by Jon E. Lewis
Some must push and some must pull,
As we go marching up the hill,
As merrily on the way we go,
Until we reach the valley, OH!
They made as good time as wagon trains. It was one of the most remarkable experiments in overland travel.
Inevitably, the Saints were not allowed to build their Utopia undisturbed. When gold was discovered in California in 1848 thousands of prospectors passed through Mormon territory, and complained of the high prices the Mormons charged them. (The miners had a case; the Mormon price for a hundredweight of flour was $25, ten times the standard price.) Nor could the gold-hunters understand the Mormon attitude to American Indians, which was respect for them as one of the original races of the continent. The Mormons wanted to convert the Indians; most frontier folk wanted to eradicate them. President James Buchanan responded to the growing anti-Mormon feeling in 1857 by dismissing Young as Territorial Governor, and sending 2,500 federal troops to Utah. The threat of invasion caused Mormon tempers to rise and some tragedy came to be expected. It took the shape of the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre of the “Gentile” emigrants travelling with the Fancher wagon train.
Most of the members of the Fancher party overlanding to California in the late summer of 1857 were peaceable Arkansas farmers. A number, however, were self-styled “Missouri Wildcats”, who habitually insulted and attacked Mormons. Several even boasted of having had a hand in the killing of Joseph Smith. When refused supplies by the Saints, the Wildcats vandalized Mormon property and threatened to return from California with a conquering Gentile army. Scared, yet also anxious for revenge, Mormons in south-west Utah stirred up the local Indians into attacking the train as it lay encamped at Mountain Meadows near Cedar City on 11 September 1857. Seven emigrants were killed, the rest obliged to fort up. After five days of siege, the train received word from the Mormons that the Indians had been pacified and that they could leave safely with an escort of Mormon militiamen. Relieved, the emigrants piled their weapons into a wagon. As the party marched out through a defile at the edge of the meadow, they were ruthlessly shot and hacked down by Mormons and their Indian allies. Within minutes 120 people lay dead. The only survivors were 17 children. The enormity of the slaughter quickly sobered the Mormon executioners. Frightened of punishment from the Church – the act was entirely unsanctioned – and the US authorities, the Mormons blamed the Indians for the massacre.
Few believed them, and rumours spread through the land that Mormons were arming Indians to fight the Gentiles. A full-scale “Mormon War” loomed as bands of Saints held off the invading federal army in the Wasatch Mountains. Yet the prospect of the hills and desert running with blood ultimately appealed to neither side. Young accepted a Gentile governor in his stead, while the army of the government made a purely symbolic march through Great Salt Lake City and then departed.
Thereafter, the Territory developed in peace. By 1860 more than 60,000 people lived in Utah, nearly all of them Saints, and a vast irrigation system of canals watered more than 100,000 acres. More hundreds of acres were added every year.
The ceaseless labour and steadfast vision of the Saints had made the desert bloom.
The Gold Rush
“Jane, i left you and them boys for no other reason than this to come here [California] to procure a littl property by the swet of my brow so that we could have a place of our own that i mite not be a dog for other people any long.”
Californian gold prospector, letter to his wife
“Gold from the American River!”
It was the lure of gold rather than God which pulled most pioneers west in the mid-years of the nineteenth century. On 24 January 1848, a carpenter named James W. Marshall made a discovery which would produce one of the most astonishing population movements in history. Inspecting a sawmill on the Sierra Nevada ranch of John Sutter, Marshall noticed something glittering at the bottom of the stream. “Boys,” he said, “I believe I’ve found a gold mine.”
Marshall had. Tests quickly confirmed the nature of the metal. Ranch owner John Augustus Sutter was less than pleased. Since 1840 the Swiss-born immigrant had built up a vast baronial estate where his word was law. It had endured Mexican government, and the 1846 “Bear Flag” rebellion by which the American settlers in California had wrested the state from Mexico and joined it to the United States. But as Sutter correctly guessed, his empire would not endure a gild rush – it would be literally trampled into the ground. He tried to suppress news of the strike, but too many workmen were involved and word got out to the small town of San Francisco.
A sharp-trading Mormon merchant by the name of Sam Brannan was the main messenger of the good news. In the spring of 1848 Brannan tramped up to Sutter’s Mill to check whether the gold story was true. When he saw that it was Brannan, who would soon be excommunicated by Brigham Young for misappropriation of Church funds, astutely realized that the easiest and most assured way of getting gold from the strike was by selling miners the victuals and tools they needed – in exchange for the gold they dug with their hands. Brannan set up shop near the Coloma diggings and returned to San Francisco with a quinine bottle full of precious gold dust. Crying “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” he pounded the streets, and talked up a gold rush. Within days every able-bodied man had left San Francisco (the male population of which dropped from 400 to 5) for the gold fields on the American, where they found Sam Brannan open for business.
From San Francisco the gold fever spread to Monterey and Los Angeles. By July most of the state was empty of men. The San Francisco schooner Louisa carried the contagion to Honolulu, and it spread from there around Cape Horn to the East Coast. On 5 December 1848, President James K. Polk confirmed the wild rumours exciting Washington. He told Congress: “The accounts of the abundance of gold . . . would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by . . . officers in the public service.” For good measure, 259 ounces of California gold dust (valued at $3,910.10) sent by the state’s military governor, Colonel R. B. Mason, were placed on public display.
America went gold crazy. The epidemic spread to the rest of the world. It was said that Californian rivers and streams ran with gold, that an average miner made $1,000 a day, that one man had dug up $9,000 in an afternoon. The California Gold Rush was on. Thousands of men left their homes and jobs, bought picks and pans and headed off to California. The day of the “forty-niner” had arrived.
There were several routes to El Dorado. The most convenient was judged to be by ship, either around the Horn or via the Panamanian isthmus. However, the length of the trip, which could be as much as six months, and the high cost for passage charged by the shipping companies, obliged many gold-seekers to go overland. (Of the 89,000 who went to California in 1849, 41,000 went by sea and 43,000 went overland; the remainder were Mexicans from Sonora.) Most popular of the overland routes were the Mormon and Oregon Trails over the Rockies to the California Trail, which led through the Sierras directly to the gold fields around Sacramento. Overland, the Argonauts (as the gold-seekers came to be called, in reference to the Greek myth of the Golden Fleece) encountered all the problems of the earlier emigrants, and more. Most pioneers were of seasoned frontier stock and used to hardship; most Argonauts were town people with no experience of outdoor living. To make matters worse, the spring of 1849 was dismally wet. “It blew, rained, thundered & lightened tremendous heavy,” recalled one overlanding Argonaut. Mud bogged down the wagons, and a cholera outbreak took the lives of 5,000 would-be prospectors. The rest, fearful of being snowbound in the Sierras, like the infamous Donners, jettisoned much of the load in their wagons. They overworked their oxen and mules, who collapsed under the strain. The plains became a junkyard and an abattoir.
Watching askance at the despoliation and endless stream of wagons rolling west were the Indians. Native Americans began to talk of emigrating eastwards. They could not believe that any Whites could be left living there. Between 1848 and 1852 the population of Cali
fornia leaped from 14,000 to a staggering 250,000. In 1851, California became the 31st state of the Union.
Hitting Pay Dirt
Some of the early prospectors did pan out fortunes of the treasure formed by nature 150 million years before. One Argonaut found $26,000 in gold dust in a single summer. Even the moderately lucky could hope to find an average $20 of gold a day, well above average pay for manual work. What made such success so possible for such inexperienced miners as the forty-niners was that all but a fraction of California’s first gold came from placers and not veins. The difference was essential. To extract gold from its quartz bed needs hydraulic machinery and chemical processes and is all but impossible for the untutored and the poor. But if the veins are eroded by nature, the gold comes free and runs off into streams as nuggets, flakes or dust. And the golden particles can be won by the simple process of placer mining (pronounced plah-sir, and taken from the Spanish for gravel beds), where the prospector needs only to throw some dirt in a pan, swill it around with water to wash the gravel and dirt away, and collect the heavy grains of gold left at the bottom. If “pay dirt” was hit, miners might use a device such as a “long tom”, a 12-foot stepped trough with a riddle at the bottom end, into which a stream was diverted while miners shovelled in earth. Unskilled work, but not easy labour. Placer mining was back-breaking, with men digging all day in temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit or wading for hours in icy mountain water. Scurvy, dysentery and pneumonia were occupational diseases. A great fist of what the miner earned was handed over to the storekeepers in the goldfields, Brannan at Coloma, Weber at French Camp on the Yuba, and Syrec at Mokelumne Hill, all of whose prices were fantastically high. Salt pork was $20 a barrel, flour $2 a pound.
Few cared. The forty-niners were a notoriously reckless, big-spending lot. Mark Twain caught them well in his classic frontier travelogue Roughing It:
It was a splendid population – for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home – you never find that sort of people among pioneers – you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day . . . But they were rough in those times! They fairly reveled in gold, whiskey, fights and fandangoes, and were unspeakably happy. The honest miner raked from a hundred to a thousand dollars out of his claim a day, and what with the gambling dens and the other entertainments, he hadn’t a cent the next morning, if he had any sort of luck.
The miner without a cent always knew that tomorrow, the day after at most, he would strike the Mother Lode. To cater for the needs and appetites of the miners, fabulous camps of tents and shacks sprang up: Poker Flat, Red Dog, Rich Bar, Indian Bar, Eureka North and Hangtown. Gambling dens, bars and brothels abounded. San Francisco boomed into a “Babylon-by-Sea”, luring the miners down with its glittering, fast pleasures. At the height of the Gold Rush, in 1853, San Francisco boasted 537 drinking establishments. Prostitutes from as far away as Chile and China charged $16 for soothing words, $400 for a night. In a gold-crazy, all-male society few Christian sons remembered their commandments, or their mothers’ sage advice.
The gleam of Californian gold attracted not only the Argonaut, the merchant, the gambler, the barkeep and the fancy lady. Professional criminals swarmed like flies. Gangs of cut-throats roamed San Francisco and the camps, led by the fearsome “Sydney Ducks”, former convicts from the British penal colonies in Australia. Murder became a commonplace, while the agencies of the law were either non-existent or incompetent. Matters became so critical in San Francisco that a Committee of Vigilance was formed on 9 June 1851. In a ten-week period it tried and hanged four men, and forced other criminals to flee. They came back, however, and the Committee had to be revived. Not until the Gold Rush was over and gone did San Francisco, and the camps which struggled into permanent existence, enjoy something like peace and order.
Race was one factor which perpetually provoked violence in the camps’ heyday. Upwards of 15 nations mixed together in the camps: White Americans, Black Americans (as slaves and free men), Indians, Mexicans, Turks, English, Welsh, Scots, French; Chinese, Germans, Chileans, Peruvians and Australians. Some White American camps barred all foreigners, others were selective. Mexicans were loathed as “greasers” and their claims ignored. There were attempts to ban Blacks from entering the state at the 1849 constitutional convention. Standardly, Whites refused to work alongside Blacks, although there were exceptions. When Daniel Rogers, a Black forty-niner, gave his Arkansas master a thousand dollars in gold dust for his freedom, the owner reneged on the deal and refused to release him. But other Arkansas Whites raised the money for the slave’s liberty and presented it to the surprised Rogers with a certificate commending his “honesty, industry and integrity”. Rogers joined the 2,000 free Blacks in the goldfields, eventually purchasing his entire family out of bondage. Slavery was abominated in the goldfields, for the independent prospectors feared that mass cheap labour would strip all the prime claims. When Thomas Green and several other Texas slaveholders arrived in California with their chattels in 1850, White miners at the Rose’s Bar camp organized two protest meetings. The Texans were informed that, unless the slaves departed, they would be forcibly expelled. Outnumbered, the Texans left.
Undoubtedly, the greatest racial hate was reserved for the Chinese forty-niners. According to custom house figures 25,000 Chinese passed through San Francisco in 1852 alone. Alien and incomprehensible, the Chinese were despised even for their careful reworking of claims long since abandoned by Whites as unprofitable. They were routinely harassed and sometimes murdered, while cutting off their pigtails was considered fine sport in a drunken spree.
By the middle 1850s it was clear that the day of the independent Californian prospector was over. California’s surface and near-surface gold had been taken, the region prospected from top to bottom. There was still gold, but it was locked in lodes of quartz or buried deep in the ground. To get it required tunnels, mills and machinery. Few independents had the necessary finance. The day of the eastern capitalist mining corporation had come.
Thousands and thousands of prospectors gazed on a dull and poor future. Few could conceive of any other life. Mining was an incurable disease; in the eye of the Argonaut every river was gold-bedded, every hill veined with precious yellow. Only mining would do.
In Pursuit of the Golden Fleece
The prospector was curiously blessed, for just as the last placer gold in California was drying up, gold was discovered in America’s far western interior. With pack mule, pan and boundless hope the prospector headed to the Gila River in southern Arizona in 1853. The first Colorado gold rush, in the Pike’s Peak area, came in 1859. Gold-seekers from the depressed Mid-West rolled Colorado way in wagons emblazoned with the slogan “Pike’s Peak or Bust!” (later, failed Argonauts headed home with “Busted, by God!” scrawled on their tailboards). The same year saw the discovery of the famous Comstock Lode in the eastern Sierras of Nevada.
The Washoe field in Nevada had been prospected in a desultory fashion since 1848, but in June of 1859 Peter O’Riley and Patrick McLaughlin discovered the fabulous Ophir Vein at Six Mile Canyon. As they dug furiously the man whose name would eventually grace the strike rode up, the dubious, slothful Henry T. P. Comstock, who declared that he and his partners, James “Old Virginny” Finney and Manny Penrod, owned the claim. Although O’Riley and McLaughlin did not believe him, they took the three into partnership. Before the Lode gave out it yielded $300 million in precious metals, and helped finance the Union side in the Civil War.
Among the 10,000 Californians who rushed to the Washoe strike was George Hearst, father of the future newspaper magnate. Hearst bought out Patrick McLaughlin’s share in the Ophir Mine for $3,500 – a sum Hearst got back countless times over. The other Ophir partners proved almost as gullible; O’Riley was bought out for
$40,000 and “Old Pancake” Comstock for $10,000, he already having bought out the hapless, bibulous “Old Virginny” Finney for a blind horse and bottle of bourbon. To Virginny’s cold comfort, the shanty town which rose in the valley below the find was called after him: Virginia City.
After the Comstock rush, the mining boom moved north into Idaho and onwards to Montana, where rich placers were found between 1862 and 1864. The large discovery at Alder Gulch in 1863 was made by Henry Edgar, who kept a journal detailing his life as a miner, a classic account of the lows, dangers (which in Montana numbered Indians) and the occasional excitements of the independent prospector:
May 2nd: All went well through the night, but towards morning the horses became restless, and required a good deal of looking after. Just as morning came I took two of them where the boys were sleeping and woke them up. I put the saddles on and was just going out to Bill when the hills were alive with Indians. They were all around Bill and I got on the horse and started for him, but an Indian grabbed him by the head; I pulled my revolver, Simmons was along side of me and told me not to shoot. Well, I got off and gave the rope of the other horse to my Indian. Here they come with other horses and Bill mounted behind another Indian with hat in one hand and rifle in the other, digging his heels in the horse’s flanks and yelling like the very devil he is. “How goes it boys?” he asked as he got off. Simmons was talking to the Indians and told us to keep quiet. Quiet, everything we had they had got, but our arms! A young buck took hold of Cover’s gun and tried to take it from him. Bill stuck his revolver in the buck’s ear, he looked in Bill’s face and let go of the gun. We told Simmons to tell them that they had got everything but our guns and that they could not get them without killing us first. We were told to keep them. Everything we had was packed and off to the village. Such a hubbub when we got there. Our traps were put in a pile and a tent put over them. Simmons and the chiefs held a long pow wow. The women brought us some breakfast; good of the kind and plenty. Simmons told us we were prisoners, to keep still and not to be afraid. I went through the village and counted the lodges; there were 180 of them. We talk the matter over and agree to keep together and if it has to come to the worst to fight while life lasts. All the young ones are around us and the women. What fun! We get plenty to eat; Indians are putting up a great big lodge – medicine lodge at that. Night, what will tomorrow bring forth? I write this – will any one ever see it? Quite dark and such a noise, dogs and drums!
