by H. W. Brands
“Why, California, of course.”
Jessie added, in her account of the moment, “And with the name which had been so long his guiding star, he spoke no more.”
John’s star was Jessie’s also. After his death she settled in Los Angeles, the town that had been eclipsed by San Francisco during the Gold Rush but was now coming into its own as the center of activity in southern California. Although she couldn’t afford to buy a house, admirers built her a comfortable home of redwood, situated in a grove of orange trees a few miles from the old pueblo. Lily, long since a grown woman, tended to her mother till Jessie died in 1902.
THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that Jessie Frémont ever met Sarah Royce, whose courage and fortitude en route to the goldfields matched her own— the one traveling across the isthmus, the other over the plains and desert. But in Jessie’s later years, she did meet Sarah’s son, Josiah Royce.
After Weaverville and San Francisco, Sarah and the elder Josiah sampled several locations along the Sierra front and in the Sacramento Valley before settling at Grass Valley, north of Coloma. There Sarah got the house she had been yearning for, and a community more composed than any she had experienced since Iowa. “There were three churches, all very well attended, and each sustaining a Sunday school,” she wrote. “There was also a good-sized public school, as well as one or two social and beneficent societies.” She and Josiah had two more daughters, a son who died in infancy, and then a second son, named for his father.
The family remained in the gold country till Josiah was ten, when, to improve his educational opportunities—he already was showing signs of brilliance at books—they moved to San Francisco, where he was enrolled in a school recently named for Abraham Lincoln. Though the city’s Vigilance Committee had disbanded years before, some of its spirit persisted on the playground. “My comrades very generally found me disagreeably striking in my appearance, by reason of the fact that I was redheaded, freckled, countrified, quaint, and unable to play boys’ games,” Josiah recalled. “The boys in question gave me my first introduction to the ‘majesty of the community.’ ” He survived to attend high school, and then to cross the bay to Oakland, where the state university specified by the constitution of 1849 had only recently opened (rather than at Vallejo, as Mariano Vallejo had hoped. The university moved to Berkeley midway through Royce’s undergraduate years). Royce impressed the president of the university, who, after relocating east, invited Royce to join him at the newly established Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. There Royce earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1878. Except for a short stint back at Berkeley, he spent the rest of his professional life in the east, mostly at Harvard.
Yet he never forgot his California roots, and when a Boston publisher invited him to write a book about the early days of California, he happily accepted. Research for the book led him to Jessie and John Frémont, whose published version of John’s role in the conquest of California struck Royce as entirely too heroic. Royce thought the Mexicans had justice on their side in resisting Frémont, whom Royce castigated as the perpetrator of “purely aggressive” actions against a legitimate government. (To a friend Royce later explained that he might have entitled the pertinent book chapter “Frémont’s League with the Devil.”) Yet though Royce had nothing good to say about the fiercely protective Jessie, he found John oddly appealing, not least in his convenient lapses of memory. The old soldier displayed, as Royce described it, a “charming and courteous mendacity.”
Royce’s book was a history of California to 1856; it was also a study of the American character as it evolved under the peculiar conditions of the Gold Rush. Before the Forty-Niners went west, Royce explained, they fairly well represented the national character as it then existed. But amid the pressures of the hunt for wealth, certain traits emerged more clearly in California than elsewhere.
Nowhere else… were we ever before so long forced by circum stances to live at the mercy of a very wayward chance, to give to even our most legitimate business a dangerously speculative character. Nowhere else were we driven so hastily to improvise a government for a large body of strangers; and nowhere else did fortune so nearly deprive us for a little time of our natural devotion to the duties of citizenship.
Californians’ mistakes were undeniable. “We exhibited a novel degree of carelessness and overhastiness, an extravagant trust in luck, a previously unknown blindness to our social duties, and an indifference to the rights of foreigners.” But Californians also showed some of the best American traits, and in doing so set an honorable path for the future. “As a body, our pioneer community in California was persistently cheerful, energetic, courageous, and teachable. In a few years it had repented of its graver faults, it had endured with charming good humor their severest penalties, and it was ready to begin with fresh devotion the work whose true importance it had now at length learned: the work of building a well-organized, permanent, and progressive State on the Pacific Coast.”
THAT SARAH ROYCE remained in California after the Gold Rush, making her permanent home there, was no great surprise. That Yee Ah Tye did the same was rather more remarkable. Like most of the argonauts, but especially the Chinese, for whom tending ancestral shrines was a filial duty, Yee aimed to return to his native land once he made his fortune in the goldfields. Yet notwithstanding the rampant prejudice against the Chinese—formalized by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the immigration of Chinese laborers—Yee chose to stay in California. Perhaps it was the personal freedom of America that appealed to him; perhaps he simply liked the idea of being able to make more money than he could ever imagine making in China. He took what he earned as an association leader in San Francisco and invested in commercial and mining operations on the Feather River. At one point he employed as many as a hundred men. By the time of his 1896 death he was honored among Asian- and Euro-Americans alike. The Plumas National-Bulletin, in reporting his passing, described him as “of unusual intelligence and business capacity, and a courteous gentleman.” His family (“all of the children being good English scholars, and the girls accomplished musicians”) had “many friends among the Americans who will feel sorry to learn of their bereavement.” Just before his death, Yee made his strongest statement of attachment to his adopted country, insisting that his bones not be returned to China, as was customary among his countrymen, but remain in America.
OTHER ARGONAUTS DID get home. Vicente Pérez Rosales returned to Chile, where he entered the service of the Chilean government. In recognition of his California experience, he was sent to Europe to promote immigration to the New World—to Chile, naturally, rather than California. Subsequently he became a provincial administrator in Concepción, and then a Chilean senator.
Tom Archer and Edward Hargraves returned to Australia, the former to resume his previous obscurity, the latter to become a national hero (but not a knight).
Jean-Nicolas Perlot made it back to Paris and then Belgium, albeit by a circuitous route. Perlot left California in 1857 for the headwaters of the Columbia River, where gold had been discovered. But he ran out of money in Portland, and opened a vegetable gardening business there. Eventually the call of home drew him east across the United States and the Atlantic. He married a girl from his ancestral town of Herbeumont. He returned with her to Portland, but she missed Belgium and convinced him that the old country was where they belonged. They bought a house in Arlon and raised four children, and vegetables. “I have remained a gardener,” Perlot wrote shortly before his death, at the age of seventy-seven. “Only I myself consume the vegetables I grow.”
William Swain survived the fevers of Chagres and rejoined Sabrina and Eliza in upstate New York. With the five hundred dollars he brought back from California, he purchased some land and developed an orchard with brother George; before long they were the leading peach growers in Niagara County.
Lewis Manly returned to Wisconsin—only to realize he’d seen too much of the elephant to resume his unexciting former life. He packed up and w
ent west again, this time giving Death Valley a wide berth. He eventually bought a ranch in the Santa Clara Valley, near San Jose.
NOT TILL 1877 did William Sherman make the trip he promised Grenville Dodge: to the Pacific by train. As commanding general of the army, Sherman had his hands full with official duties. He directed continuing efforts to suppress Indian resistance on the plains, employing at times the harsh tactics he warned the Sioux against at Fort Laramie. He stopped short, however, of enlisting civilian volunteers in the wake of Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn, as many public officials advocated; doubtless his experience with volunteer law enforcement in San Francisco influenced his decision. (In 1881, following the assassination of President James Garfield by Charles Guiteau, Sherman stationed troops around Guiteau’s jail cell to forestall any vigilante action.) During this same period he authorized retaliation against the Modoc tribe of northern California after their leader—called Captain Jack by whites—killed General Edward Canby, the head of a truce commission and a comrade of Sherman’s from the days at Monterey in the Mexican War. (The defeat of Captain Jack essentially marked the end of Indian resistance in California.)
In 1875, amid the serial scandals that engulfed the presidency of Ulysses Grant, Sherman published his memoirs of the Civil War (and of his time in California before the war). As Grant’s stock slipped, Sherman’s rose, and he became, in the eyes of many Americans of the North and West, the country’s model military hero. That southerners greeted his memoirs with renewed bitterness seemed to leaders of the Republican party all the more cause to sponsor Sherman for the presidency. In 1876, in 1880, and again in 1884, concerted draft-Sherman movements developed; only when he responded to the best-organized of the campaigns, in 1884, with what became the definitive statement of denial—“I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected”—did the appeals die down.
For the rest of his life he remained a celebrity and a speaker much in demand. Chauncey Depew, no mean toastmaster himself, called Sherman “the readiest and most original talker in the United States.” In Columbus, Ohio, Sherman added another epigram to the American lexicon when he told the younger generation not to get the wrong idea about war. “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory,” he said. “But boys, it is all hell.”
Having complained during the 1850s at the agitation over slavery, Sherman in the 1880s became an advocate for African-American equality. He recommended against the segregation of black troops within the army, and urged that if the southern states continued to deny the franchise to blacks, they lose seats in Congress or, in the extreme case, face another northern invasion.
With the encouragement of Sam Clemens, he published a revised edition of his memoirs in 1885. He wrote various magazine articles, including one entitled “Old Times in California.” He died in New York City in 1891.
ROBERT WATERMAN AND James Douglass were tried in San Francisco for murder and lesser crimes in their brutal treatment of the crew of the Challenge on its failed run for the record around Cape Horn. The jury deadlocked over Captain Waterman on the murder charge, convicting him instead of cruel treatment and fining him $400. First Mate Douglass was convicted of murder (in the death of the Italian, Pawpaw) and of assault, but was merely fined $250, the jury evidently accepting Waterman’s defiant word—in which Douglass gladly concurred—that the mate was simply following orders.
JOHN SUTTER’S BAD LUCK lasted the rest of his life. Acting on the philosophy he developed by hard experience during the Gold Rush years—“Gold digging is a lottery,” he said; “among hundreds, maybe one or two get rich from it. Most people prefer a safe investment; farming is the best of all”—he retired to his farm on the Feather River. He regaled visitors with stories of California before the Gold Rush and sat for portraits by itinerant painters, but drank away what little money he still had. In 1864 the California legislature, embarrassed at the poverty of the man who was widely called the father of California, voted him $15,000, payable over five years at $250 per month. He said he disdained charity but would accept the payment as restitution for the injuries done him.
In 1865 he reprised his earlier role as patron of the tired and hungry, and took in a drifter, who proceeded to rob him. When, reprising his role as law-giver, he had the man apprehended and whipped, the miscreant responded by burning down Sutter’s farmhouse. With no place to live, Sutter sailed for the American East, where he hoped to secure compensation from Congress for what he had lost. Various influential people endorsed his petition; William Sherman wrote, “Your hospitality was proverbial. It was the common belief that if not for your fort, and your herds of cattle, sheep, etc., the immigrants arriving in California during the years 1847, 8 and 9 would have suffered for food. It was owing to your efforts to develop the country, more especially in your building the grist mill and the sawmill at Coloma, that the world was indebted for the discovery of the gold mines.” After years of dithering, the relevant House committee in 1880 reported favorably on a Sutter relief bill; a joint resolution was introduced in the Senate to grant the old impresario $50,000. The measure got caught in the politics of that election year, yet its sponsors assured Sutter that it would pass first thing the next session.
Sutter died of undetermined but presumably natural causes, before Congress met again.
A MID HIS OWN ill fortune, Sutter could take a certain pleasure from the downfall of the man responsible for much of his grief. Till the end of the 1850s, Sam Brannan maintained his Midas touch. His business operations in Sacramento and San Francisco paid handsomely, allowing him to diversify still further. He bought land in southern California, near Los Angeles, and in Hawaii, at Honolulu. He traded across the Pacific to China, and across the Atlantic to Europe. He imported prime livestock and the best varieties of wine grapes.
He also invested heavily in the Napa Valley, north of San Francisco. But the valley, which Brannan hoped to develop as a watering spot for the well-to-do, proved deeper than it looked, at least with regard to Brannan’s money. Tens of thousands of dollars went in, and very little came out. As one common version of the story explained, the only thing Brannan got from his investment in Napa was the liquor from a distillery there—and he got far too much of that. He began to exhibit the same weakness for drink that afflicted Sutter; this clouded his judgment and limited his ability to deal with such new challenges as the Civil War. Unlike Asbury Harpending and his secessionist friends, Brannan was an outspoken Unionist, although he sometimes spoke too soon, as when he threw a party to celebrate the capture of Charleston—before the city fell to Federal forces.
Brannan’s wife divorced him and took their children; his payments to her drained him badly. Fair-weather friends fled to others who had better cash flow. He traveled to Mexico to redeem some old bonds and was compensated in land, which he hoped would allow him to turn his affairs around. But the Indians occupying the land had other notions and ran him off. He married again, to a Mexican woman, who cared for him at Escondido, north of San Diego, as his alcoholism deepened and depression set in.
He died at Escondido in 1889. His widow lacked the money to bury him, so the body lay unclaimed in a vault for more than a year. Finally a nephew appeared and arranged an interment.
MARIANO VALLEJO SPENT the last years of his life in poverty of a more genteel sort, on a remnant of his once-vast empire, a small parcel at Sonoma called Lachryma Montis. The name referred to an artesian spring that flowed like tears from a hillside, but it might also have summarized Vallejo’s feelings on retreating there.
Yet Vallejo wasn’t one to dwell on his losses. Though accustomed to being the bestower of gifts rather than the recipient, he and his wife lived off the generosity of their son-in-law, John Frisbie, until the mid-1870s, when Frisbie lost heavily in a Nevada bubble. The younger man fled his creditors for Mexico, where he ingratiated himself to President Porfirio Díaz by arranging a reduction of American tariffs on Mexican imports. Díaz rewarded Frisbie with, among other ite
ms, a gold mine. Before long he was far richer than he had ever been in the United States, and he resumed support of his parents-in-law.
At times Vallejo waxed nostalgic for the days before the Americans. “If the Californians could all gather together to breathe a lament,” he wrote, “it would reach Heaven as a moving sigh which would cause fear and consternation to the Universe. What misery!… This country was the true Eden, the land of promise where hunger was never known.”
More often, however, he was willing to forgive and forget. To stretch the household budget, he taught himself to do his own maintenance and repair work. He learned to operate the machinery of the Sonoma waterworks. He engaged, in a minor way, in various civic and political activities, accepting appointment to the state horticultural board and addressing audiences on holidays. He wrote his memoirs and gathered the papers and recollections of other native Californians. And he reaffirmed the faith that had been sorely tested during the dark days—for him—of the Gold Rush. “Believe me, Ricardo,” he wrote another son-in-law (who happened to be the Mexican consul in California), “American democracy is the best democracy in the world.” When one of his sons spoke of pursuing old grievances, Vallejo answered, “No, let it go. What good to keep open an old sore? Let the wound heal.”
CONSIDERING THE FATE of Vallejo, Brannan, Sutter, and Frémont, one might easily conclude that, whatever its actual chemical properties, the gold of California was corrosive of personal happiness, and that its coefficient of friction was such that it invariably slipped through the hands of those who acquired it.
Certainly there is something to this observation. Many of those, like Vallejo and Sutter, whose wealth and stature derived from the old regime, did indeed see their positions dissolve as a result of the changes the Gold Rush set in motion. And as for Brannan and Frémont, the proverbial warning about easy come, easy go, doubtless applied.
