Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

by Timothy Egan

  By the first year of the American Revolution, 1776, the Spanish had made it clear that they were in California to stay. They put down a mission and small garrison at San Francisco, preaching to the Ohlone children who played near a waterfall on what is now the corner of 18th and Valencia streets. Most of the missions had cemeteries outside their walls and frescoed houses of worship inside. Within a generations time, the graveyards were much fuller than the churches. Spain wanted volume baptisms, a source of cheap labor, and a military presence. The church kept good records, which showed that the friars got the numbers they wanted: during the mission era, fifty-four thousand natives were baptized. But there was a more telling number, related to the cemeteries. Indian contact with whites anywhere in North America usually resulted in mass death by disease. In California, the story was the same, but only more horrific. During the initial mission era, about sixty thousand were lost to diseases to which they had no immunity. And then, during smallpox epidemics of 1828–29 and 1838, nearly half of the remaining California natives died.

  At Acoma, the Indians stayed put on their rock perch, despite Spanish harquebuses and waves of aggressive priests. In California, the missionaries yanked the natives from their villages, trained them as laborers in the agricultural fields, and tried to eradicate their religions. “For the slightest thing they receive heavy floggings, are shackled, and put in stocks, and treated with so much cruelty that they are kept whole days without a drink of water,” wrote one observer, a priest at the missions, Father Antonio de la Concepción flora.

  How these missions came to be bathed in the soft light of romanticism, cast as Mediterranean outposts of multicultural order and pre-gridlock California good life, is one of the great examples of Western historical alchemy. But if serial killers like Billy the Kid could become lasting icons, if Utah’s authoritarian theocrats could be polished into tolerant freedom-lovers, then forced-labor posts like San Juan Bautista could be seen as health spas with a spiritual side. California, after all, is the state that came up with the term “alternative lifestyle advocates” to describe homeless alcoholics. The first real Western novel, the book that set the tone for all the dime paperbacks and movies that were to follow, was written by a bona fide member of the Eastern Media Elite—Owen Wister, author of The Virginian. He was a Philadelphia socialite and a Harvard man. In California, the mission image overhaul was accomplished by another outsider, Helen Hunt Jackson, daughter of a Calvinist theologian in Amherst, Massachusetts. Jackson lived for a time in the Plaza Hotel, not far from the crumbling Mission San Juan Bautista, while writing Ramona, the late-nineteenth-century novel that would make early Spanish mission life seem like an extended holiday at a seaside resort. Just as writers of nature deserve credit for helping to create national parks and protected wilderness areas, so must writers of wish-fulfillment fiction be given their due for foisting on the public the dominant myths of the West. Shaking those stories is said to involve embracing a graduate-seminar version of the West, depressing and bleak, with abundant shame and obloquy for all races and religions. But simply looking anew at a somewhat forgotten piece of ground, in the era that followed the missions, will do wonders for a pilgrim in the West.

  WE ARE deep in a multiple-green fold of the Sierra, shadowed by high cliffs of oak, pine, fir, and chaparral—cleared every thirty years or so by fire, another California constant. Every inch of ground, on a slope so steep it is nearly impossible to get a foothold, is covered. The American River canyon is full of birds darting back and forth, squawking and fishing. I don’t recognize many of them.

  “They’re tropical birds,” says another of our rafting mates, a sometime ornithologist. “This place has two hundred thirty different bird species in the canyon. It’s one of the biggest refuges in America for tropical birds migrating from Central America.”

  We float on the laziest stretch of water, in the siesta part of the day, day-dreamers skipping out on the toils of Wednesday. Oars are in the raft. The current, such as it is, controls destiny. Around a bend, we come upon a pair of extras from Deliverance. Property-rights wackos, says the ornithologist, who has run into them on many a trip; they are a haunt in the rot of ghost towns left from a time when ten thousand people lived in the canyon. They curse the government for designating part of the American River as wild and scenic, their lives held together by the dream that one day irrefutable evidence will be found linking the United Nations, the Sierra Club, and an electronic signal in the back of speed-limit signs. I say make them part of the scenery, grandfather them into the wild-and-scenic law. Every wilderness needs an indigenous predator.

  The banjo music in my head passes, and then we approach a family on the beach—two kids and their mother—playing with what looks like a frying pan.

  “Watcha’ doing?”

  “Panning for gold,” says a little girl. “Look…” And she shows me a few shiny specks of whatever-she-wants-to-believe-it-is in the bottom of the pan. Prospecting with a frying pan is a reflex reaction in this part of California—the Gold Country, they still call it, the setting where the “strange disease of the heart” that Cortés spoke of was epidemic.

  “Wanna try?”

  “Sure.”

  I swish gravel around in the pan like an omelette in the forming stage, standing knee-deep in the American River. The heavier stuff, the gold flecks from the blocks of the Sierra, dust from a solid formed 150 million years ago, is supposed to linger in the bottom—if you’re lucky. It is fun and diverting for a few moments, and then a little bit of the fever kicks in, the lust. You look at this sloth of a river, this heaven of a canyon, this breach in the mountain as… motherlode! Every wash in the pan a potential strike. Every scrape at a sandbar a chance at early retirement. The American River was the source of the California Dream, and it set a pattern for all others. If you heard about it in feudal China, or hopeless Sicily, or incomprehensible New York, the promise was so simple: come to the American River, no matter your standing or background, and maybe in a months time, or half a year at the most, free yourself from a dismal fate.

  A million people died in Ireland at the time of the Gold Rush—one-eighth of the Emerald Isles population, killed by famine. Little wonder that so much Gaelic was heard around Sutter’s Mill. If they could read, they had seen headlines such as this, which ran in 1849:

  EL DORADO

  OF THE

  UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!

  And this:

  THE DISCOVERY

  OF

  INEXHAUSTIBLE GOLD MINES

  IN

  CALIFORNIA

  From Canton and from Guangdong Province came the first significant immigration of Chinese to America—twenty-five thousand arrived in California in 1852, most of them men with peasant backgrounds. They worked the mines that had already been abandoned by earlier argonauts, or set up merchant shops in Sacramento and San Francisco. A few of them made astonishing finds. At a place called Chinese Camp, a chunk of pure gold weighing 195 pounds was discovered. Nearly two thousand free blacks and a handful of runaway slaves made it to the Sierra foothills—some getting rich, most others getting harassed. From the Sonoran district of Mexico, entire villages were emptied of their men, the people heading for a territory that had been ceded to America nine days after the American River gold discovery. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed just before Mormon merchant Sam Brannon, in a brilliant bid at self-enrichment, walked through the streets of San Francisco holding a little vial while shouting, “Gold! Gold from the American River!”

  In Oregon it is still said that at the fork of the great wagon trail west, those who could read went north to the Willamette Valley; those who could not went south to California. But in a few years, nearly two-thirds of the men of literate Oregon abandoned their homes for California’s goldfields. Nearly half of all Gold Rush migrants came from New England, a region ragged and depressed in an early downcycle of the Industrial Revolution. Young, bearded, rangy-looking men, they were not paradigms of Yankee sta
bility. In daguerreotypes, they stare back with take-the-goddamn-picture looks, anxious to get back to the desperate task of ground-scraping for a jackpot.

  Some saw the frenzy as an appalling greed-fest, and this view has developed into a consensus way of looking at the mad scramble above Sacramento. “Our countrymen are the most discontented of mortals,” wrote Louisa Clapp, one of few women to venture into the goldfields. “They are always longing for the big strikes.” The historian Patricia Limerick similarly sideswiped the Gold Rush, dwelling on poor gastrointestinal health and how the camps were such a pit. The “disease of California,” one doctor is quoted in Limericks account, “was diarrhea.” So much for Eureka.

  But early on at least, it was pure West—the throwing together of races and backgrounds, the utter disregard for established order, the chaos of opportunity in a wild land. “They fairly reveled in gold, whiskey, fights, and fandangos, and were unspeakably happy,” wrote Mark Twain, whose career was jump-started in California. It was all over in less than four years. By 1852, human hands and a strong backbone were quaint anachronisms in the California goldfields. Earth-gouging hydraulic machines, channeling river water and scraping out canyon sides, replaced gold pans, and small prospectors gave way to wage crews.

  From the disorder and violence, the potluck of dreams, came the rough outline of what California would eventually become: the worlds first truly polyglot state. So, for all the latter-day hand-wringing about what a debasing free-for-all the Gold Rush had been, it did produce something that the West is still known for manufacturing—a society from scratch. Not orderly, certainly. It was something new altogether, with Americas fatal faults of gun violence and money obsession at play with some of Americas best attributes, opportunity and open land. California’s population rose from fourteen thousand in 1849 to 250,000 in 1852, at which point the state had more immigrants than any other place in America—and arguably, the world—a blend of Latinos and Anglos, blacks and Chinese, Russians and Swedes, and Indians with superior immunity to foreign diseases. In fifty years time, five flags had flown over parts of California, representing Russia, Spain, Mexico, the Bear Flag Republic, and America. In 1850, more than two dozen languages were heard in the stores and bars and rivers of the Sierra foothills. It would take another century and a half for California to revert to that form.

  Now, at the millennial snapshot, when there are more Koreans in California than any place outside of Seoul and more people of Mexican ancestry in Los Angeles than in any community other than Mexico City, the Golden State is seen by some as a tremulous new world where everyone is a minority. At Hollywood High School, eighty languages are spoken. But the modern state may be simply a more crowded, somewhat more refined, version of California in It’s El Dorado exuberance.

  DURING the interim, from motherlode to obituary, came the fanciful attempt to graft a midwestern society onto the most Western of states. And here again, California set a pattern that other Western states would follow. As odd as it now seems to find Lake Havasu trying to be Olde England in the Arizona Desert, with a community of former Californians living around a transplanted London Bridge, consider what the great-grandparents of those Lake Havasupians tried to do. In the 1850s, Yankee settlers imported entire frame houses to California, shipping them in a kit around Cape Horn. They came with gables and picket fences to a place where people lived most comfortably behind mud and mortar. A duplicate of Boston’s Faneuil Hall was built in downtown Los Angeles in 1859; brick for brick, it was a copy from across the continent.

  Working with timber and white paint would prove to be the easy part in the imagined society. After building the railroads and many of the roads, and providing labor that no other people would in the Sierra goldfields, the Chinese were excluded from owning mines, from testifying against whites in court, and from citizenship. The days of ku li, bitter toil, were over, but only the physical part. At one point, the state constitution read that “no native of China, no idiot, no insane person, or person convicted of infamous crimes,” could be a citizen. The challenge must have been establishing proof of idiocy. Mexicans were chased out of the cities and deprived of their ranchos, even as novels and songs were created around the story of their pastoral lives in California. After passage of the Anti-Alien Act of 1913, Japanese immigrants were prohibited from owning farmland. By 1895, Charles Fletcher Loomis would write: “The ignorant, hopelessly un-American type of foreigner which infests and largely controls Eastern cities is almost unknown here.” By 1910, over 60 percent of the people who lived in California were from the Midwest. It was a warm Iowa, a looser Minnesota, a less gothic Indiana, a prettier Michigan.

  The Wizard of Oz was written by one transplanted midwesterner, L. Frank Baum. He had to close his eyes to imagine Dorothy’s Kansas, because for all the flatland cultural export, California did not look or feel like the Midwest. Still, it is where the imagined West took root, quite literally. The Spanish brought in palm trees, planting them around the missions. Soon they were the signature tree of California. From Brazil came jacarandas, flowering purple in April, some even holding their color as blocks of Los Angeles burned in the 1992 riots. Trees of heaven, so-called, were brought over by Chinese who wanted something to remind them of home. The first oranges were planted by the Franciscans in 1805. Beginning in the 1890s, garden societies organized eucalyptus crusades, planting the Australian imports on formerly treeless hillsides. The eucalyptus grows well in California; it also has taken to the hissy fits of nature indigenous to the state. In a fire, as many neighborhoods in Oakland’s hills found out not long ago, a eucalyptus will heat up and then explode.

  WILD ONIONS and garlic, acorns crushed into fine meal, and chinook salmon—such was the food eaten over the centuries by people living in the middle-fork canyon of the American River. Onions and garlic are plentiful this summer in the valley; I had them in a salad two nights earlier. We drank old-vine Zinfandel, a taste of the foothills. Wonderful. But the king salmon of this part of California have joined Ishi in the museum. Still, what is so startling about this float is seeing how a little ribbon of California life has healed. I had studied pictures of the late-nineteenth-century American River: Kuwait after it was torched and bombed in the Gulf War may have looked better. But the river just could not be killed. Tiger lilies and columbine, sugar pine and rhododendron—there is enough left of California before the pave-over to get a sense of the balming effect it had on people.

  But we are now close to the pinkish air, the whir of autos above the canyon racing to warehouse stores, the nexus between the California where the land breeds optimism and the California where one out of every nine people lives behind gates and lasers. And again, I wonder how it all could have gone so quickly from one extreme to the other. When the gold streams were played out in the last century, people pulled their noses from the gravel and found new riches in the basic elements of California life. The Sierra air, said Twain, was the same air that the angels breathed. A person had to leave the state in order to die, he wrote without sarcasm. “What a land! What mountains! What blue skies!” said Alice H. Ramsey, another writer, after clearing Donner Pass and shouting exclamations into the setting sun, not long after the turn of the century. “Clear sparkling water! Our hearts lept within us. None of us had ever seen the like—and we loved it.”

  A Scottish immigrant, arriving in California after walking more than a thousand miles from Indiana to the Florida coast, sailing to Panama and then up the West coast, fell deeply in love. Stepping off a steamer in San Francisco in 1868, he asked for directions out of town.

  “But where do you want to go?” a stranger replied.

  “To any place that is wild,” John Muir answered. He was a wiry man of twenty-nine, endowed with ceaseless curiosity and springy legs. Flat broke, he hired on as a sheepherder in the Sierra, bound for the headwaters of the Merced and Tuolumne rivers. He was indifferent to the sheep, but he took to his companion, a St. Bernard. He got so sick of eating mutton he could not sleep for the
turbulence in his stomach. But one dawn he came to a ridge on the west side of Indian Canyon—“every feature glowing, radiating beauty”—and his stomach problems were forgotten. It was a mystical introduction to Yosemite for the most loyal friend the valley would ever have. Muir could not contain himself. “I shouted and gesticulated in a burst of ecstasy,” he said, an exuberance that startled his dog.

  More than thirty years later, the former sheepherder was back in Yosemite with a barrel-chested dandy in spectacles—President Theodore Roosevelt. There is no state in the West that T.R. did not touch.

  “An influential man from Washington wants to make a trip into the Sierra with me,” Muir wrote. “I might be able to do some good in freely talking around the campfire.” Muir was world-famous by then, a friend to the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Jack London, who lived in Oakland, where Muir’s father-in-law had an orchard. His writings were largely responsible for the establishment of Yosemite National Park in 1890. And his foot-long beard made him look like an American Tolstoy. Though sixty-four, he was nimble as ever, the kind of man who loved nothing so much as a good earthquake for stimulation. One night in Yosemite, when the moon was nearly full, the ground suddenly groaned, boulders tumbled, and rock walls shivered. Muir felt like a sailor on a ship tossed by the high seas. “A noble earthquake!” he yelled out. “A noble earthquake!” He called the experience “thrilling,” perhaps the first time such an adjective had ever been used to describe California’s ongoing labor pains.

  The president had asked for four days of aerobic talk with Muir in Yosemite; he requested only that there be no roof over their heads, nor Capitol Hill gibberish among them. “I want to drop politics absolutely for four days and just be out in the open,” Roosevelt told Muir. In May 1903, they scrambled up to the granite summit of Glacier Point for a view of the falls. They dodged a crowd of politicians and hangers-on at a dinner planned in their honor down below, opting to eat camp chow near the sunset-gold walls of El Capitan. Another night, they slept under a sequoia tree with a trunk wider than the table reserved for the presidents cabinet meetings. T.R. loved the West down to It’s driest canyons, It’s wettest forests, It’s ugliest spiders. But he was also a bait fisherman, a trophy-bagger. Nature was utilitarian. He had been influenced by Gifford Pinchot, founder of the modern Forest Service, who railed against the “massacre” of Western logging but had little use for a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it.