Gold! (8 page)

Cump's father died when he was young. Unable to care for her family, Cump's widowed mother made a painful decision. She sent Cump's brother Thomas to be raised by an aunt. Then she turned to Cump's father's best friend, diplomat Thomas Ewing. A wealthy man, Ewing took Cump in as his own. Cump became a foster child to Thomas. His new brother was Boyd Ewing.

A smart, resourceful child, Cump grew up to graduate from West Point as a second lieutenant in 1840. In 1848, at age twenty-eight, he was posted to California as adjutant to Governor Mason. He quickly gained Mason's
confidence and became extremely influential in his correspondence and therefore how government worked in California.

In early March 1848, Cump looked up from his desk in the anteroom of the governor's office in Monterey to see a lanky American. He introduced himself as “Bennett,” and said he had just come down from Captain Sutter's on special business. He wanted to see Governor Mason
in person
.

Looking the man over, Cump could see that he meant business; something was going on. Cump escorted him in to see the colonel and left them together. After some time the colonel came to the door and called to Cump.

“Lieutenant, come in.”

Cump did as ordered.

“Look at that.”

Cump's attention was directed to a series of papers unfolded on the colonel's table, in which lay what looked to Cump like half an ounce or so of placer-gold.

“What is that?” Mason asked.

Cump touched it and examined one or two of the larger pieces.

“Is it gold?”

“You ever see native gold, Lieutenant?”

“In 1844 I was in Upper Georgia, and there saw some native gold, but it was much finer than this, and it was in phials, or in transparent quills. If this is gold, it could be easily tested, first, by its malleability, and next by acids.”

Cump took a piece in his teeth, and the metallic luster was perfect.

“Baden, bring an ax!” Cump yelled out to a military clerk. “Also a hatchet and ax from the backyard.”

When they were brought in, Cump took the largest piece and beat it flat. Beyond doubt it was metal, and a pure metal. Still, neither Mason nor Sherman at first attached much significance to the discovery. Gold was known to exist at San Fernando, to the south, and yet was not considered of much value there. Colonel Mason then handed Cump a letter from Captain Sutter, addressed to the governor.

In the letter Sutter said, “I am engaged in erecting a saw-mill at Coloma, about forty miles up the American Fork, above my fort at New Helvetia, for the general benefit of the settlers in that vicinity. I have incurred considerable expense, and wanted a ‘preemption' to the quarter-section of land on which the mill is located, embracing the tail-race in which this particular gold has been found.” He also wanted Mason to acknowledge the land grants he had previously received from the Mexican government.

“Lieutenant, prepare a letter, in answer, for my signature,” Mason instructed his protégé.

Immediately Cump wrote a letter reciting that California was yet a Mexican province, simply held by the United States as a conquest; that no laws of the United States yet applied to it, much less the land laws or preemption laws, which could only apply after a public survey. Therefore it was impossible for the governor to promise him (Sutter) a title to the land; yet, as there were no settlements within forty miles, he was not likely to be
disturbed by trespassers. Colonel Mason signed the letter and handed it to Bennett, who immediately departed.

Writing in his memoirs later, Sherman said ruefully, “That gold was the
first
discovered in the Sierra Nevada, which soon revolutionized the whole country, and actually moved the whole civilized world.”

On March 13, Bennett returned to the fort from Monterey, bringing word that Colonel Mason, the interim governor, had refused to confirm Sutter's title to the land at the sawmill, because a treaty had not yet been signed with Mexico to end the war. The discovery of gold in California was finally reported publically when Brannan's
Californian
newspaper ran a story about the find in its March 15 edition. That was followed on March 18 with E. C. Kemble's article about the discovery in the
California Star
. Other California newspapers picked up on the story. As for the rest for the nation, they would have to wait.

While the telegraph united sections of the country, there was no way to send a telegram from coast-to-coast simply because a transcontinental telegraph line had not yet been laid. There also was no coast-to-coast railroad. There had never really been any need for one. For the moment, Marshall's gold discovery was just California news.

Meanwhile, by March 19, the millrace had been deepened enough that the mill was working at 100 percent capacity. Work was going well. And every Sunday, the Mormons went out to pan for gold and came back to camp at dusk with gold dust. With the sawmill completed, there was nothing to keep the Mormons, the Indians, or any of the other workers in Marshall's
employ when they could just as easily pan for the gold all around them.

As California was writing its history almost every day, the Mexican-American War was coming, after two years of protracted conflict, to an end. A copy of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was sent to President Polk in Washington via James Freaner, a correspondent for the
New Orleans Delta
. He hand-delivered the document to Polk on February 19, 1848.

Angered that Trist had not returned when he demanded, Polk was smart enough to put his feelings aside in favor of recommending the treaty to the Senate for ratification; on March 10, 1848, with two amendments, it was approved. Six days later, Polk signed it into law.

Under the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, Mexico ceded California and New Mexico to the United States, and recognized the Rio Grande as the southern and western boundary of Texas. For that land, the United States paid Mexico $15 million in cash, also assuming $3.25 million more in American claims on the Mexican government.

Were it not for the discovery of gold in California—which Mexico would, of course, control if they had owned the land—the deal might actually have been a good one for Santa Anna's country. California might have been a Mexican province, but under minimal control by the “mother” country. It was not inconceivable that colonial powers, including Russia, England, or France, might have moved to take the burgeoning colony at any
moment. As for Texas, it had already been lost when that confounded Tennessean with the coonskin cap showed up at the Alamo.

And New Mexico? The Mexicans didn't really care about the place. They had done little to settle the land, nor would they have been successful had they tried. The fierce Apache tribe would have risen to stop them; Comanches would raid Mexican settlements; conquest would have come at great cost in human life. Proving themselves an enlightened country, Mexico could not stomach such slaughter and instead chose a graceful exit.

It was the United States that was the real beneficiary of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. For the first time since the Louisiana Purchase in 1806, the country had expanded by buying its continental land from a foreign government. This was just as good a bargain as last time. For a little over $18 million, the Union expanded into the southwestern and western parts of the American continent.

Washington acquired two new states, California and Texas, and one new territory, New Mexico. The United States was clearly on a roll. Yet, as Sutter and Marshall suspected, history was about to bite them right on the ass. By April, men were staking out their claims on the American River, while others were opting to mine in and around Coloma. One by one, Marshall began to lose his workers to the lure of gold. On April 8, the Mormons Bigler, Stevens, and Brown settled their accounts with Sutter at his fort and went back to the sawmill. This time they weren't millworkers; they were gold miners. After
prospecting a little downstream from the mill, they headed over to what became known as Mormon Island in they middle of the river. Seven other Mormons were already there, prospecting. They had $250 worth of gold combined.

For the first time, someone was “mining” gold at the site of the California Gold Rush without using a knife as the principal mining implement. Instead, the Mormons used a contraption made of two closely woven Indian baskets. The idea was to dredge up sand and gravel from the riverbed and put it into the contraption, where gravity and rotating the basket back and forth produced a settling of the heaviest element—gold—to the bottom of the barrel. Only this time, the bottom of the barrel was more valuable than anything toward the top. The Mormons estimated that they could do $2.50 worth of gold for every basket.

By May I, most of the white men were gone from the mill. The bulk of the work was being done by the Indians. Marshall was worried about the dearth of qualified help, plus the fact that it was difficult to run a business when you had prospectors coming around at all hours.

“I had scarcely arrived at the mill again till several persons appeared with pans, shovels, and hoes, and those that had not iron picks had wooden ones, all anxious to fall to work and dig up our mill, but this we would not permit. As fast as one party disappeared another would arrive. Sometimes, I had the greatest kind of trouble to get rid of them. I sent them all off in different directions, telling them about such and such places, where I
was certain there was plenty of gold if they would only take the trouble of looking for it.”

What Marshall never imagined was “that the gold was so abundant. I told them to go to such and such places, because it appeared that they would dig nowhere but in such places as I pointed out, and I believe such was their confidence in me that they would have dug on the very top of yon mountain if I had told them to do so.” Invariably, the newly minted miners would strike gold.

A May 16 entry in Sutter's diary shows that he was momentarily optimistic with the mill he was constructing at Natamo. But that was just false optimism. Sutter seemed to have a talent for staying too late in a place where things weren't working. Rather than sell his interests right then, he soldiered on as he had been taught in the Swiss militia.

After cutting only a few thousand feet of lumber, the sawmill was forced to close. There was no one to run it, and Marshall couldn't do the whole thing by himself; it just wasn't physically possible. Sutter was worn out. May 25 is the last date recorded in his diary:

“A number of people continue traveling to the Mountains,” he wrote simply. In his own backyard, things were literally falling down around him.

The business on the docks was going better than well; it was booming. There was money to be made off this trade if a merchant were situated closer to the docks. Unfortunately, it was a good five miles to travel from the harbor to Sutter's. Why make a customer do that when the store could come to him?

The storeowners in Sutter's Fort owned the adobe brick of the fort that housed their businesses in the fort's interior perimeter. Brick by brick, Sutter's merchants dismantled their part of the fort and carted it down the hill to the shores of the Sacramento River. There, the merchants simply used the brick to rebuild their shops. Sutter's loss was Sacramento's gain.

Back East, the federal government in Washington was concerned. They had heard the rumors of gold discovery coming from California. President Polk wanted a firsthand account of what was going on “out there.”

He turned to Thomas Larkin.

5.

THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT

Thomas Larkin was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1802. When he came of age, Larkin began to travel, first to North Carolina, then migrating across the country to California, where he arrived as a merchant in 1831 and set up a store in Monterey. The store proved profitable; his primary trade was with Mexico and the Hawaiian Islands.

Larkin also was an architect. He invented what would come to be known as the Monterey style of architecture. Combining local adobe walls and the balconies of a southern plantation home with a Massachusetts Yankee's ornamental taste, his Monterey home was the first two-story adobe in California and still stands.

In 1838 he was chosen to be the first—and only—American consul to the Mexican government. He looked
more the part of a prosperous merchant. He had a hawk-like nose; a high, intelligent forehead; and deep, penetrating dark eyes, but an unprepossessing physical presence. That suited Secretary of State (and future president) James Buchanan just fine, considering that Larkin's value to the U.S. government went way beyond his consular abilities.

Larkin was a confidential agent for the U.S. government from 1846 to 1848, whose job it was to bring about the U.S. conquest of California with minimal loss of life. The federal government figured that having an intelligence agent in the Mexican province to note the comings and goings was as potentially profitable as a fomenter of revolution, but with half the cost.

Prone to careful observation and ceaseless documentation, possessed of an excellent memory for everything from figures to geography, Larkin was the best choice for a California spy in the government's employ. Besides that, Thomas Larkin was a damn good writer.

Polk needed his agent to authenticate the rumors of gold and give the president an idea of the extent of the find. The president could then craft his official announcement of the gold discovery to support and encourage expansion of the Union. The government had been on a track of westward expansion; everyone knew that. It wasn't “manifest destiny,” as it would later be called, that drove that expansion, but rather a distinct aspect of the American character that had yet to come to the fore.

It wasn't that Americans, whether naturalized or not, had a rootlessness in their character. For generations they had been satisfied to stay on their farms, till the soil, and pass on whatever they could to the next generation. Reward for this life was in the next. It was as secure a belief as the clasp of the strongest locket and held as dear to the heart.