgents, noted with satisfaction in his diary: “Last Sunday we moved into it in order to get rid of the brawling, partial mistress, and cook for ourselves.”

  JOHN SUTTER, MARSHALL’S PARTNER, felt much the same way about Marshall that Marshall felt about Jennie Wimmer. In Sutter’s homeland of Switzerland, where tapping the power of falling water was an ancient art, Marshall never would have qualified as a millwright. He had built no mills nor apprenticed to anyone who had. His training, such as it was, was in carpentry, which was not irrelevant to the construction of the shed and platform that would house and support the millworks, but lacked the elements of smithing—of fabricating iron gears and levers and steel saw-blades—that distinguished the craft of genuine millwrights from the make-do approximations of amateurs.

  Marshall inspired even less confidence as a business partner. He had the uncertain, backward-glancing air of a man who had been haunted by misfortune and was reasonably sure it was still on his trail. His business acumen was demonstrably deficient, his most recent failure being the loss of a ranch in the Sacramento Valley not far from Sutter’s own.

  But Sutter needed a sawmill and couldn’t build it himself. New Helvetia was thriving a decade after Sutter had persuaded the governor of California to award him a tract of land on the northern frontier of that Mexican province as a way of forestalling settlement by encroaching Americans—whose proximity was already reflected in the name of a principal tributary to the Sacramento: Río de los Americanos. Sutter selected a site at the confluence of the two streams, on the east bank of the Sacramento and the south bank of the American. The site was fifty river miles from the nearest arm of the San Francisco Bay, and two hundred miles by river, bay, and ocean from Monterey, the provincial capital.

  Sutter hired Indians, including some whose families had first gathered around the Catholic missions in the days of the Spanish. Although the natives required stern guidance, supplied by soldiers Sutter employed, they worked cheaply—which was why they required such stern guidance. In time they dug irrigation ditches and planted fields, vineyards, and orchards. New Helvetia didn’t look much like its namesake, for beyond the reach of Sutter’s acequias, the broad flanks of the Sacramento Valley were parched and brown through summers unthinkably hot by Alpine standards. But it was his, and for a man whose career had taken him from Baden and Bern to New York, Missouri, New Mexico, Oregon, Hawaii, and Alaska before he finally reached California in 1839, it felt increasingly like home.

  The sawmill was part of the latest stage of Sutter’s expansion, a stage that also included construction of a gristmill. The latter would be located in the valley, near the fort and its fields of grain. Employing the power of gravity, as delivered by the waters of the American River, it would grind Sutter’s wheat for his own use and for sale down the Sacramento; for a fee, it would grind the wheat of Sutter’s neighbors. The sawmill would be located up the American River, near the trees that would supply the timber the mill would saw into beams and boards. The cut lumber would be carted west to the fort for use there; what Sutter didn’t need he would raft down the Sacramento to the village of Yerba Buena—or San Francisco, as some of the inhabitants had lately started calling it—on a sheltered cove on the inland side of the peninsula south of the entrance to San Francisco Bay.

  Sutter was a soldier by training, albeit less training than he let on. He said he had reached the rank of captain in the Swiss army. This wasn’t true; he never got further than first under-lieutenant of reserves. But he looked the soldier’s part. He carried himself erect, in the military manner. His blond hair curled above his ears and across the crest of his broad forehead, giving him the appearance of a Teutonic Napoleon. He kept his side- whiskers and mustache neatly trimmed, imperial-fashion. His eyebrows arched quizzically above his clear blue eyes, as if to inquire whether an order had been carried out with sufficient alacrity.

  The pose worked. The governor of California commissioned Sutter a captain of militia, to guard against the Americans and other foreigners. Sutter was also appointed alcalde, thereby receiving powers akin to those of an American mayor and sheriff combined. He liked the authority and the titles; when the more obsequious of those requesting his favor called him “General,” he didn’t correct them. For a man who had fled Switzerland just ahead of the debt-police, leaving behind a wife and children, he could congratulate himself on doing well, remarkably well. Looking out from his headquarters in the fort he named for himself, he was lord of all he surveyed.

  Yet the lord slept uneasily some nights. His fitfulness traced to the March day in 1844 when an American military officer unexpectedly appeared from out of the snowdrifts of the Sierras at the head of a mounted column. Sutter knew enough about Americans to know they collectively possessed an annoying self-confidence, a smug certitude that God smiled more brightly on them than on any other portion of humanity; but he had never met anyone as infuriatingly self-assured as John Frémont. The Amer ican captain had conquered the mountains to reach California—no mean midwinter’s feat, Sutter had to admit—and he acted as if he could conquer anything or anyone in the valley below. On that 1844 visit Frémont had contented himself with registering disdain for Mexican authority, parading about the province as he pleased, leaving only when he saw fit. But he returned in December 1845, and his second coming heralded the war that even now seemed likely to wrest California from Mexico and deliver it to the United States, in apparent fulfillment of the plan the Americans ascribed to Providence.

  Against Frémont’s arms, and those of the larger American force that followed him, Sutter had no answer. He was compelled to endure Frémont’s scorn, and he prepared to accommodate himself to the new American regime as he had adjusted himself to the old Mexican one.

  James Marshall was part of his strategy of accommodation. Whichever country wound up owning California would need the cattle Sutter’s pastures fed, the grain his gristmill ground, the lumber his sawmill on the American River cut. In Switzerland, Sutter would have insisted on better than Marshall. But California wasn’t Switzerland, as he had to keep reminding himself. “Made a contract and entered in partnership with Marshall for a sawmill to be built on the American fork,” he recorded in his journal for August 27, 1847. The terms of the partnership were straightforward. Sutter would furnish materials for construction, and expenses and wages for the men; Marshall would supervise construction and manage operation of the mill. The two would split the profits from the sale of the lumber.

  MARSHALL WAS COUNTING on the partnership. For most of his life, it seemed, his only partner had been bad luck. His father died when Marshall was in his early twenties, leaving the young man nothing but debts, and with little alternative—as he saw it—to heading west on the tide of the times. He drifted through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, stumbling into Missouri during the land rush to the Platte Purchase on the Missouri River. Briefly it appeared that his luck had changed, for he staked out a homestead and planted corn and fenceposts and the beginning of roots. And he fell in love with a young woman of Platte City, aptly named Missouri Green. But fortune fooled him. He contracted an illness his contemporaries called “fever and ague”—later generations would identify it as malaria—which sapped his strength, blurred his vision and judgment, and left him shivering and shaking in the hottest weather. Although the etiology of malaria was unknown (including the role of mosquitoes in spreading the disease), the epidemiology was plain enough, and when a local doctor advised him he would never get well till he left the bottomlands of the Missouri, he couldn’t argue. Whether this doctor was the same physician for whom Miss Missouri Green rejected Mar
shall is unclear. But reject him she did, and for the sake of both his health and his self-respect he moved on.

  In the early 1840s the Missouri Valley was a highway to Oregon, a land extolled for its fertile soil and salubrious climate. Marshall joined an emigrant train and in the spring of 1845 arrived in the Willamette Valley. But that spring was as drizzly as most Oregon springs, and in early June, having hardly seen the sun, Marshall headed south. With a small party he crossed the curiously chaotic Siskiyou Mountains (which refused to follow the north-south axis of nearly all other American ranges), and in mid-July found himself at the gate of Sutter’s Fort. Sutter, looking over the new arrivals, remarked their “decent appearance” and allowed, in light of the shortage of even marginally skilled labor in the area, that some might be “very useful.” He welcomed them on behalf of the Mexican government and issued them visas.

  He offered Marshall work around the fort, and when the American proved handy with small tools, Sutter helped him arrange a mortgage to purchase two leagues of land on a tributary of the Sacramento. Marshall took some of his wages from Sutter in cattle, which he used to stock his new ranch.

  Yet trouble was still on Marshall’s trail. He had scarcely started ranching when the war broke out between the United States and Mexico. Along with nearly all the Americans in California, Marshall sided with the land of his birth against the country of his current residence. He enlisted under Captain Frémont and marched south to San Pasqual, then to San Diego. After a great deal of walking and relatively little fighting, he was mustered out at San Diego in March 1847. Another long walk brought him back to the Sacramento Valley, where he learned that in his absence his cattle had strayed or been stolen. This was a grievous blow, for the cattle were more valuable than the land. Without the cattle he couldn’t make the payments on his mortgage. He lost the land, and once again turned to Sutter for work.

  Sutter spoke of a sawmill, for which Marshall began scouting. “In May 1847, with my rifle, blanket, and a few crackers to eat with my venison (for the deer were then awful plenty),” he recounted later, “I ascended the American River according to Mr. Sutter’s wish, as he wanted to find a good site for a sawmill, where we could have plenty of timber, and where wagons would be able to ascend and descend the river hills.” The two elements—timber and accessibility via wagon—were crucial, and not often encountered together. “Many places would suit very well for the erection of the mill, with plenty of timber everywhere, but then nothing but a mule could climb the hills; and when I would find a spot where the hills were not steep, there was no timber to be had.”