by H. W. Brands
So discouraging was this news, at what had seemed the moment of triumph, that the feeling of common purpose that had held the Rangers together across the plains, the Rockies, and the Great Basin suddenly dissolved. Those who knew they could travel faster determined to do so; calling a meeting of the association, they moved to disband. The motion carried. In groups of four, the members split up the common property, with each foursome getting a wagon, a team, and an equal share of what provisions remained. “Mr. Hutchinson, Mr. Bailey, Mr. McClellan and self drew a team and wagon together and shall travel the remainder of the way on our own hook,” Swain recorded.
Through the country of the Pit Indians (so called for the pits they dug to trap game and unwary enemies), Swain and the others trudged, keeping watch night and day to prevent the theft of animals or food. The last week of October and first week of November brought snow on the ridges and rain in the valleys; they slogged through mud up to the axles. As the government beef ran low, they missed meals once again. But finally, at sun down on November 8, Swain and his partners reached the Sacramento River at Lassen’s Ranch.
HUGH HEISKELL AND Sarah Royce met the relief parties on the eastern slope of the Sierras, where the central emigrant trail climbed out of the Great Basin. Heiskell and his Tennessee and Alabama companions had fared better than many overlanders, crossing the Carson Desert without undue hardship, and they subsequently made the ascent of the Carson River into the Sierras in good shape and time. The last stretch over the top slowed them, with the steep trail requiring a doubling of teams to pull the wagons up. Not far from the crest a relief party with extra oxen arrived. “They brought us 6 yoke of cattle to assist us,” Heiskell wrote. “We could have [a word is missing here: managed?] without danger, but we will not insult Uncle Sam by refusing his aid.”
Sarah Royce and her family couldn’t have survived without the government aid. Heiskell and the others told the relief parties about groups farther east who were having serious difficulty. At the rate these stragglers were going, they would never make it over the mountains before snow blocked the pass.
Sarah realized the danger, yet there was nothing to do but plod on. She and the others were inching up the Carson River when they discerned approaching dust on the trail ahead. As all the white people in that country were going the other way, she and Josiah feared Indians. But there was nothing to do about this either, except put on a brave face and hope for the best. Presently the cause of the dust appeared: two riders in loose garments that blew in the breeze, lending the riders the appearance—to Sarah, with her biblical inclinations—of angels. “Their rapidity of motion and the steepness of the descent gave a strong impression of coming down from above, and the thought flashed into my mind, ‘They look heaven-sent.’”
On reaching the Royce party, one of the riders addressed Josiah: “Well, sir, you are the man we are after!”
“How can that be?” answered Josiah.
“Yes, sir, you and your wife, and that little girl, are what brought us as far as this.” The man explained that his orders were to go no farther than the summit. But a woman there said she knew of another party, containing a woman and a small girl, back down the trail and in trouble. The woman who provided the information wouldn’t rest until the man agreed to rescue that woman and girl. “You see, I’ve got a wife and little girl of my own,” he explained, “so I felt just how it was.”
The man went on to say that the Royces would never get their wagon over the summit. Their oxen couldn’t handle the climb, and it was already snowing in the heights. Indeed, a snowstorm had lately closed the pass temporarily; when the next storm would arrive, perhaps closing the pass for the winter, could only be guessed. They must abandon the wagon and pack what they could on the oxen and on two mules the rescuers had brought. Only by this means could they hope to cross the mountains.
Sarah reflected on how, when leaving her Iowa home, she had shuddered to think that all her worldly possessions were reduced to what would fit in a wagon. Now not even the wagon survived. Yet life was more precious than possessions; if they reached California alive and together, that would be enough.
Packing the oxen and managing the mules was no small task, but several days later saw them near the Sierra crest. So much faster was pack- travel than driving wagons that they caught Hugh Heiskell’s train just before the top. “Rice [that is, Royce] came in with his oxen packed and his wife riding a mule—furnished them by Uncle Sam—& carrying a child,” Heiskell wrote on October 18.
The next day the combined party reached the summit. Speaking for every emigrant who achieved that goal, Sarah recalled the glorious moment. “I looked down, far over constantly descending hills, to where a soft haze sent up a warm, rosy glow that seemed to me a smile of welcome; while beyond, occasional faint outlines of other mountains appeared; and I knew I was looking across the Sacramento Valley.”
Never, since the Roman legionry shadowed the earth with their eagles, in search of spoil—not even when Spain ravished the wealth of a world, or England devastated the Indies for its treasures—never has such a gorgeous treasury been opened to the astonished world.
—James Hutchings, gold-hunter and publisher
And so they came, in wave after wave after wave. The Pacific wave splashed tens of thousands of argonauts ashore; the larger rollers from the isthmus and around Cape Horn carried scores of thousands more; the great breakers that crashed across the plains and desert and mountains flooded California with a hundred-and-a-half-thousand immigrants. By 1853 the tally of gold-hunters had passed a quarter million. At that point the Americans, including Sarah Royce and Lewis Manly and the others, composed perhaps two-thirds of the total. The Latin Americans, including Chileans like Vicente Pérez Rosales, made a tenth of the total. The contingent from France, including Jean-Nicolas Perlot, and from other parts of Europe made another tenth. Yee Ah Tye and his Chinese compatriots were somewhat less than a tenth, while Tom Archer and the Australians were about a third of the Chinese. (Much guesswork goes into these numbers, as the new Californians were too busy digging gold to queue up for counting, but the figures give an idea of the size and composition of the immigration.)
Although the difficulty of their journeys had varied drastically—Tom Archer’s Pacific voyage was a pleasure cruise compared to the Great Basin ordeals of Sarah Royce and Lewis Manly—nearly all the immigrants felt tremendous relief on reaching California. When they stepped ashore at Monterey or San Francisco, or gazed down upon the Sacramento Valley from the summit of the Sierras, most sensed a huge burden lifting from their souls. Their bones wouldn’t bleach on the desert; their flesh wouldn’t feed the fishes; their children wouldn’t be orphaned for their parents’ reckless decision to leave home. They had survived; they had triumphed.
But they soon discovered that their struggle had just begun. For those who came by sea, the journey from harbor to mines could be as difficult and dangerous as the journey from home to California. And when the argonauts reached the diggings, the place where, in their dreams, they had imagined plucking gold nuggets from the ground, they encountered another set of challenges. They had to master the art of mining, which turned out to involve much more than simply pocketing nuggets. Where the inherited techniques of the art fell short of the argonauts’ need, they had to invent new ones, often complicated and costly.
And they had to do all this amid a human welter none had ever experienced. The gold-hunters scrambled over each other at San Francisco; they elbowed and jostled one another in the mining camps. They competed fiercely in the river bottoms and gravel bars for the best claims. Time was money, and none had a moment to lose.
A few found what they came for, filling their pockets easily and heading home convinced that California was God’s apology for ousting Adam and Eve from the Garden. But the many more toiled in a decidedly post-Edenic state, with uncertain and often diminishing success.
Had the immigrants known what a task the gold-hunting would be, their spirits might have
failed. Yet had they been the kind to weigh trials in advance and be daunted, they wouldn’t have come in the first place. And so, with the same determination—and in many cases blithe ignorance—that had launched them out upon the stormy oceans and over the endless plains and desert, they embarked on the next phase of their great adventure: the apportioning of El Dorado.
7
With a Washbowl on My Knee
Some two hundred million years before Sarah Royce and Hugh Heiskell and the other overlanders crossed the Sierra summit, giant bubbles began forming far beneath the surface of the earth. These weren’t bubbles of air, but of molten rock, and although their weight totaled perhaps a quadrillion tons (give or take a few hundred trillion), they were lighter than the surrounding material and accordingly buoyant. The bubbles had their genesis in the constant recycling of the earth’s crust, from its fiery emergence out of the mantle beneath what would become the Atlantic Ocean, through its conveyorlike transport across the earth’s surface, to its plunging return to the abyss. As it plunged, the crust grew hot again and started to melt; the melting produced the bubbles that floated slowly—very, very slowly— upward.
In some places the bubbles reached the surface. Where they did, the molten rock spilled forth as lava, covering the landscape in sheets of liquid flame. But the greatest part of the molten rock never got that far. Cooling as it ascended, it froze in place, creating what geologists would call the Sierra Nevada batholith, a giant body of granite underlying twenty-five thousand square miles of the future states of California and Nevada.
The melting, bubbling, and cooling was a messy process. Different minerals in the rock liquefied at different temperatures; these minerals were then mobilized by water squeezed from the rock under the enormous pressure. As the rock cooled, the minerals precipitated out in streaks or veins. Eons hence, humans would learn to separate and concentrate chemical elements by similar distillation methods; in doing so they would be puny mimics of the planet beneath their feet. The results of the subterranean refining process were striking. Gold, for example, occurs in the crust of the earth at an average concentration of five parts per billion. But the melting and cooling that produced the Sierra batholith yielded veins of gold-bearing quartz in which the gold occurred in concentrations as high as one hundred million parts per billion.
Yet most of this gold was trapped far below the surface of the earth, where it remained for tens of millions of years. About four million years before the arrival of the Royces and the rest, however, the crust that contained the batholith and the golden quartz began to crumple and heave, as its forward edge crashed down into the mantle. Along a front stretching four hundred miles from north to south, the batholith was raised thousands of feet into the air; so too were the veins of gold.
Then the forces of erosion went to work. During chilly spells—spells long by human standards but fleeting in geological terms—glaciers ground away at the granite, producing such sculptures as Yosemite Valley. In warmer eras, water did the heavy work, aided by seasonal ice that crept into crevices and chiseled off pieces of the batholith, tumbling them down into the riverbeds where the rushing water pummeled them. (Similar action farther east deposited the boulders that slowed Lewis Manly’s journey through the Green River gorge.)
The gold, having been chemically distilled beneath the surface, now was mechanically sifted from the quartz that encased it. The glaciers, the winter ice, and especially the rushing water attacked the veins, grinding them to gravel, sand, and dust. In the steeper regions, the water carried all the rubble indiscriminately: large pieces and small, heavy pieces and light. But wherever the water slowed, the densest material drifted to the bottom, catching behind boulders, accumulating in eddies, piling up along the inside of river bends. The gold, seven times heavier than the quartz, sank while the quartz was carried away.
Where the gold sank it waited—waited, in nearly all cases, to be buried anew by additional debris borne down from the higher elevations. Time and again the riverbeds shifted; the caches of gold were entombed under tons of gravel and sand and mud. Forests grew atop the tombs, quiet and serene by the measure of biological time, amid a landscape that remained violently unsettled in geological time.
Eventually those forests attracted an inquisitive species, a biped drawn to the forests for their timber, but possessing a peculiar penchant for shiny yellow metal. When this species began scratching about in one of the streams as yet unburied, biological time and geological time abruptly intersected, and entered historical time.
“THE GOLD IS IN fine bright scales and is very pure,” William Sherman wrote a friend, regarding the diggings on the American River.
It is separated from the earth and gravel by washing in the pans by hand, but the better plan is in a kind of inclined trough with cleats nailed across the bottom. A grate is placed over the highest part of this trough, upon which the gravel is thrown, afterward the water. The gold passes into the trough, the gravel and stones are removed, and by a constant dashing of water and rocking the machine, the earthy matter is washed off, leaving the gold mixed with black sand in the bottom of the machine. These are separated by drying them in the sun and blowing off the sand, leaving the gold pure. You would be astonished at the ease with which the precious metal is obtained; any man by common industry can make $25 a day.
The ease of the gold-gathering was certainly astonishing, but the principle behind it wasn’t surprising, or at least it wouldn’t have been surprising had Sherman and those in the streambeds understood the geology of gold. The heat of the earth—the heat that drove the crustal plates to their collision at the western edge of North America, the heat that then melted the rock and boiled out the precious metal—had done the hard work over two hundred million years; all that remained for humans was to harvest what the earth had already collected. In time a practical knowledge of gold’s geology would develop along the Sierra front, and prospectors would acquire a keen sense for which formations were likely to yield pay dirt. But in the beginning they operated blindly, groping about the placers (pronounced plassers, derived from the Spanish placer—“to please”—and referring to the deposits of gold in streambeds) for each new nugget, each fresh niche of gold dust.
The gold-hunters at first employed the most rudimentary and unspecialized equipment. A sheath knife loosened nuggets; a shovel shifted gravel. Shortly the miners (for so they were called, even though few initially went near anything easterners associated with “mines”) ascended to the next rung of technology: ordinary tools turned to novel ends. A pan or a washbowl was filled with a slurry of sand and water. The vessel was rocked back and forth by hand, causing the water to spill over the sides, carrying with it the comparatively light quartz sand and leaving behind the much heavier gold. Where necessary, a final sifting was accomplished by letting the leavings dry and blowing away the last of the sand.
Local Indians soon joined the hunt, once they discovered what the whites would pay for gold. The Indians often used sticks instead of shovels, and baskets in place of washbowls. And they made a family affair of the undertaking. “The system they employed for washing the earth was the same as that still used by our panners of gold, but more methodical,” wrote Vicente Pérez Rosales.
With sticks hardened in the fire, or an occasional worn-out tool of civilization, the men dug until they came to the circa, one of the strata most largely composed of sand and of the heavy bodies deposited in the valleys by the water that drains into them. This sand the children loaded into tightly woven grass baskets and carried to the banks of the stream where a row of women with fine trays of the same material washed it, wrapping the gold in small packages to the value of about two Spanish gold pieces, for use in trading.
From stick and sheath knife, washbowl and basket, the next step up the ladder of mining technology was the cradle. Pérez Rosales and his Chilean companions had made their way to Weber Creek, a tributary of the American River above Sutter’s Fort. They observed the Indians’ method of g
athering gold and briefly tried copying it (using pan and scoop rather than basket and stick). The results were disappointing. “For the first three days the harvest was meager,” Pérez Rosales wrote. Then they discovered some of their neighbors using the “California cradle.”
The cradle is a very simple and ingenious apparatus that has all the advantages of a scoop on a colossal scale, but is no larger than an actual cradle a yard and a half long by half a yard wide, placed so that the head rests on a base a fourth higher than the one at the foot. These bases are nothing more than wooden arcs that facilitate the rocking of the cradle. The upper end of the latter holds a rough sieve built of pieces of wood bored full of holes; the foot has no bottom. Along the floor of this singular device at intervals of four inches are nailed strips of wood a quarter of an inch square. These prevent the escape of the heavy particles mixed with the mud that runs down the inclined floor.
The method of using this primitive but highly important machine is so simple and easy that the dullest observer can take his diploma in the science in no time at all. One man feeds the gold- bearing earth into the sieve, another pours buckets of water over it, a third rocks the cradle, and finally still another takes out by hand the stones that are too large to pass through the strainer, examines them, and throws away such as do not contain gold. The water rinses the earth through the seive, the mixture drops down and flows over the sloping bottom, and the gold and other more or less heavy bodies lodge in the cleats provided by the crosswise strips of wood. Every ten minutes the work is interrupted and the gold dust and nuggets mixed with iron that have been caught in these small angles are collected. This material is then placed in a hand trough for separation later, and the operation continues all day long.
