The Age of Gold

by H. W. Brands

  Yee Ah Tye was one of the emigrants. Like the great majority of Chinese gold-seekers, he left to historians no written records; the tale of his removal from China to California survives only in the memory of his descendants and their friends. The date of his birth is vague—but not the location, a fact of fundamental importance to traditional Chinese. The Yees had been living in the Sunwui District of Kwantung Province for eight hundred years. At one time they counted prominent government officials among their number, but for the last few centuries they had been farmers and fishermen. Yet Yee Ah Tye had love for neither crops nor catch. He moved from the village of his birth, Chang-wan, to Hong Kong after the British wrested that colony from China as part of the Opium War settlement; in Hong Kong he learned to speak English, evidently with an eye toward lifting himself from manual labor to commerce. He heard the news from California and read the notices of the departing vessels. He watched other Chinese leave for the land of gold and determined to follow. The longtime nurse of his eventual widow heard this part of the story from her: “Yee Ah Tye came to America in a junk. He was about twenty years old. The voyage started with twenty-two young Chinese men and ended with twenty.”

  Whether this rate of attrition was typical of ships sailing from China to California is hard to tell; passengers weren’t counted carefully at either end of the voyage. Yet enough arrived at San Francisco—Dai Fow, or Big City—that by the end of 1851 there were perhaps 25,000 Chinese in California. Already they were a familiar, and simultaneously exotic, sight. A San Francisco parade included a contingent of Chinese; the Alta California reported that the “Celestials” (as the Chinese were often called, after a traditional name—“Celestial Kingdom”—for China) carried “a banner of crimson satin, on which were some Chinese characters and the inscription, ‘China Boys.’”

  3

  The Peaks of Darien

  Miss Jessie, although extremely intelligent, lacks the docility of a model student. Moreover, she has the objectionable manner of seeming to take our orders and assignments under consideration, to be accepted or disregarded by some standard of her own.”

  The young lady in question was Jessie Ann Benton; this letter from her teachers was addressed to her father, Thomas Hart Benton. The two were the talk of Washington and St. Louis during the 1830s and 1840s. Thomas Benton was a senator from Missouri, a bruising frontiersman who had once tussled, nearly fatally, with Andrew Jackson. Jackson had agreed to second a friend in a duel with Jesse Benton, Thomas Benton’s brother. Thomas arrived at the City Hotel in Nashville late but angry, and a general melee of knives, clubs, and pistols ensued. Thomas Benton was thrown headlong down a flight of stairs while Jackson’s shoulder stopped a Benton bullet. The wound would have killed many a lesser man; as it was, Jackson’s blood soaked through two mattresses before being stanched, and the bullet remained in Old Hickory’s flesh for years. (In a coincidence that astonished the principals when they eventually discovered it, another Benton bullet ripped a hole through the wall of an adjoining guest room, in which slumbered a nine-month-old baby named John Charles Frémont, visiting Nashville with his parents.)

  The scrape with Jackson didn’t cure Benton of his violent streak; he subsequently killed a man in a duel. In the East this might have disqualified him from public office, but in Missouri it simply made him more popular, and he was elected senator upon that state’s admission to the Union in 1820.

  Midway through his first term (of six), Benton became the father of a feisty girl who inherited his uncompromising spirit. Jessie afterward commented on “that instinctive sympathy which made us one”; in her youth, friends and neighbors commented on how impossible both were, and how much the father spoiled the daughter. When her teachers would no longer have her, he tutored her at home. When the world, including Jessie’s mother, chastised the girl, he took her part. One Saturday evening Jessie stole off to the house of a French Catholic playmate, with pajamas and other spurious evidence of permission to spend the night. She returned home next day to a stern lecture from her mother, who concluded by inquiring why the young lady had missed Sunday school. “Because I planned to go to mass,” Jessie replied saucily, “to learn more about a church that doesn’t confine your Sunday reading to one good book. Besides, I hate the Presbyterian church—no flowers, no candle light, no pictures.” After Jessie had been sent to her room, her sister inquired what their father’s reaction had been. “He scolded me for disrespect to mother, but not to the Presbyterians,” she said.

  Jessie blossomed into a dark-eyed, raven-haired beauty, which simply made her father more protective. He tried to steer her affections toward young men of family and prospects. But Jessie had different ideas. One day a dashing lieutenant named Frémont visited the Benton home to see the senator about support for an exploratory expedition to the West. Jessie was smitten before Benton could warn her about the young man’s checkered past. Sensing trouble, Benton forbade Jessie to see Frémont and made sure the explorer got the money for his journey far away from Washington.

  Yet Jessie, all of sixteen years old, refused to accept the paternal veto. She smuggled letters to Frémont, and upon his return the two eloped. When Benton learned of the marriage, he ordered Frémont out of the house and told him never to return. Jessie, he said, would stay.

  But Jessie would not stay. If her husband was banished from the family house, she declared, so was she.

  Benton had never been so angry, and he held out for weeks. Yet, as he always did with Jessie, he finally gave in. Daughter and son-in-law were permitted back home. Benton once more, but now with no ulterior motives, sponsored Frémont’s exploratory career.

  Jessie did, too. She became her husband’s collaborator and ghostwriter. When he returned from the expedition that scouted the Oregon Trail, and sat down to write the report required by Congress, he discovered that all the courage and ambition that had carried him over the mountains and deserts couldn’t get him past his first paragraph. A severe case of writer’s block induced headaches and nosebleeds. Jessie suggested that the man of action wasn’t necessarily the one best-suited to putting action to paper. As she explained afterward, “The horseback life, the sleep in the open air, had unfitted Mr. Frémont for the indoor work of writing.” (Jessie’s recollections almost always make her sound more demure than she really was. As with many memoirists, so especially with her: one has to read between the lines.) The two agreed that he would tell the story to her, and she would round it into literary form. The resulting report was a popular and political triumph. Congress ordered a thousand extra copies; newspapers reprinted it and reprinted again. Emigrants to Oregon packed the authorized versions and bootlegged copies in the tops of their trunks for ready reference. With Benton’s encouragement, the legislature ordered a second Frémont expedition, better funded and manned than the first.

  This expedition also proved to be better armed than the first: Frémont included a twelve-pound howitzer in his kit. When news of his armament reached Washington, officials at the War Department objected. Frémont would be entering territory in dispute with Britain and Spain; any hint of an armed invasion might provoke a diplomatic crisis. Frémont’s superiors dispatched an urgent message ordering him to leave his artillery at home or return to Washington to explain himself.

  Jessie intercepted the message at St. Louis. Acting as her husband’s secretary, she opened his mail in his absence; reading this letter, she concluded that jealous bureaucrats intended to subvert the Frémont expedition. “I felt the whole situation in a flash,” she recalled. “I had been too much a part of the whole plan for the expeditions to put them in peril now—and I alone could act.” She added, with hindsight, “It was in the blessed day before telegraphs; and character counted for something then, and I was only eighteen, an age when one takes risks, willingly.” She hazarded the censure of the federal government by refusing to forward the letter to Frémont, instead dispatching a swift emissary with a message of her own: “Only trust me and Go.”

 
; Frémont went, leaving before a copy of the letter, sent straight from Washington to his camp on the Missouri River arrived. The ensuing expedition, made possible by Jessie’s brazenness, was the one that first took him to California, and when he returned east and Jessie wrote up the report, he became more famous than ever. Congress ordered ten thousand copies, which magnified the Manifest Destinarianism that elected James Polk and triggered the Mexican War.

  THE IGNOMINIOUS WAY the war ended for Frémont—culminating in his court-martial and resignation—was what prompted his and Jessie’s move to California. Their thinking was that in California he might restore his sullied reputation and she create a family home, which, on account of his frequent absences, they had never really had. She was pregnant, for the second time. A daughter, Elizabeth, had been born in 1842; now a son, Benton, followed. The four would make a new life in the new territory.

  Before leaving California as Kearny’s prisoner, John had entrusted $3,000 to Thomas Larkin, the American consul at Monterey, with the understanding that Larkin would purchase a ranch Frémont had identified in the hills behind San Francisco. The property had various charms, including an ocean view; Frémont supposed it would be both a pleasant place to live and a good investment. But through some combination of accident and shady dealing, Larkin instead purchased a property in the Sierra foothills. The Mariposa tract, as it was called, was much larger than the San Francisco ranch, but was far removed from civilization, was occupied by fiercely possessive Indians, and, for that reason, was inhabitable by out siders such as the Frémont family only at great peril. Frémont learned of the misdealing and vowed to make it right. He demanded an explanation from Larkin, saying he wanted either his money back or the ranch he originally selected. And he was coming to California to ensure that his demands were met.

  Jessie would follow, with the children. The plan she and John devised called for him to travel overland, at the head of another expedition, this one privately funded and designed to test the feasibility of a railroad route to California. Jessie, Elizabeth (whom the family called Lily), and baby Benton would travel by steamer from New York to the isthmus of Panama, cross the isthmus by riverboat and mule, and take a second ship up the coast to Monterey, where they would meet John.

  Because the overland expedition would require longer than the Central American journey, and because Jessie had seen so little of John during the last several years, she accompanied him to his jumping-off point on the Missouri River. They traveled by train to St. Louis, then by steamboat up the Missouri to Westport. En route little Benton, who had never been strong during the several weeks of his young life, fell ill and died. Doctors attributed the death vaguely to a defective heart, and attempted to console the mother and father by explaining that the child couldn’t have lived long in any case.

  John carried his grief into the wilderness, bidding Jessie and Lily farewell in late October 1848. Jessie sadly returned down the Missouri to St. Louis. There she received a message that General Kearny, in the city and sick with yellow fever, wished to see her—to ask forgiveness for his treatment of John, she inferred. She rejected the invitation. Not only did she blame Kearny for destroying her husband’s career, she convinced herself that the strain of the trial during her pregnancy had harmed her unborn, and now dead, son. Kearny shortly died himself, unforgiven by the angry, grieving mother.

  SHE THEREUPON TRAVELED east to New York—and ran into a hurricane of popular emotion like nothing she or anyone else in America had ever experienced. The letter William Sherman had drafted at Monterey and sent off with the gold-laden Lieutenant Loeser had finally arrived at Washington, and President Polk had translated it into a special message to the American people. “The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service, who have visited the mineral district, and derived the facts which they detail from personal observation,” the president said. The entire California region was in a fit of excitement. “Labor commands a most exorbitant price, and all other pursuits but that of searching for the precious metals are abandoned. Nearly the whole of the male population of the country have gone to the gold district. Ships arriving on the coast are deserted by their crews, and their voyages suspended for want of sailors…. This abundance of gold, and the all-engrossing pursuit of it, have already caused in California an unprecedented rise in the price of the necessaries of life.” Americans from every region of the country—eastern merchants and manufacturers, southern planters, western farmers—could expect to benefit from the gold discovery and the demand it created for those necessaries of life. Polk predicted that California and the other territories acquired from Mexico would “add more to the strength and wealth of the nation than any which have preceded them since the adoption of the Constitution.”

  Rumors of the California gold had been circulating for weeks, but skeptics could easily dismiss such rumors as self-interested efforts to drum up business. Polk’s statement, backed by the can of gold, transformed the rumors into hard news. And it touched off a torrent of commentary and conjecture. “We are on the brink of the Age of Gold,” asserted Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune. The New York Herald declared, “The Eldorado of the old Spaniards is discovered at last. We now have the highest official authority for believing in the discovery of vast gold mines in California, and that the discovery is the greatest and most startling, not to say miraculous, that the history of the last five centuries can produce.”

  New York’s merchants eagerly calculated what part of the profits they might hope to claim. One merchant, Franklin Buck, watched his commercial colleagues lay in goods and passengers for the Far West. “Look out on the docks,” he wrote his sister, appealing to her mind’s eye, “and you will see from twenty to thirty ships loading with all kinds of merchandise and filling up with passengers.” Buck, a Massachusetts man by birth and an heir to the sober Puritan tradition of ancestor Samuel Sewall (of the Salem witch trials), wasn’t one to be swept away by every avaricious enthusiasm that came along. But this was more than he could resist.

  When I see business firms—rich men—going into it, men who know how to make money too, and young men of my acquaintance leaving good situations and fitting themselves out with arms and ammunition, tents, provisions and mining implements, there is something about it—the excitement, the crossing the Isthmus, seeing new countries and the prospect of making a fortune in a few years—that takes hold of my imagination, that tells me “Now is your chance. Strike while the iron is hot!”

  Not all were so sanguine. The Boston Courier—reflecting that dour Puritanism—wondered whether reality was so golden as portrayed. The Spanish, after all, had owned California for two centuries without discovering gold, despite their adeptness at locating it elsewhere. Imagination strained to think that Americans, with no history in precious metals, should find gold within weeks of acquiring the territory. But Boston’s doubts ran deeper than this. Even assuming that the reports were true in their entirety, they didn’t augur well for California, or for America. “The last thing that we should desire for the prosperity and permanent welfare of a country would be the discovery of a gold mine in it. Hardly any thing can be more certain to repress industry, productive labor, thrifty habits, and social improvement in general.” Were the mining regions of South America prosperous? Hardly—they were characterized by “ragged people, ruinous dwellings, neglected agriculture, sloth, ignorance, squalor, dirt, and dissipation.” Americans would do well to heed the lesson of Spain’s experience. “The romance of El Dorado cost the Spaniards more blood, treasure, fatigue, and suffering than all their real conquests and acquisitions in the Western world. It is to be hoped that our own times will not witness a copy of that delusion.”

  JESSIE FRéMONT HAD expected a leisurely start to a genteel journey; what she encountered were mobs of argonauts (as they styled themselves, after Jason and his fle
ece-seeking shipmates) clamoring for space on the vessels heading down the Atlantic coast. For gold-seekers with money, the isthmus was the route of choice. The price of ocean passage, on the New York to Panama and Panama to San Francisco legs together, ran from $200 to $500 depending on the class of one’s shipboard accommodations. And this was just the start. Under the crush of the gold-hunters, traversing the isthmus became a major operation and a major expense.

  Fortunately for Jessie Frémont, money was no problem. Her father was happy to pay her way west. He was rather less happy for her to go unaccompanied by anyone older than Lily. Other Benton relatives were shocked that he even considered allowing her to travel so far, accompanied or otherwise. But he knew Jessie better than they, and knew it was futile to forbid what she had set her mind on—in this case, starting a new life with her husband in California. So her sister’s husband, Richard Taylor Jacob, was pressed into service to escort her to San Francisco.

  Jessie’s maid was less amenable to persuasion. The young black woman had fallen in love with a young man who was distraught at the idea that his darling should leave him, and on such a perilous and lengthy journey, no less. As resourceful as he was desperate, he concocted a story that she was being spirited away against her will. In abolitionist circles in New York, claims of the kidnapping of free blacks for sale into slavery could be counted on to draw large and threatening crowds; just such a crowd gathered to protest this latest alleged atrocity. The young woman in fact was free, she wasn’t being forced against her will, and she wasn’t being sold into slavery. But she was so impressed with her sweetheart’s determination that she told Jessie she couldn’t accompany her to California. Jessie, too, had to admire the young man’s audacity, although she was indignant at being accused of an act that was illegal and, worse, low. The Bentons had always opposed slavery.