by H. W. Brands
Yet there were others who managed to hold on to their fortunes, and indeed multiply them. George Hearst was the best example in this regard, with one mining success leading to another and another. But even in Hearst’s case, the good example didn’t extend to the second generation. William Randolph Hearst proved to be the only child of George and Phoebe, from whom he inherited far more money than was good for him. Like Josiah Royce, Will Hearst found his way to Harvard—as a student who was expelled for a practical joke that involved sending chamber pots to professors. He took up journalism back in San Francisco, importing from New York the obsession with sex scandals, messy murders, and other manifestations of human frailty that gave the yellow press of the 1890s its peculiar hue. He also nominated himself guardian of the people against the monied interests. The incongruity of the millionaire’s boy assaulting the citadel of privilege cocked more than a few eyebrows, but when Hearst led a campaign that prevented the Central Pacific from reneging on its debts to American taxpayers, he earned an appreciative, if still somewhat puzzled, following.
Hearst expanded his ambitions east by purchasing the New York Morning Journal. Matching Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World sensation for sensation, Hearst’s Journal helped provoke the Spanish-American War, and it provided a springboard for its owner’s entry into elective politics. He ran for Congress and was twice victorious; in 1904 he sought the Democratic nomination for president. Failing, he ran for governor of New York; when this bid likewise fell shy, he threw himself into the creation of a media empire that spanned the country. He also indulged himself in an openly adulterous and long-running romance, and in the construction of an egregious villa at San Simeon on the California coast, where he dreamed of what could have been had he possessed a little more of the genuine common touch.
THE SON OF LELAND Stanford might have turned out not much different from William Randolph Hearst, had he lived. Like George and Phoebe Hearst, Leland and Jane Stanford had just one child, whom they spoiled no less than the Hearsts spoiled their Will. But Leland Jr. died in his teens, compelling his parents to find something else to do with their money. By the bereaved father’s own testimony, he was visited by the ghost of his son, who told him he must devote his fortune to humanity. Reflecting that Leland Jr. would soon have gone off to college, Leland and Jane determined to build a college for other young people. A horse farm they owned at Palo Alto (not far from Lewis Manly’s ranch) seemed a suitable site, and within weeks they were interviewing the most distinguished educators in America. The Leland Stanford Junior University was chartered in 1885; construction commenced in 1887; the first students arrived in 1891.
The infant university drew its students primarily from the West Coast. The inaugural class included an orphan from Oregon named Herbert Hoover, who studied mining engineering and went on to make a fortune finding gold and other minerals in Australia, China, Russia, and more exotic locales. His postmining career as American president proved rather less successful, but by the time voters, in the 1932 election, retired Hoover to Palo Alto, Leland Stanford’s university was emphasizing engineering of another sort. In the electrical engineering department a professor named Frederick Terman played matchmaker to two former students, encouraging them to commercialize certain promising ideas they’d been talking about; a coin flip determined that William Hewlett’s name would precede David Packard’s on the masthead of the company they created.
Hewlett-Packard struggled during the late 1930s, along with most of corporate America, but as the Great Depression gave way to World War II, the U.S. government discovered a need for the testing equipment the company produced. By war’s end Hewlett-Packard had a hundred employees and sales of more than $1 million per year. Electronics was becoming big business, and Hewlett-Packard led the field.
Soon the neighborhood near Leland Stanford’s old farm was full of bright young men (they were nearly all men) with bright new ideas. The brightest idea was the transistor, which multiplied (and miniaturized) into the integrated circuit. Not long after the latter made its market debut, an area booster dubbed the region Silicon Valley, for the humble material that provided the basis for the electronic marvels devised and fabricated there. Yet there was nothing humble about the prices the silicon technology commanded, and the principals of the new companies soon found themselves astonishingly rich.
By then the term “gold rush” had long been applied to any sudden efflorescence of wealth and opportunity. There was a “gold rush” for the oil (“black gold”) of Pennsylvania in the 1860s, and of Texas after 1900 and again in the 1930s, and of Alaska in the 1970s. There was a rush for land in Oklahoma in the 1890s and in Florida in the 1920s. The bull market of Wall Street in the 1920s and the defense industry in the 1950s were likened to gold rushes. Any entrepreneur who achieved overnight success, as all dreamed of doing, was described as striking it rich.
But in the case of Silicon Valley in the 1980s and 1990s—the case that epitomized modern American success—the parallels to the original Gold Rush were especially apt. As in the first Gold Rush, people came from all over the world to try their luck in Silicon Valley. The pace of life in the valley was as frenetic as it had been in the diggings—more frenetic, in fact, since neither night nor winter suspended work in the silicon mines. Both settings were permeated by a conviction that tremendous opportunities existed but faded fast. “Time is money,” Jean-Nicolas Perlot heard over and over in the gold diggings; his silicon successors constantly sought the grail of “the new new thing.” In each case random chance played a large role, and if failure preceded success, the appropriate response was not to blame oneself but one’s luck, and try again. A denizen of Silicon Valley described the “vein of gold” that ran through the valley, and declared, “Anybody can reach down into it and strike it rich.” But not everybody would. “No matter how big your hand is, if you reach down in the wrong spot, you don’t get anything.” A Silicon Valley venture capitalist called the phenomenon in which he participated “the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet,” which may have been true. But when the high-tech bubble burst in the spring of 2000, the losses were also among the largest in history. It was poetic (or perhaps geologic) justice that silicon was the primary constituent of both the quartz of the Mother Lode and the semiconductors of Silicon Valley; in each case, a lead that looked promising at the surface could attract huge amounts of capital and then play out before yielding a profit.
So striking were the similarities between the Gold Rush and the Silicon Rush that it was tempting to seek a causal connection. Was it blind chance that determined that of all the places in the world where the silicon revolution might have occurred, it happened in the land of the Gold Rush? Silicon is ubiquitous, and smart people are portable; but the highly charged atmosphere in which the two combined to produce Hewlett- Packard and Fairchild and Intel and Xerox PARC and Sun and Cisco and Netscape and Yahoo was peculiar to California; or at least the California atmosphere carried a larger charge—of hell-for-leather entrepreneurship— than the air did elsewhere. California had seen and done it all before. Chambers of commerce in every region of the country envied Silicon Valley’s success and tried to reproduce it; Silicon Forest sprang up in the Northwest, Silicon Hills in central Texas, Silicon Alley in New York City. But none of the imitations quite matched the original, perhaps because nowhere else was the new American dream such a fundamental part of the psychic landscape.
“WE ARE ON THE brink of the age of gold,” Horace Greeley had said in 1848. The reforming editor wrote better than he knew. The discovery at Coloma commenced a revolution that rumbled across the oceans and continents to the ends of the earth, and echoed down the decades to the dawn of the third millennium. The revolution manifested itself demographically, in drawing hundreds of thousands of people to California; politically, in propelling America along the path to the Civil War; economically, in spurring the construction of the transcontinental railroad. But beyond everything else, the Gold Rush established
a new template for the American dream. America had always been the land of promise, but never had the promise been so decidedly—so gloriously—material. The new dream held out the hope that anyone could have what everyone wants: respite from toil, security in old age, a better life for one’s children. By no means could all achieve success (fleeting or otherwise) at the level of John Frémont or George Hearst or Sam Brannan or Leland Stanford. But all could reasonably hope to emulate Jean-Nicolas Perlot, gardening happily in Herbeumont; or William Swain, in his orchard near Niagara Falls; or Lewis Manly, on his ranch outside San Jose; or Sarah Royce, in her house in Grass Valley; or Yee Ah Tye, on the banks of the Feather River.
To be sure, the new dream had a dark side; it destroyed even as it created. The argonauts dismantled John Sutter’s handiwork all at once; the lawyers took longer to dispossess Mariano Vallejo. The Indians of California lost far more. Considering the grim fate of aboriginal peoples almost everywhere the American flag was raised, the destruction of the tribes of California may not have depended on the discovery of gold there, but the gold certainly hastened the process—as it hastened the demise of the plains tribes corralled onto reservations to allow the Pacific railroad to go through. Of a different nature was the damage mining operations did to the ecology of California, from the modest excavations of the placermen to the mountain-moving of the hydraulickers. (Eventually the silting caused by the latter provoked an outcry that compelled the water cannons to cease fire.) The speculative scandals of the post–Civil War era and the emergence of monopolies weren’t the work of the California experience alone, but to the extent the Gold Rush mentality migrated east along the route of the Pacific railroad, they too might be fairly charged against the new American dream.
Were the benefits worth the cost? To ask the question is to imply that an alternative existed. Maybe it did, but only if human nature could have resisted the temptation to seek a shortcut to happiness. America’s enthronement of individualism magnified the impact of the gold discovery; the gold rushes to Canada and Siberia were more orderly than the rush to California. But they were also less history-shaping, partly because neither the Klondike nor Siberia was anyone’s vision of paradise, but also because neither Canada nor Russia elevated the pursuit of happiness to the status of inalienable right. Americans, and those who came to America, cherished that right, and when the gold of California promised a way to find happiness all at once, they couldn’t resist.
And in this lay the ultimate meaning of the Gold Rush. The Gold Rush shaped history so profoundly because it harnessed the most basic of human desires, the desire for happiness. None of the gold-seekers went to California to build a new state, to force a resolution of the sectional conflict, to construct a transcontinental railroad, to reconstruct the American dream. They went to California to seek individual happiness. Some found it; some didn’t. But the side effect of their pursuit—the cumulative outcome of their individual quests—was a transformation of American history. The men and women of the Gold Rush hoped to change their lives by going to California; in the bargain they changed their world.
AS FOR THE CARPENTER who set everything in motion, he never reached El Dorado. The sawmill at Coloma cut logs intermittently for three years before river miners diverted the American River and left the mill dry and powerless. Anyway, by then James Marshall had managed to lose the money he made from the cutting, for even less than his partner, Sutter, was the unlucky and unworldly Marshall able to accomplish the transition from the old era to the new. He spent the next thirty-five years trying to win acknowledgment of his role in creating the new California. But his neighbors were in too much of a hurry exploiting his discovery to notice, and he died forgotten and nearly destitute.
Yet he was remembered after his death, and a statue was erected in his honor. The statue stands above the river at Coloma, in a hillside copse of trees. From a stone pedestal Marshall gazes out across the valley. The mill is long gone, and the millrace obliterated. But so is most evidence of the hordes who followed Marshall here, and the general scene isn’t much different than it was on that sunny, cold morning in 1848, when the carpenter’s eye fell on the glittering yellow flakes that set the heart of the world aquiver.
Sources
The principal sources for this book are the words of the men and women who went to California in search of gold, or whose lives were otherwise touched by the gold discoveries there. In many cases, these words were put to writing contemporaneously, in the form of diaries, journals, and letters. In some cases they were recorded after the fact, as reminiscences or memoirs. A large number of these writings have been published; others remain unpublished, in archives and other depositories. The bibliography below includes all those firsthand accounts that have been quoted in the text as well as many others that have provided important information.
The bibliography also includes secondary works: works authored not by participants or eyewitnesses but by historians and others writing after the fact. In rare cases such secondary studies have been quoted in the text, and are cited, like the primary sources, in the page notes. More often, these works of history, geology, economics, and other disciplines provide background material that broadly informs the text in a way that defies specific citation. A few works are neither quite primary nor exactly secondary, but something in between. J. S. Holliday’s The World Rushed In, for example, reproduces the diary and letters of William Swain, which have been quoted in several places in the text; the book also provides insightful commentary on Swain’s great adventure. Any comprehensive bibliography of secondary works on the Gold Rush and other events related here would run to tens of thousands of entries; consequently, only those works that have been most helpful to the present author have been included.
The notes immediately below provide brief references to collections and works described in full detail in the bibliography.
Prologue: The Baron and the Carpenter
2 “On Christmas morning”: Bigler, following p. 66.
2 “Last Sunday”: Smith, 108.
5 “Made a contract”: Sutter, 72.
6 “decent appearance”: Gay, 55.
7 “In May 1847”: ibid., 520–23.
11 “Their bones”: Smith, 102n.
11 “The provisions”: Dillon (1967), 261.
12 “We crossed”: Smith, 102.
12–13 “We was… chill and fever”: ibid., 104–7.
13 “We have had”: ibid., 106.
14 “Started 5 wagons”: Sutter, 93.
14 “Yesterday… ever since”: Smith, 106–7.
14 “It raised”: Smith, 107.
14 “Clear as a bell”: Paul, ed., 61.
16 “I picked up”: ibid., 118.
16 “I have found it… nothing else”: ibid.
17 “odd spells”: Smith, 110.
18 “From the unusual agitation”: Paul, ed., 122.
18–19 “I declared… such a discovery”: ibid., 129.
Part One: The Gathering of Peoples
23 “As when some carcass”: Bancroft, 6:52.
1. In the Footsteps of Father Serra
28–30 “The hills… this might be”: Dana, 52, 71, 152–53, 209–10.
33 “band of robbers”: Nevins (1928), 1:264–65.
33 “If we are unjustly”: Bancroft, 5:14.
34 “Captain, shall I take”: Bancroft, 5:171.
36–37 “My acts… for duty”: Nevins (1928), 2:381–83.
38–39 “Being unfamiliar…in the country”: Sherman (1875), 43–54.
39 “Two men”: Sherman (1875), 64–65.
41 “The Mormon Co.”: Larkin, 5:79.
41 “Damn that flag!”: Scherer, 12.
42 “We traveled”: Bailey, 97.
43–44 “Gold! Gold!… per diem”: Bancroft, 6:56–60.
44 “I of course”: Sherman (1875), 70.
44–45 “The Sacramento… frontier town”: Sherman and Sherman, 43–44.
45 “on hand…to interfere”: Sherman (
1875), 76–77.
45 “The most moderate”: Paul, ed., 95–97.
2. Across the Pacific
48 “The gold nuggets”: Pérez Rosales, 271.
49–53 “Four brothers…to receive us”: ibid., 272–79.
54 “Morals”: Archer, 38.
54 “I caught sight”: ibid., 45.
55 “We believe”: Bateson, 29.
55–56 “Mormons… afterwards”: Monaghan, 28–29.
57 “my two”: Archer, 163.
58 “At least a score”: ibid., 167–68.
59 “A more happy”: Hargraves, 74.
59 “This was too touching”: Archer, 173.
60 “A very queer-looking”: ibid., 180–81.
61 “As we entered”: Hargraves, 75.
63 “Americans are very rich”: McLeod, 23.
64 “Yee Ah Tye”: Farkas, 7.
64 “Celestials”: ibid.
3. The Peaks of Darien
65 “Miss Jessie”: Phillips, 47.
66 “that instinctive sympathy”: Herr, 19.
66 “Because I planned”: Phillips, 41.
67 “The horseback life”: Jessie Frémont memoirs, 54.
68 “I felt the whole situation”: ibid., 56–57.
68 “Only trust me”: Herr, 91.
70 “The accounts”: Browning, 36–37.
70 “We are on the brink”: Bancroft, 6:119.
70 “The Eldorado”: Browning, 45.
71 “Look out”: Buck, 27.
71 “The last thing”: Browning 43–44.
73 “She was a hard”: Jessie Frémont (1878), 12.
73 “I had never been”: ibid., 13.
74 “When we reached”: ibid., 26.
75 “For three or four days”: Borthwick, 21–22.
76 “The eastern shore”: Taylor, 9.
77 “We found Chagres”: Davis, 7.
77 “negroes in a state”: Browning, 174.
