The Age of Gold

by H. W. Brands

Marshall supervised the work of nature as closely as he supervised the work of the men. Each morning he closed the gate and cut off the water through the race, and walked the channel below the mill to see what the flow had accomplished overnight. One morning not long after his return from Sutter’s Fort—the date generally given is January 24, although Marshall’s memory wavered on this point—about half past seven, he stepped along the race toward its confluence with the river. The night had been cold, and a rime of ice covered the rocks where the water had splashed. This, and the water still in the bed of the channel, gave a gleam to the pebbles and sand in the morning light. A few particular sparkles caught his eye, but at first he thought these were merely pieces of shiny quartz. Near the lower end of the race, however, just above its junction with the river, some two hundred yards from the mill, where about six inches of water pooled in the bed of the tailrace, he decided to investigate further.

  “I picked up one or two pieces,” he recalled, “and examined them attentively; and 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. I then collected four or five more pieces.”

  A more devious, or even more thoughtful, man than Marshall might have pocketed the gold and kept the discovery to himself. But a more devious or more thoughtful man might not have found himself digging ditches that January morning in a gravel bar so far from home and kin and civilization. As it was, he hastened to the mill and shared his surprising intelligence with the men there. William Scott was at the carpenter’s bench, working on the mill wheel.

  “I have found it,” Marshall said. At least this was what he remembered saying; the words have an odd ring. The phrasing sounds as though Marshall was looking for gold, and perhaps that Scott knew he was doing so. Yet when some question arose as to Marshall’s primacy in discovery, when it would have served his purpose to say he had gone looking for the precious metal, he claimed nothing of the sort. Quite possibly, in remembering things as he did, Marshall unthinkingly translated the mania of the aftermath of his discovery—when “it” was on everyone’s mind—to the very moment when the new age dawned.

  On the other hand, maybe he said just what he later remembered. According to that memory, Scott replied, “What is it?”

  “Gold,” answered Marshall.

  “Oh, no!” said Scott in disbelief. “That can’t be.”

  “I know it to be nothing else.”

  Scott’s skepticism erased any residual inclination in Marshall to keep the discovery quiet. Several of the other men working in the vicinity were called over to examine the specimens and render judgment. Charles Bennett, at Marshall’s direction, took a hammer and pounded one of the flakes into a thin sheet—strong evidence that this was the genuine article. Peter Wimmer carried a flake to the cabin where his wife was making soap; she threw it into the boiling lye solution, and it emerged shinier than ever. A similar result followed an assay by saleratus (baking powder). Although less telling than the malleability test, these experiments added weight to the gold hypothesis.

  Had anyone at Coloma known what everyone in the world knew later, Marshall’s men would have dropped their tools at once and gone looking for more of what he had found. But at the time it appeared a curiosity, a fluke. After all, they had moved thousands of cubic yards of dirt and sand and gravel in that same location during the previous several months, and this was the first sign that those thousands of yards contained anything but dirt and sand and gravel. Marshall reminded them that they had come to Coloma to build a sawmill. If they didn’t work on the mill, they wouldn’t get paid. Perhaps he did not remind them—although they doubtless realized—that he wouldn’t start getting paid until the mill started sawing wood.

  Yet, bowing to reality, Marshall told the men that if they continued to work on the mill during regular hours, they might search for gold during “odd spells and Sundays” (as Azariah Smith recorded). At some point either then or later they agreed, in exchange for this privilege, to split their findings with Marshall.

  The fact that Marshall was more concerned with lumber than with gold was underscored by the fact that he waited four days after his remarkable discovery to travel to Sutter’s Fort. Perhaps he failed to appreciate how that discovery changed everything. Perhaps he did appreciate it, and affected nonchalance for the benefit of the men.

  SUTTER WAS CONCERNED with lumber, too, but with larger issues as well. In January 1848 the United States and Mexico remained formally at war, yet the shape of the American victory was evident. The United States would acquire California, among other spoils of the conflict. While Marshall and most Americans in California cheered the change of sovereignty, Sutter shuddered. As an official of the Mexican government, he had lately been an enemy of the region’s new rulers; more unnerving, everything he had built and achieved at New Helvetia—the fort, the farms, the herds, the authority he wielded, the respect he commanded— were based on his good relations with Mexico. Mexico’s defeat canceled all that. Perhaps he could make himself as valuable to the Americans as he had been to the Mexicans; flexibility and the capacity to ingratiate had long been his stock-in-trade. But the process would take time—a luxury he wasn’t sure he would be allowed.

  Such was Sutter’s thinking when, to his surprise, Marshall arrived back from Coloma. Because Marshall had left the fort only two weeks earlier, with the intention of finishing the construction, Sutter assumed something was amiss. Marshall’s demeanor added to this impression. “From the unusual agitation in his manner I imagined that something serious had occurred,” Sutter said afterward. He added, “As we involuntarily do in this part of the world, I at once glanced to see if my rifle was in its proper place.”

  When Marshall explained the cause of his excitement, the two men retired to Sutter’s office on the second floor of the building at the center of the fort. They consulted Sutter’s Encyclopaedia Americana, which had a long article describing the properties of gold. The apothecary shop at the fort possessed some aqua fortis—nitric acid—which Sutter sent a servant to fetch. Marshall’s samples withstood the acid—a strong indication of gold. To determine the density of the metal, they reproduced Archimedes’ famous experiment. They placed in one pan of a scales a quantity of Marshall’s sample sufficient to balance three silver dollars in the other pan; then they immersed the scales in water, whereupon the pan with the sample sank, revealing the greater density of the sample—again, as expected of gold.

  Sutter concluded what Marshall already had. “I declared this to be gold,” he remembered. He told Marshall that it was “of the finest quality, of at least 23 carats.”

  Marshall thought the two of them should leave for Coloma at once. Sutter was reluctant. He cited the lateness of the afternoon and the inclemency of the weather—it had begun raining again, hard.

  Sutter had another reason for delay. He needed time to think. A sleep less night got him started. By his own testimony, he “thought a great deal during the night about the consequences which might follow such a discovery.” He considered himself as resourceful as the next man; his whole career, culminating in New Helvetia, was evidence of his ability to adapt to changing circumstances. But he had never encountered anything like this.

  As when some carcass, hidden in sequestered nook, draws from every near and distant point myriads of discordant vultures, so drew these little flakes of gold the voracious sons of men. The strongest human appetite was aroused—the sum of appetites—this yellow dirt embodying the means for gratifying love, hate, lust, and domination. This little scratch upon the earth to make a backwoods mill-race touched the cerebral nerve that quickened humanity, and sent a thrill throughout the system. It tingled in the ear and at the finger-ends; it buzzed about the brain and tickled in the stomach; it warmed the blood and swelled the heart; new fires were kindled on
the hearth-stones, new castles builded in the air. If Satan from Diablo’s peak had sounded the knell of time; if a heavenly angel from the Sierras’ height had heralded the millennial day; if the blessed Christ himself had risen from that ditch and proclaimed to all mankind amnesty—their greedy hearts had never half so thrilled.

  —Hubert Howe Bancroft, gold-hunter and historian

  James Marshall’s discovery of gold at Coloma turned out to be a seminal event in history, one of those rare moments that divide human existence into before and after. When news of the discovery floated down the Sacramento to the more populated regions of California, it sucked nearly every free hand and available arm to the gold mines, leaving children to ask where their fathers had gone and wives wondering when their husbands would return. As the golden news spread beyond California to the outside world, it triggered the most astonishing mass movement of peoples since the Crusades. From all over the planet they came—from Mexico and Peru and Chile and Argentina, from Oregon and Hawaii and Australia and New Zealand and China, from the American North and the American South, from Britain and France and Germany and Italy and Greece and Russia. They came by the tens and hundreds and thousands, then by the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. They came by sailing ship and steamship, by horse and mule and ox and wagon and foot. They came in companies and alone, with money and without, knowing and naïve. They tore themselves from warm hearths and good homes, promising to return; they fled from cold hearts and bad debts, vowing never to return. They were farmers and merchants and sailors and slaves and abolitionists and soldiers of fortune and ladies of the night. They jumped bail to start their journey, and jumped ship at journey’s end. They were pillars of their communities, and their communities’ dregs.

  Their journey, taken collectively, was the epic of the age, a saga of world history, an adventure on the largest scale. But their collective enterprise was the sum of hundreds of thousands of individual journeys, hundreds of thousands of small stories that changed the world by changing the lives of the men and women who traveled to California in pursuit of their common dream. For nearly all of them, the journey was the most difficult thing they had ever done, and far more difficult than they imagined on setting out. Not all survived the journey; those who did would never forget the trials they endured, the challenges they met, the companions they lost. They would tell the story of the journey to their children and their children’s children.

  None of those who traveled to California in search of gold had any inkling, before January 24, 1848, of what was in store for them. Their lives, about to become threads in a grand—a golden—tapestry, were still distinct, wound on spindles separated by oceans and continents and gulfs of culture and mountain ranges of history. And they would have remained distinct, in nearly all cases, if not for James Marshall’s discovery. But starting on that day, a powerful engine—the engine of fate, or perhaps merely of human nature—began winding them all in.

  1

  In the Footsteps of Father Serra

  A less likely terminus of all these journeys could scarcely have been conceived. A principal attraction of California in the period before Coloma was that it was so far off the beaten track. John Sutter could hide there from his wife and creditors; James Marshall could hope to shake the failure that had dogged his steps since Missouri. At a time when long-distance travel averaged little faster than a man could walk—railroads were appearing in the most advanced countries, and promised to revolutionize transport, but for now they were primarily local or regional affairs—California was about as far from the centers of Western civilization as a land could be. The sea voyage around South America from New York or Liverpool or Le Havre required five or six months, depending on conditions off Cape Horn, which could terrify the most hardened unbeliever to prayer. Recently, intrepid and lightly laden travelers had begun to attempt the Central American isthmus, but the justifiably dreaded Chagres fever and the uncertain connections to vessels on the Pacific side deterred many who otherwise would have employed this shortcut. For those setting out from the American East, travel by foot or wagon was feasible, but hardly attractive. Since the early 1840s emigrants had been crossing the plains and mountains to Oregon; the journey required half a year and all the fortitude and stamina ordinary folks could muster. And it was essentially one-way: when people left for Oregon, they might as well have dropped off the face of the earth for all their relatives were unlikely to see them again. The trail to California was much less traveled, and far less certain, than that to Oregon.

  In the time before Coloma, those few outsiders who did visit California fell into a small number of discrete categories. European explorers arrived in the sixteenth century. Spain’s Juan Cabrillo in 1542 sighted the coast of Alta California—as distinct from peninsular Baja California—but promptly sailed away. The English sea dog Francis Drake scouted California in 1579, landing at some bay never since clearly identified, but probably Drake’s Bay, below Point Reyes, and burying a plaque never since found, but staking England’s claim to the region. Subsequently Russian ship captains, seeking provisions for their country’s Bering Sea fur hunters, began appearing in the neighborhood north of San Francisco Bay.

  The English and Russians eventually awoke the Spanish, who already controlled most of the territory from Tierra del Fuego to Mexico, to the wisdom of colonizing California. The Spanish monarchy in the late eighteenth century enlisted the padres of the Franciscan order, who set out to secure California for the king of Spain even as they secured the souls of California’s inhabitants for the King of Heaven.

  Junipero Serra, the Majorca-born missionary who headed the effort, and his small band of Franciscan followers built a chain of missions from San Diego in the south to San Rafael in the north. The missions were located a day’s walk apart, typically near the mouths of the short rivers that ran from the coastal mountains to the sea. Each mission centered on a chapel, usually built of adobe but occasionally of stone. Adjacent to the chapel was the home of the resident priests (typically two per mission) and assorted other structures. Surrounding the mission proper was a large tract of land, a hundred square miles or more. In time the mission lands supported great herds of cattle and horses and flocks of sheep. Grain fields, vegetable gardens, and fruit orchards rounded out the farms.

  Besides the missions, which were controlled by the Franciscans, were four presidios, at San Diego, Santa Barbara, Monterey, and San Francisco. These forts barracked soldiers of the Spanish army, who were assigned to protect the missions and inspire awe in the local Indians. The Indians were encouraged by this means to seek refuge in the vineyards of the Lord and the fields of the friars.

  Separate from the missions and the presidios were a handful of pueblos, or independent towns. Los Angeles was the most important of the pueblos; during the early nineteenth century it surpassed in size and economic activity all but a few of the missions.

  In its heyday, the Spanish system in California constituted a pastoral empire of impressive proportions. Several of the missions boasted herds and flocks that numbered in the scores of thousands, barns bursting with grain and other produce, and the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars in specie or precious plate. Indian “neophytes”—natives attached to the missions religiously and economically—totaled perhaps twenty thousand. They would have numbered far more if not for the introduced European diseases that ravaged the native populations even as they lent credence to the friars’ assertion that repentance was in order because the end was near.

  But the mission system was no stronger than the Spanish authority on which it rested, and when Mexico threw off Spanish control in the early 1820s, the California missions quickly declined. The new government of independent Mexico was republican and anticlerical; neither the power of the mission priests nor the subjection of the mission Indians sat well with those who now ruled California.

  More precisely, the new regime claimed to rule California; in fact Mexican independence inaugurated an era of tur
bulence in California affairs. The friars preferred sabotage to secularization of the missions; they began to liquidate the herds and run down the farms. The Spanish-descended elites in California often disdained the mixed-blood mestizos of Mexico. The inhabitants of Monterey and the northern part of California fell out with the Los Angelenos of southern California. The small but growing contingent of foreigners, especially Americans, contributed a further element of restiveness and uncertainty.

  OF ALL THIS, the large majority of Americans knew next to nothing until 1840, when Richard Dana published Two Years Before the Mast. Dana was heir to a tradition of distinguished Boston lawyers; his father had signed the Articles of Confederation and served fifteen years as chief justice of Massachusetts. The younger Dana was preparing for a legal career of his own when he contracted a bad case of measles. The illness especially afflicted his eyes, precluding an early return to his studies. Doctors suggested a sea voyage, perhaps a cruise to India. But the strapping young man, now returned to all but visual health, chafed at the thought of months in a deck chair; instead he chose to ship before the mast, on the brig Pilgrim, bound for the coast of California via Cape Horn.

  The vessel left Boston in August 1834. After five months it reached Santa Barbara. Dana’s first impression of California was decidedly unfavorable. “The hills have no large trees upon them, they having been all burnt by a great fire which swept them off about a dozen years ago, and they had not yet grown again,” he wrote. “The fire was described to me by a inhabitant, as having been a very terrible and magnificent sight. The air of the whole valley was so heated that the people were obliged to leave the town and take up their quarters for several days upon the beach.”

  Dana’s opinion of California gradually improved. He came to appreciate the climate and soil and scenery, and was fascinated by the polyglot mix of souls frequenting the coast: Polynesians, Russians, Italians, French, English. Yet he never learned to like the Californians themselves. They were “an idle, thriftless people,” he said, unwilling or unable to make anything of the land they inhabited. A passenger who traveled aboard the Pilgrim from Monterey to Santa Barbara epitomized the type. Don Juan Bandini was descended from aristocrats, his family priding itself on the purity of its Spanish blood and its continuing importance in Mexico. Don Juan’s father had been governor of California, and had sent his son to Mexico City for school and an introduction to the first circle of Mexican society. But misfortune and extravagance eroded the family estate, and the young Don Juan was now returning to California—“accomplished, poor, and proud, and without any office or occupation, to lead the life of most young men of the better families: dissipated and extravagant when the means are at hand; ambitious at heart, and impotent in act; often pinched for bread; keeping up an appearance of style, when their poverty is known to each half-naked Indian boy in the street, and standing in dread of every small trader and shopkeeper in the place.”