Gold! (23 page)

In seeking to help out the widow of their beloved preacher, James's congregation took up a collection for the widow and her children, “He was the humble instrument of God. He saw the awful condition we were in and helped us to see it too as we should have done during his pastoral charge of New Hope Church for seven years. We hereby agree and bind ourselves to relieve his heirs.” They meant, of course, only part of his debt. After that it was a hand-to-mouth existence for Zerelda and her children.

On September 12, 1855, Zerelda remarried, to Dr. Reuben Samuels, in personality the direct opposite of Robert. Where Robert was strong, authoritative, and loving, Samuels was weak, meek, and cold, hardly the sort of personality to father children on the frontier.

The next crucial point where Robert would have made a difference came in 1861. With the Civil War already under way, Samuels stood by tacitly as his eighteen-year-old stepson joined up with William Quantrill. No matter Robert James's Southern sympathies, he would have died first before allowing Frank to join up with such a scoundrel. Quantrill had defied all of the Ten Commandments before he was twenty-one.

William C. Quantrill was born in Ohio on July 31,
1837. He became a schoolteacher in Ohio and Illinois. That makes him, perhaps, American history's only mass murderer with such a benign and educated background. Like many a pioneer from the East, his profession did not offer enough challenge, enough adventure, and so Quantrill went west in 1857. The following year came the charge that he was a horse-stealer, a hanging offense in any frontier town. Quantrill quickly found employment as a trail hand on a wagon train traveling west to Salt Lake City.

Quantrill would subsequently be involved in a number of murders and thefts in Utah, and later in 1860 he fled a Utah arrest warrant, taking up residence in Lawrence, Kansas. There, the Southern sympathizer joined a group of abolitionists for the sole purpose of setting them up. The latter had plans to go across the border to Missouri to free some slaves. But Quantrill was working an angle.

Secretly, Quantrill let his proslavery brethren know they were coming. When they got to the Missouri farm to free those slaves, the Southerners opened fire from their places of concealment in the brush surrounding the farm. In a hail of bullets, the abolitionists were cut down by the proslavers. Quantrill—who, of course, survived—smiled when the massacre was over.

In 1861, when Fort Sumter was attacked and the Civil War began, punitive raids by the Kansas-based Jayhawkers began. A guerrilla band, they rode into Missouri to kill slaveowners. Quantrill decided to emulate their tactics, only his Confederate sympathies served as a thin veneer for what he really was: a cold-blooded murderer
who liked killing. He enlisted to his banner men of similar disposition, every out-of-work thief and murderer he could find. His lieutenant was seventeen-year-old cherub-faced Archie Clements, who would scalp an enemy's head and give it to Quantrill as a souvenir.

It was into this band of misfits who showed depraved indifference to human life that Frank James decided to ally himself. If Robert James were still alive, he would never allowed it to happen, but if it did, he would have gotten the rest of his family out of harm's way. Instead, Zerelda and Jesse stayed put.

That wasn't too good an idea.

Missouri was considered a “border” state—that is, neutral on slavery. Of course the state wasn't, and had many proslavery counties besides Clay. Union soldiers stationed in Missouri were under orders from Washington to ferret out Confederate sympathizers, which meant regular raids on the homes of people who had relatives allied with Quantrill. Since Quantrill operated independently except for a brief period when the Confederates mistakenly gave him a captainship and shortly thereafter came to their senses and kicked him out, he was considered an outlaw.

In 1863, a detachment of Union Army soldiers rode out to the James farm. It was still called that despite Reuben Samuels' residence. The officer in charge, Lieutenant Rip Masters, asked for Frank, to which Zerelda replied that she knew nothing and Samuels shrugged. Jesse, fifteen years old, sassed the Northern soldier and leaped to the attack.

Masters's response was to punch Jesse senseless; he was then stomped by the soldiers who were in the process of burning the farm to the ground. Robert James, a man of peace, would have counseled patience, and Christ's dying words “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”

Crap. That's what the James family had left after the soldiers got finished with their farm. Over time, it would be rebuilt. But Jesse's heart had been broken when his father went to the Gold Rush, stomped on when his mother remarried, and now it had been shredded by the bluecoats' beating. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Robert James's death was the beginning of a downward spiral for Jesse James that became a problem for many.

Soon after that beating, Jesse sought out Quantrill, and at age sixteen in 1864, joined up and was assigned to Bloody Bill Andersen's detachment. Andersen was another one of Quantrill's “lieutenants.” He wasn't called “Bloody” Bill for nothing; he liked to kill and mutilate. Jesse's first “engagement” was in September 1864. At Centralia, Kansas, Andersen's detachment, which included Frank and Jesse James and their cousins Cole and Bob Younger, rode hell-bent into the abolitionist town.

Andersen allowed his men to rape the women. Surprising a squad of twenty-six Union soldiers in transit, Andersen and his men cornered them at the town's railroad station. As Jesse watched, Andersen lined them up side by side and then went down the line of twenty-six, carefully shooting each man in the back of the head. Jesse drank it all in.

In April 1865, with the war finally at an end, blanket amnesty was offered to those who fought for the Southern cause, including the survivors of Quantrill's band. Quantrill himself, as well as Andersen and Clements, were all dead. To get amnesty, it was necessary for the former “soldiers” to take an oath of allegiance to the United States of America, and to do that, Missourians had to travel to their county seat.

This is the only moment in their lives of the James boys after their father died, where he would have counseled them to do what they did—ride into Liberty, swear the oath, and put the killing behind them. Unfortunately, the James boys happened to be traveling into Liberty during the week of April 14, 1865.

By the time they got to the outskirts of Liberty, news of President Lincoln's assassination by the actor John Wilkes Booth had been telegraphed. In anger, the Union garrison stationed there decided to shoot any rebels who had the audacity to come into town expecting to swear amnesty.

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.