by Fred Rosen
Ambushed on the trail into Liberty by Union soldiers, Jesse took a .36-caliber bullet to the rib cage, perilously close to his heart. Frank and Cole Younger got him to the safety of a relative’s home in Nebraska. There, Dr. Reuben Samuels finally proved himself as an excellent surgeon. He had read of Pasteur’s germ theory and so washed his hands before operating, which probably saved Jesse’s life. Infection did not prove to be any obstacle in Jesse’s recuperation.
After his recovery, Jesse James revolutionized robbery. Organizing the prototype for the modern-day “gang,” Jesse recruited experienced guerrillas such as the Youngers. For the next sixteen years, the James/Younger gang cut a swatch across the Midwest, murdering innocent bystanders in cold-blooded rage as they robbed banks; stagecoaches; and for the first time, trains. It was Jesse James who bears the dubious distinction of having been the first to rob a train.
But what gets lost in the retelling of the James legend is what effect Robert James could have had on his youngest boy had he not perished in the Gold Rush. If Robert had been alive to instill ethics and morality into his son’s character, how many of the Union soldiers killed at Centralia would be alive today if Jesse had intervened?
How many of the James gang’s twenty-odd known victims, and their ancestors, would be alive today if either of the brothers had not set foot down the criminal path because of their father’s positive influence? Surely there were other factors in the mix, least of which was the racial tension of the time, adding to their murdering brew. But other guerrillas went on to lead normal lives, whereas Frank and Jesse clearly did not.
Consider that approximately twenty-five thousand died during the California Gold Rush. Robert James’s death is but one example of how a Gold Rush death ripples through time to affect people to the present day.
13.
MORE GOLD RUSHES
Between 1848 and 1852, the peak years of the Gold Rush, California’s full-time population reached two hundred thousand. More than three hundred thousand had trekked across the continent in search of gold, and tens of thousands more arrived by ship.
Few of the miners who came did so with any intention of staying. Many did, and their relatives live in California today. What grew out of Marshall’s discovery is, arguably, the most culturally diverse population in the country.
It should be enough to say that the Gold Rush ended in the 1850s as the gold ran out. It didn’t. Not really. There were many gold rushes to come before the century ended. With every one, America and the world would look upon each through the California prism. There was always the chance that a discovery could equal or surpass Marshall’s. That belief, get rich quick, fueled itself. Foreigners in Austria and Germany, France, England, China, Japan, all over the world, their eyes turned toward the United States.
California gold had changed the nation’s character. It was not so much that the nation had shed its en masse belief that hard work and a strong spirit of God in their lives lead to rewards in the next. It was just no longer enough. Men like Samuel O’Neil had discovered that through speculation on their future, they could change their lot in life.
For the next fifty years, that belief was played out in boomtown after boomtown. Amazing reports of mineral wealth discovered in various parts of the United States would lure hundreds of thousands more to America. Known by the derisive term “greenhorn” to citizens born here, the immigrants gave up sedate lives to take a chance on America. Their ancestors in the United States today number in the tens of millions.
The country the greenhorns found when they got here was going through what a later generation would call the Industrial Revolution. Americans began to rely on machines to do the work of everything from humans to mules. Voices could suddenly be made to travel over wires, light to be born from an “electric” bulb.
Machines made life better and easier, but they also replaced human beings. No one was going to immigrate to America simply because they had better machines than anyone else. Besides, how could you even afford the machines when you had nothing? Immigrants put their life savings into expensive transoceanic fares. The one thing that kept immigrants coming until the century’s end was the lure of the gold and what it could do for their lives.
These were not the people who came to America and settled in the slums of the dense Eastern cities, hoping to patiently work themselves up a little higher on the economic ladder to give their kids and grandkids a leg up. These were the people who were willing to forgo the civilized East and travel west into a vast wilderness where fortunes could be made quickly. It was these immigrants who subsequently settled the western part of the United States, including Idaho, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona.
Not coincidentally, all these places had their gold rushes that sparked that new American belief of get rich quick. Unfortunately, the gold was in a rather hostile environment of wild animals, dense tree growth that sometimes made it impassable, and hot, dry plains and deserts, places that hadn’t seen regular habitation by anyone, including Indians, since the late Stone Age.
There was nothing late Stone Age about the Indian tribes on the Plains and deserts the white Europeans and their American counterparts encountered in their search for gold. The Sioux and the Cheyenne, arguably the strongest militarily, had a strong patriarchal society with defined tribal boundaries They were pragmatic enough to be willing to negotiate with the foreigners for the mineral rights, which meant nothing to them, in return for peace.
The California prism would be brought to bear on the Indians. This time, in the national limelight, the government would not be able to put a bounty on the Indian scalps, as the California legislature had. Instead, to allow the cavalry to go after them, they would have to show that the Indians were in some way violating federal law.
The search for another California Gold Rush would soon provoke American history’s most celebrated battle between the army and the Indian nations, and it would create a legend of a man that defined the American character of the late nineteenth century that survives to this day.
James Marshall never seemed to have any luck. By 1850, the mill had been completely abandoned because of management problems that entangled the mill in legal difficulties. It was better for Sutter and Marshall to just let it go.
Marshall spent the first few years of the 1850s searching for gold himself, with little success. He was a millwright, not a miner, but his services were becoming outmoded as steam engines threatened to replace horses, thereby making a man with the talent of manufacturing wooden wheels obsolete.
In 1857, James Marshall bought fifteen acres of land in Coloma for $15. He built a cabin near the Catholic church. He decided to become a vintner. Investing in new and exotic varieties of grapevines, Marshall planted a vineyard on the hillside above the town cemetery. He dug a cellar in his cabin and began making wine.
By 1860, his vines were doing so well that his entry in the county fair received an award. But his drinking, which continued his whole life, finally wore him down as his liver slowly deteriorated and with it his financial and physical health. Marshall took to prospecting again and became part owner of a quartz mine near Kelsey, California.
Maybe, at last, he’d strike it rich.
By the end of the 1850s, the California Gold Rush boomtowns were in sharp decline in direct proportion to the placer gold that was running out in the American and Feather Rivers.
Huge mining combines had come in to get at the ore beneath the earth. Gradually, the prospectors were being pushed out in favor of actual miners, who traveled deep into the earth to get the gold ore that would later be distilled. Out-of-work prospectors soon found themselves turning their collective heads to the east. Some of them climbed over the Sierra Nevada into Nevada, where they began mining gold on the eastern slope.
By that time, the Mexicans and the Chinese, with their more sophisticated mining techniques, were long gone, frozen out by xenophobic laws. The white California miners on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada i
n 1859 were literally throwing away pounds of silver every day because they were looking for gold. It took a while for two guys to get smart and realize that there was something special in the blue mud they were throwing away. They decided to take a sample to be assayed in Virginia City.
Just as they were leaving, Frank Comstock confronted them. A loafer who would give Washington’s legendary Beau Hickman a run for his money in the loafing department, Comstock also had a dishonest streak. The two guys who had the blue mud in hand were told by Comstock that it was his land they had been working on. Instead of fighting it out with fists or guns, the two guys compromised and cut Comstock in as a full partner.
Thus, when the blue mud was assayed as being full of silver, the discovery became known worldwide as the Comstock Lode. It was a vein of silver that ran half a mile wide and seventy miles long. During the next twelve years it would be mined two thousand feet into the earth, where the temperature rose to 130 degrees Fahrenheit.
The California prospectors set off, en masse, to Virginia City. Mining the Comstock Lode for all it was worth, nearby Virginia City became the largest city between Denver and San Francisco, thus helping to settle the surrounding country. Unfortunately, the Comstock Lode required sophisticated machinery to mine. The California prospectors discovered that the kind of “mining” they had done was small potatoes compared to what was necessary here: huge reserves of capital and industrial skills were necessary to get to the silver ore deep in the earth. That was way beyond the capability of the average prospector, immigrant or otherwise.
Still the belief was there, and men streamed into Virginia City looking to strike it rich. In 1861, with the Comstock Lode still going strong, albeit controlled by mining combines of American big business, the country’s attention turned to a more immediate problem. The country was at war, with itself.
The United States found itself embroiled in a civil war. While one meaning of the word “civil” is being friendly with another, the Civil War was anything but civil. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died on the Confederate and Union sides. The man who turned the tide, who cut the Confederacy in half and thus ended the war, was a survivor of the Gold Rush, William Tecumseh “Cump” Sherman.
In 1850, Cump had married his foster sister Eleanor, Thomas Ewing’s daughter. Resigning his army commission in 1853, Cump became a partner in a San Francisco banking establishment, Lucas, Turner, & Co. He oversaw the construction of the new bank building, which opened on July 11, 1854, at 800 Montgomery Street. It still stands, and is today known as Sherman’s Bank.
Cump grew restless. Since he couldn’t go west, into the Pacific Ocean, he showed the contrariness that would serve him well in Georgia years later, by turning east, and traveled in the opposite direction of the pioneers. He settled for a year in Leavenworth, Kansas, where he practiced law between 1858 and 1859. Then the military bug hit him again. He took the job of superintendent of the Louisiana State Military Academy at Alexandria, Louisiana.
A Northerner by birth and temperament, he resigned from the military academy in January 1861. When the Civil War started the same year, Cump joined the Union Army as a colonel. He commanded a brigade in the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861. By August he had been made a brigadier general of volunteers and reassigned to Kentucky. No sooner had he taken command of the army’s Department of the Cumberland in October than he was reassigned to the Department of the Missouri.
A heroic division commander at the bloody Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, he was promoted to major general in May. In subsequent battles at Corinth, Vicksburg, and Arkansas Post, he continued to distinguish himself in battle as an intelligent, able soldier. In July 1863 he was made a brigadier general in the regular army.
Sherman’s experiences during the Gold Rush period had seasoned him into a hard, competent man who understood that victory was surviving. No wonder, then, that Colonel Mason’s adjutant went onto become, to the present day, the most reviled man in the southern United States.
Had Sherman’s subsequent actions not shortened the war, it would certainly have gone on longer and affected the silver rush to come. That he could be so brilliant against one enemy, however, and so ignorant of the other says a lot about the man’s willingness, at least, to put it all on the line for what he felt was right.
Sherman had seen in the California gold fields how important a man’s spirit was. Without it, he’d fail at the backbreaking work of gold prospecting every time. He had to believe to get it done. In the same way, he knew that if the South were to be beaten, the sooner he vanquished the rebellious spirit of its civilians, the sooner the war would be over.
In September 1864 he applied the same careful thought to how to defeat the enemy as he had years before on Sutter’s request to own the land on which gold had been discovered. Sitting in his Atlanta headquarters, Cump tried to decide where to move his army next. The March to the Sea was conceived as the final psychological blow to the Confederacy, one that would make it fall to its knees.
Looking at census records, he tried to determine which route across Georgia would supply his men with food and forage for their animals. A skeptical President Lincoln was presented with Cump’s report that he could march across Georgia, to the ocean, and thereby cut the Confederacy in half. The point wasn’t so much to engage the enemy but to show the civilians that the Union could do it with impunity.
The president waited until his November 1864 reelection before giving Cump the go-ahead. By that time, most of Georgia had been cleared of Confederate forces. For his march to the sea from Atlanta to Savannah, Cump divided his men into two wings. He gave them strict orders to forage as much as they needed, though not to use force against the civilian population unless it was used against them. In that case, they were to proceed to level the town where such an incident occurred and move on.
Meeting little military resistance, Cump and his men took Savannah. In their wake, they left burned-out hulks that had once been homes and towns to the guerrillas who fired upon the Union troops. As for crops, any in the army’s path had been totally gone over by Cump’s men.
On December 21, Cump telegraphed President Lincoln that Savannah was now under Union Army control, offering the city and twenty-five thousand bales of cotton as Christmas presents. In his wake, Cump left more destruction than any military campaign, before or since, on the continent. But Cump knew that the kind of ruthlessness he showed in war would shorten it.
He was right. As a result of his March to the Sea, Cump had split the Confederacy into two parts, depriving each “side” of supplies without which they would be forced to surrender or perish.
After the war, Sherman stayed in the regular army, with a commission of lieutenant general. He would soon have a hand, once again, in a major gold discovery.
On April 9, 1865, the war ended when General Lee presented his sword to General Grant at Virginia’s Appomattox Courthouse. Five days later, President Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth during a performance of Our American Cousin at Washington’s Ford’s Theater.
It was on that day, when the nation lost its greatest president, that John Sutter once again showed his penchant for poor timing. He chose to petition the U.S. Congress for the “loss” of his land to the Gold Rush on the day Lincoln died. To say the least, the Congress was preoccupied with other matters.
Booth’s plan that night had not been just to assassinate Lincoln. Coconspirator David Herold was supposed to kill Vice President Johnson but “chickened” out. But coconspirator Lewis Paine did attack and attempt to kill the third in line to presidential succession, Secretary of State William Seward. Were it not for the riding accident Seward had recently been in, leaving him wearing a leather brace around his back, Paine would have succeeded. But the brace served to stop the blade of Paine’s knife from sinking into his throat. Instead, Paine slashed him across the face, a wound from which the secretary would recover.
Had Booth succeeded in killing all three, the federal government w
ould have fallen into ruin because the next in line to head the executive branch was the president pro tempore of the Senate, a political nonentity named Lafayette Sabine. But Booth hadn’t succeeded.
When things began to get back to normal in late May, the last thing Congress or anyone else wanted to deal with were the grievances of a sixty-three-year-old man who once had visions of a grand empire in his youth. Showing the stubbornness that had characterized his ability to build his fort in the wilderness, and finance the building of the sawmill where gold was discovered, Sutter decided to stay in the East and pursue his claim to his last breath.
By 1868, the country had recovered its collective breath and was ready to move forward. Once again, the seed of the new American Dream, planted by Marshall and Sutter, was about to blossom. There was an expectation now that prosperity was just around the corner.
While most of the nation’s attention was focused on Washington, where President Johnson was being impeached by a reactionary Congress, and his trial in the Senate was about to begin, the country’s economic interests were being negotiated in Laramie, Wyoming. That’s where Cump Sherman, now a full general, went to represent the interests of the U.S. government.
Cump knew that if the hostile Indians were not pacified, they would be wiped out by force. He knew war, and he didn’t want to see it again. Instead, he wanted the western tribes to give up their ancestral lands and live on reservations, where the government would provision them. If he could succeed in doing that, then the land they controlled would come under the aegis of the federal government, which would do everything possible to promote its growth in accord with the government’s avowed policy of “Manifest Destiny.”
Under the Treaty of 1868, the Great Sioux Reservation in Dakota Territory was established, on which the Sioux—Brule, Ogallala, Miniconjou, Yanktonai, Hunkpapa, Blackfeet, Cuthead, Two Kettle, Sans Arcs, Sante, and Arapaho—would settle. In so doing, the federal government reaffirmed the Sioux hunting rights on land the Sioux controlled, including the Black Hills of what is now South Dakota.
