What Hath God Wrought (120 page)

More than half of American migrants chose an overland route to California. This consumed at least three months of a spring and summer. Although the least expensive, it still required investment in a wagon and draft animals. Oxen were slower than mules but more tractable; most people opted for oxen. Outfitting the trip cost $180 to $200 per person, and emigrants hoped to recoup much of that by selling their animals at inflated California prices upon arrival. Of course, overland travel demanded much more in human effort than the ocean routes. Of all land emigrants, the overwhelming majority (seventy thousand in 1849–50) took the conventional pathway along the Platte and Humboldt Rivers, though some followed more southerly trails through Santa Fe and Tucson. The Gold Rush overland migration dwarfed earlier overland ones in size and included a higher proportion of town and city dwellers. Like the earlier migrants, these formed “companies,” democratically organized, for their collective welfare. They found it harder, however, to hire knowledgeable guides for so many caravans leaving about the same time. Trails soon became littered with discarded equipment and supplies that reflected bad initial advice on what to carry. Cholera from crowded campsites and polluted water along the Platte proved as dangerous as malaria and yellow fever in Central America. Many who set out turned back.
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One anticipated danger on the overland trails did not usually materialize: Indian attack. To their surprise, the travelers typically enjoyed good relations with the Plains peoples through whose lands they passed. Native guides often substituted for the scarce white ones; Indian trade goods, especially horses, could be purchased when supplies ran low or animals died. After the mid-1850s, however, as the number of white migrants swelled, problems developed: The caravans competed with the bison for forage, spread disease, and sometimes killed precious game just for sport. Both on their way to California and after they got there, the gold-seekers sought anxiously to keep in touch with those they had left behind, especially wives managing a family, business, or farm in their husbands’ absence. People needed to be able to send and receive not only advice but also money. Postal authorities improvised ways to provide service to California long before the famous Pony Express was established in 1860.
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While migrants and letter-carriers could follow any of a number of paths to California, shippers of merchandise found that the ocean route around Cape Horn provided the only practical means for sending supplies in any quantity to the burgeoning West Coast society. At the height of the Gold Rush the U.S. merchant marine almost disappeared from foreign ports, as shipowners concentrated on voyages to California.
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Responding to the sudden demand for fast sailing vessels to navigate the Cape Horn route, the beautiful American clipper ships appeared in the 1850s. They cut the time to San Francisco to three months and proved themselves valuable for the China as well as the California trade, until eventually rendered obsolete when the British developed oceangoing steamships.

As a result of the Gold Rush, California’s population increased much more rapidly than that of other Far West societies. The census of 1850 showed a population of 93,000, not counting those whose constant motion eluded the census-taker, those who had already come and gone, or “Indians not taxed.” Utah and Oregon, by comparison, then had about twelve thousand each. The economic effort required to supply and equip so many migrants in so brief a time has been compared to mobilizing an army in wartime. The effort in this case was made by the private, not the public, sector. Who came? Yeoman farmers, middle-class townsfolk (including a surprisingly large number of professionals), and journeyman workers—in short, those who could raise or borrow money for the trip.
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Emigrants usually received help (financial or otherwise) from family members, even though the family was being left behind. Whole families sometimes moved within California to the gold fields in 1848, but thereafter, and among those undertaking longer journeys, about 90 percent of argonauts were men.
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The few women who came to the early mining camps might well be as scruffy and tough as the males; they seldom actually mined but could earn as much money as the average miner (with less risk) in the traditional female occupations of washing and cooking, which were in great demand. Other entrepreneurial women set up boardinghouses in shacks.
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California’s population expanded not only in size but also in ethnic diversity. The first participants in the Gold Rush were those already living nearby: Hispanic
californios
, the few Anglo-Americans, and the Native Americans, who, once they learned that others valued gold, used their unmatched local knowledge to advantage in finding it.
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Then came the Pacific peoples: Native Hawaiians, Latin Americans, Asians. When migrants arrived from the United States proper—whites, free blacks, a handful of enslaved blacks—with them came Europeans: British, French, German, and Russian, sometimes failed revolutionaries. In 1848, the different varieties of newcomers got along reasonably well with each other, but in succeeding years unbridled competition among increasing numbers provoked savage ethnic violence.
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From the start, however, the Native Americans were victimized, not permitted to stake claims either individual or tribal, and often coerced into working for others. By the end of 1848 some four thousand Indians were already employed in the mines, generally at subsistence wages and sometimes in virtual slavery. In the years to come the Natives would sometimes fight back in vain, sometimes accommodate to white domination, and sometimes retreat farther into the mountains. A gold rush invariably spelled bad news for Indian tribes, as it had for the Cherokee in 1829 and as later rushes would for the Cheyenne and Sioux.
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The times of the California Gold Rush were turbulent, wasteful, and short. Prostitution flourished. Some women volunteered to pay for their ocean passage by indenturing their bodies for a term of six months. Other women and girls were brought involuntarily—usually from Latin America or China.
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Gambling flourished too—not surprisingly, with prospecting for gold itself such a big gamble. Most argonauts, of whatever nationality, hoped to get rich quick and return home, not stay and build for the future. Besides wealth, they came for adventure, to participate in the great excitement (“to see the elephant,” the saying went, a reference to why kids wanted to go to the circus parade). These motives did not foster prudence or public responsibility. Heedless of the environmental damage they inflicted, the migrants denuded the mountainsides of trees to get wood for their shantytowns, mines, and fuel. Even after a state government existed in Sacramento, mining camps governed themselves as informal democracies “not sharply distinguished from mob law,” as the early California historian and philosopher Josiah Royce put it. Kangaroo courts dealt out rough justice to suspected offenders; notorious lynchings occurred. Personal violence became common after 1848. Royce blamed the “irresponsibility” of individual fortune-hunters plus hostility toward “foreigners” for a lack of community loyalty.
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The shortage of women also contributed to the temporary drop in the level of civilization among the new arrivals, mostly men in their twenties—though they had, after all, usually come from solid communities and been schooled in conventional values. The presence of respectable Anglo womanhood in California became a dream, part of an aspiration to the civilization the migrants had left behind. When her husband died in far-off San Francisco in September 1848, Eliza Farnham of New York conceived a plan to lead a shipload of virtuous, eligible young women to California to provide the new society with suitable wives and mothers. But she found only three qualified takers for her plan. She decided to go to California anyway, and operated her late husband’s farm at Santa Cruz. In practice, the Gold Rush probably had as significant an impact on the status of women in the East as it did in California itself. The many married women left behind had to take on unaccustomed responsibilities, such as running the family farm or business.
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In 1848 and for several years thereafter, all California gold mining occurred in “placers,” places where gold had been eroded out of the rocks and washed by flowing water into beds of dirt or gravel. Panning for gold in such a location required only inexpensive equipment and no great expertise, favoring the early prospectors. Some of them soon graduated to using a “rocker” or “cradle,” which washed dirt more efficiently than a pan. Later arrivals would have to work harder to find gold the early ones had missed. Often they went to work for wages in hydraulic mining operations that used large amounts of water under high pressure. Eventually, excavation of quartz deposits for gold ore required both capital and specialized knowledge, and the industrial revolution came to gold mining. Mining evolved into a corporate enterprise, and the miners became unionized employees instead of amateur entrepreneurs.
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The amount of money an individual miner could expect to make fell sharply over the years. According to the estimates of the modern expert Rodman Paul, an average miner could earn $20 a day in 1848, $16 in 1849, $5 by 1852, and $3 by 1856. Declining local prices partially offset these declining earnings. By comparison, in New York City at this time a male carpenter or printer earned on average $1.40 a day, a female milliner, about 40 cents.
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Quite unintentionally, President Polk dramatically exacerbated sectional conflict by his territorial acquisitions and his promotion of rapid development. The miners in California, even if Democrats or southerners, overwhelmingly opposed the introduction of black slaves—not because slavery was unsuitable for gold mining but for the very opposite reason: because employment of unfree labor conferred such a huge advantage that individual prospectors felt they would be forced out of the gold fields if large slaveholders came in. The conscripted labor of Indians had demonstrated the point, which was why the forty-niners made it their policy to kill or drive the Natives away. The same fear of the competition of cheap gang labor also appeared in the vicious persecution of Chinese “coolies” after 1852. Knowing the state of public opinion in California, and the impossibility of preventing slaves there from escaping, southern participants in the Gold Rush very seldom brought slaves with them. However, political spokesmen for the southern slaveholding interest did not readily acquiesce in its exclusion from the territories acquired from Mexico. Calhoun proclaimed the legal right of slaveholders to take their human property into all the territories as a matter of principle, fearing that legal exclusion of slavery implied moral disapproval of the institution and constituted the thin end of a wedge of eventual general emancipation. Unable to resolve the question of slavery’s legality, the federal government provided no organized civilian political structures for the former Mexican territories until the great Compromise of 1850.
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What resulted in the meantime was vigilantism in California, theocracy in Utah, and a mixture of military rule with persistent tradition in New Mexico. One of those who foresaw the bitter political fallout from the war of conquest was the Concord sage Ralph Waldo Emerson, who predicted, “The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man who swallows the arsenic which brings him down in return. Mexico will poison us.”
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In 1837, Emerson had published his ode for the monument to commemorate the Battle of Concord: “Here once the embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard round the world.” The memorable lines were hyperbole—the sound of the American Revolution resonated around the Atlantic but not the Pacific. James Marshall’s discovery of gold in the Sierra had a better claim to triggering an event in global history. California was the first state to be settled by peoples from all over the world. (Indeed, it remains the most ethnically cosmopolitan society in existence today.) Endowing an occurrence in such a remote place with global historical consequences were the nineteenth-century developments in communication: the mass newspapers that publicized the finding, the advertisements that sold equipment and tickets, the increased knowledge of geography and ocean currents, the improvements in shipbuilding. Although the travel times to California seem long to us, the Gold Rush of 1848-49 represented an unprecedented worldwide concentration of human purpose and mobilization of human effort. To those who lived through it, the well-named “Rush” seemed a dramatic example of the individualism, instability, rapid change, eager pursuit of wealth, and preoccupation with speed characteristic of America in their lifetime. It also testified to the power of hope, and hope built the United States.

VI

The blight came upon Ireland suddenly. As harvest time approached in 1845, “the crops looked splendid,” an emigrant remembered. “But one fine morning in July there was a cry around that some blight had struck the potato stalks.” The leaves blackened, the tubers quickly rotted, and “a sickly odor of decay” spread over the land, “as if the hand of death had stricken the potato field.”
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Even today, the fungus-like spores named
Phytophthera infestans
cause hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of damage to potato and tomato crops all over the world. In 1845–51, they constituted a novel, unforeseen, and mysterious catastrophe, producing the last major famine in European history:
an gorta mór
, “the great hunger” in Irish.

Of the eight million people in Ireland at the onset of the famine, three million ate potatoes at every meal, and the poorest ones ate very little else.
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In 1845, the blight stole about a third of the potato crop, causing serious economic hardship; in 1846, virtually the entire crop was destroyed, and famine stalked the land. By 1847, most people had eaten their seed potatoes, so only a small crop appeared; in 1848, the blight returned. Many Irish peasants had practiced “composite” agriculture, raising potatoes to eat and feed their animals, while selling the animals and other produce to pay the rent. In normal times agricultural Ireland exported linens, grain, and livestock to England. Ironically, exports of food continued during the famine; had the British government halted them, it would have provoked hunger in England. Three times as much food was imported into Ireland from the United States, including for the first time maize. (The Creek Indians, from their reservation in Oklahoma, donated a hundred thousand bushels.)
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Prime Minister Robert Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws (the protective tariffs on grain) facilitated such importation. The maize was boiled into gruel and given away at outdoor soup kitchens by the government; in July 1847, three million Irish people got what little food they had that way. The soup kitchens, the rapid expansion of public works (chiefly road building), and relief efforts by landlords, local authorities, and religious philanthropies all fell hopelessly far short of the human need. In the decade 1846-55, over a million Irish people, perhaps a million and a half, died of starvation or diseases provoked by malnutrition such as cholera, typhus, dysentery, and typhoid fever. About two million emigrated to Britain, North America, or the Antipodes, with over half of them going to the United States. All these figures are estimates; during the Great Famine no one kept track of dying rural paupers, and because Irish people of the time enjoyed freedom to travel without passports or visas, comprehensive records of their comings and goings do not survive. The population of Ireland has never since attained its level of the 1841 census, and the Great Famine has been called an Irish holocaust.
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