The Age of Gold (29 page)

Local Indians soon joined the hunt, once they discovered what the whites would pay for gold. The Indians often used sticks instead of shovels, and baskets in place of washbowls. And they made a family affair of the undertaking. “The system they employed for washing the earth was the same as that still used by our panners of gold, but more methodical,” wrote Vicente Pérez Rosales.

From stick and sheath knife, washbowl and basket, the next step up the ladder of mining technology was the cradle. Pérez Rosales and his Chilean companions had made their way to Weber Creek, a tributary of the American River above Sutter’s Fort. They observed the Indians’ method of gathering gold and briefly tried copying it (using pan and scoop rather than basket and stick). The results were disappointing. “For the first three days the harvest was meager,” Pérez Rosales wrote. Then they discovered some of their neighbors using the “California cradle.”

Pérez Rosales and the Chileans found the cradle—the device Sherman described to his friend—to be a vast improvement over the pan. “In this device we lovingly rocked the infant gold and beheld it wax portentously…. Our daily harvest varied between ten and twenty-two ounces of gold.”

Although much better than the pan, the cradle suffered from the inefficiency implied by the frequent interruptions of the washing to clean the gold from the cleats. A variant of the cradle solved this problem, as Jean- Nicolas Perlot and his French partners discovered on their arrival at the gold regions.

H
AD THE PRIMARY GOAL
of mining operations been to maximize the yield of gold per cubic yard of ore (which is, of course, what the composite of sand, gravel, and gold was, though the argonauts didn’t initially use the term), the miners should have stuck with the washbowl—or the
grass basket. The Indians, with their methodical approach, sifted the gold- bearing materials far more thoroughly than the whites did with their cradles and long-toms.

But the yield-per-yard mattered less than the yield-per-day. “Time is money,” Perlot heard again and again, and all evidence indicated that this was true. At bottom the obsession with time derived from the peculiar property arrangements in the goldfields. No one owned the gold until someone discovered it. Upon ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, nearly all the land in the gold regions became American public land, held in common by the people of the United States. The minerals on or under that land might be claimed by anyone. But a claim was valid only as long as it was being exercised—that is, as long as the claim was being physically worked. Neither an individual nor a company could set aside property to be worked later; if not worked now, someone else might legally come in and begin taking out the gold. Yet because new fields were being discovered all the time, no one was interested in wringing the last ounce of gold out of any existing claim; better to take what came easily, then move to another site and skim the cream there.

John Frémont discovered the evanescent nature of mineral rights in California upon his return there in 1849. He also discovered—and indeed epitomized—what became a principal theme of life in the new land: that luck was as important as industry in tapping the wealth of the new land.

Frémont almost literally stumbled into the Gold Rush. Before his frostbitten leg was fully recovered from the disaster in the Rockies, he headed haltingly west to meet Jessie. En route he encountered a large group of Mexicans from the border province of Sonora, going the same way. He had no idea why they were traveling to California, and had to ask. To dig the gold, they replied. Wasn’t that why everyone was going to California?

This was the first Frémont heard of the gold discovery, and he plied the Sonorans for details. How much gold was there in California? Where was it found? The Sonorans couldn’t say. They knew only that gold had been discovered at Sutter’s mill and that people were getting rich.

Impulsiveness was an essential part of Frémont’s character. Sometimes it surfaced as boldness, sometimes as rashness; in this case it inspired a
stroke of genius. Frémont had never seen the Sierra tract that had been purchased for him; indeed, until now he was convinced he’d been swindled. And he knew nothing of these Sonorans, whose golden tales he had no immediate way of verifying. But he had seen enough of the Sierras to guess that if there was gold at Sutter’s mill, there was gold in the streams of the Mariposa. And these Sonorans, sons (and daughters, for some of the miners brought their wives) of a district where mining was centuries old, appeared to know what they were talking about. On the spot he engaged twenty- eight of the Mexicans to work for him. He would outfit and feed them; they would hunt gold on his property. He and they would split the profits.

While Frémont continued to the coast to meet Jessie, the Sonorans proceeded to the Mariposa to start mining. The placers there soon began yielding gold in promising, then eye-popping, then brain-boggling, quantities. Even the half-share sent to Frémont was a prince’s ransom. Jessie described “the astonishment and pleasure of receiving buckskin bags filled with gold dust and lumps of gold.” The first installment was a hundred pounds of gold, worth $18,000. Additional installments followed regularly.

Frémont often acted as though a personal version of Manifest Destiny applied to him, as though Providence, already looking out for Americans, kept special watch over him. This attitude had carried him across the snowy Sierras to his first meeting with John Sutter; it had allowed him (with Jessie as co-conspirator) to defy the War Department; it had encouraged him to flaunt his disdain for the Mexican government of California. It had got him into trouble when he challenged General Kearny, and had almost killed him (and did kill several of his followers) when he tried to cross the winter Rockies. Some of those who knew him, starting with William Sherman, interpreted this trait in Frémont as unwarranted conceit. But now not even Sherman could gainsay that Providence or destiny or something was smiling on Frémont. From disgrace and near-death he was fast becoming as rich as Croesus. Who wouldn’t feel blessed?

J
ESSIE SHARED
the feeling. Several days after touching at San Diego, her ship from Panama anchored at San Francisco. Getting ashore was a
challenge, as the boat crews that transported the passengers to the beach promptly abandoned their craft and headed for the mines. But, as before, her name preceded her, and one of the town’s enterprising businessmen rowed out to fetch her and Lily.

San Francisco was a wild place that summer of 1849, a village fast becoming a city, a vortex of human activity that never ceased nor even much slowed. In the year since Sam Brannan had paraded about the plaza shouting of gold on the American River, San Francisco had undergone a revolutionary transformation. The first effect of the gold discovery was to empty the town, as everyone left for the goldfields. This effect lasted several months, or as long as was required for the news of the discovery to reach the outside world and for the outside world to reach back. By early 1849, as the Pacific fleet of argonauts from Latin America and Australia started to arrive, the town began to fill up again, but with a population unlike that of any other American city. Not only was this new group more cosmopolitan—or foreign, to put the matter plainly—it consisted almost entirely of people who didn’t want to be there. The argonauts saw San Francisco as a way station to the mines; the sooner they could leave the town and get digging, the better.

The transformation continued with the arrival of the ships from the isthmus and around Cape Horn. The large number of Americans in this part of the argosy diluted the foreign influence but, accompanied as the Americans were by Europeans, not all that much. Meanwhile the transient atmosphere increased with the increase in the number of transients. If anything, the desire to keep moving grew more frantic, as each shipload of argonauts arrived and learned how many others had preceded them.

The incessant rush lent a peculiar disorder to the place. Nothing appeared permanent; most of the buildings were actually tents: canvas tossed over a few boards and tied down against the winds that arose off the Pacific each afternoon and blew sand and dust everywhere (and set such tender- lunged newcomers as Jessie Frémont coughing). The few trees that had graced the virgin peninsula had nearly all vanished, cut for lumber or firewood. Merchants lacked warehouses for the goods they sold the argonauts, and so they simply piled their wares in the street. Some of the argonauts
slept in tent-hotels; others camped in the open. Viewed from the dunes that stood behind the city, San Francisco that summer looked like nothing so much as the bivouac of an army on the move—which essentially was what it was.

This was hardly what Jessie had envisioned when she dreamed of her new home in California, the refuge she would create for herself and John and Lily. If anything, it reminded her of Chagres and Panama City, albeit without the tropical diseases. Consequently, she stayed in San Francisco only long enough for John to arrive from Los Angeles. On her tenth day there he appeared, and they shared a warm and weepy reunion, with each filling the other in on the details of their eventful six months apart. Shortly thereafter they moved to Monterey, where they took up residence in the house of John’s erstwhile bête noire, José Castro, who had retreated to Mexico.

Monterey was more in keeping with Jessie’s domestic vision. The town was very quiet, suspended, so to speak, in the first phase of the gold- induced transformation—the phase in which everybody left. The difference was that no one replaced Monterey’s departed, as the old capital was utterly eclipsed by San Francisco, which was much more convenient to the goldfields. At the time of Jessie and John’s arrival, in the summer of 1849, about the only men in Monterey were those required by law or unbreakable contract to be there. These included some American soldiers, among them, as Jessie put it, “a long thin young captain” with red hair named Sherman.

There were a larger number of women, nearly all of them native Californians. At first they kept their distance from Jessie. She understood why: “My name represented only invasion and defeat.” But before long the common bond of motherhood brought them together. They traded milk and flour and fabric and advice. The one thing Jessie never learned to appreciate was the Californians’ addiction to cigars, which she declined as often as the other mothers offered a puff.

Daily life in Gold Rush California posed peculiar problems. Even after the Frémonts’ gold began pouring down from the Mariposa, many things Jessie took for granted back east were simply unavailable (starting with
banks to hold their money: she stored the gold under the mattress, and then in trunks). She sought to hire a chambermaid, and by dint of much effort found a woman willing to work for $240 a month and perquisites. This wage was more than ten times the going rate in the East, but Jessie agreed to pay it. She also agreed to the woman’s demand for housing for herself and her children. But when the woman began borrowing Jessie’s dresses for copying by her—the maid’s—seamstress, Jessie demurred. The woman indignantly resigned, leaving Jessie to tend to her own and Lily’s needs herself.