Which Way to the Wild West? (9 page)

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Authors: Steve Sheinkin

BOOK: Which Way to the Wild West?
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W
asn't there an easier way to make money than sifting through dirt from your dead friend's grave? Definitely.
The surest way to make money in California was not to
be
a gold miner but to
sell stuff
to gold miners. Merchants made fortunes selling food, mining supplies, and clothes—gladly taking miners' gold in exchange. In mining camp bars, the price for a glass of whiskey was one pinch of gold dust (which explains why bar owners liked to hire bartenders with fat fingers).
When a twenty-four-year-old Jewish immigrant named Levi Strauss arrived in San Francisco, he was amazed to see store owners racing each other out to his ship in rowboats, each shouting that he would buy all the goods on board. The local stores must be pretty busy, Strauss figured. He set up his own shop, where miners told him they were always looking for pants that wouldn't fall apart on them. So Strauss and a friend invented a new kind of pants, made from tough denim fabric, dyed blue, and held together with metal rivets. And that's how blue jeans were born.
Women in California saw other moneymaking opportunities—ones the men had missed. There were no laundries in San Francisco, for example. Most men just walked around in smelly shirts. Those who were picky about cleanliness sent their clothes to be washed in Hawaii or China, then waited six months to get them back. Women started local laundries (and offered much quicker service).
When Luzena Stanley Wilson came to California with her husband
and kids in 1849, she had the usual dreams of finding a fortune in gold. But soon she discovered a much better way to make money. She was bending over a campfire, cooking dinner for her family, when a hungry miner walked up and said: “I'll give you five dollars, ma'am, for them biscuits.”
“It sounded like a fortune to me,” she said. She stood there silently, too surprised to answer.
The man thought she was driving a hard bargain. He took out a ten-dollar gold piece and dropped it into her hand.
“I made some more biscuits for my family,” she remembered.
The next day, as the family drove into Sacramento, the coin fell from a box and rolled out though the bottom of the wagon. But Wilson knew where to get more.
Sure enough, as she cooked at her family's campsite a few days later, a man walked up and got right to business:
Luzena Stanley Wilson
“Madame, I want a good substantial breakfast, cooked by a woman.”
“I asked him what he would have,” Wilson said.
“Two onions, two eggs, a beef-steak, and a cup of coffee.”
“He ate it, thanked me, and gave me five dollars,” she said. “If I had asked ten dollars he would have paid it.”
The family sold their oxen and put the money into a restaurant and hotel. The profits were piling up—until they lost everything in a flood. So they moved on to another mining town, where Wilson started selling meals again. She soon saved enough to buy a new hotel and was making great money—until they lost everything in a fire.
“I, as before, set up my stove and camp kettle,” Wilson said. She started all over again, selling meals to miners, and saving up to buy a bigger business …
Well, no one said life out west was going to be easy.
O
ne day a miner named Daniel Knower walked into a store and paid for his supplies with gold dust, as miners always did. The store owner weighed the dust and told Knower what it was worth. But the figure seemed too low. Knower asked the man to weigh the gold again.
“He came back in a few minutes and apologized,” Knower remembered, “saying that he had weighed it in the scales that he used when he traded with the Indians.”
Many mining town merchants were doing the same thing. They had two scales to weigh gold: one for whites and one for Native Americans (gold always seemed to weigh less on the scale used for Native Americans).
This brings up an important point about the gold rush: it looked very different from different points of view. Even though most American miners never struck it rich, they saw the search as the adventure of a lifetime. “It is far more pleasing to me than to sit daily locked up in a dirty office,” said one miner from Pennsylvania.
To the Indians of California, the gold rush looked less like an adventure and more like an invasion. Miners drove away the deer and other game that Indians had always relied on for food. They chopped down forests and polluted salmon streams. When some Native Americans tried to join the search for gold, they were violently driven away from good mining spots. And as had happened in Oregon, newcomers brought new diseases that devastated the native villages.
Everyone saw this happening, but to many Americans it seemed like a necessary step toward making California part of the United States. The
San Francisco Bulletin
put it bluntly: “It is a painful necessity of advancing civilization that the Indians should gradually disappear.”
They didn't disappear, but it was close. Before 1849 there were about 150,000 Indians in California. By 1870 fewer than 30,000 would still be alive.
M
eanwhile, miners from Mexico, Chile, China, France, and other countries were having their own troubles.
As more and more people crowded into the mining camps, some American miners turned angrily against those they saw as unwelcome competition for the scarce gold. “California for the Americans!” shouted American miners (perhaps forgetting that California had been part of the United States for only a year).
California's government responded in 1850 with the Foreign Miners' Tax, requiring foreign-born miners to pay a fee every month to stay at the mines. Tax collectors (and people pretending to be tax collectors) starting roaming through immigrants' mining camps, demanding the payment. This often led to fights. “I was sorry to stab the poor creature,” one collector said after viciously snatching cash from a Chinese miner. “But the law makes it necessary to collect the tax.”
None of this stopped the flow of foreign miners to California. Facing poverty, famine, and war in China, young men excitedly talked of California as
Gum Shan,
or Golden Mountain. By 1852 more than 20,000 men had sailed from China to California, and thousands more made the trip in the following years. Back home in China, wives of the absent miners were singing a new song:
Oh, don't ever marry your daughter to a man from Gold Mountain.
Lonely and sad—a cooking pot is her only companion.
Chinese miners dreamed of finding some quick gold in California, and then heading back home. They had a hard time with the gold
part. The tax on foreign miners was one problem. Another was that American miners kept chasing them off any decent mining site they happened to find. Most of them stayed on in California, though, determined to find new opportunities.
Remember these guys. They're going to play a major role in the story of the West.
M
exican miners were clashing with Americans as well. There was plenty of leftover anger from the recent U.S.-Mexican War. Also, many Mexicans had mining experience and were good at digging gold, which some Americans found annoying.
This hostility led to one of the most famous stories of the gold rush. According to one version, it all began one day when a young miner from Mexico named Joaquin Murrieta was riding a horse that belonged to his brother. A group of American miners thought they recognized the horse as one that had been stolen from them, and they approached Murrieta. One of the Americans said:
“You are the chap that's been a'stealing horses and mules around here, for the last six months, are you?”
“You charge me unjustly,” replied Murrieta. “I borrowed this horse of my half brother, who bought it from an American, which he can easily prove.”
“You are nothing but a dirty thief!” the American yelled.
“Hang him! Hang him!” the others shouted.
The men pulled Murrieta off the horse, tied him up, and dragged him to his brother's cabin. They wrapped a rope around his brother's neck and hanged him from a tree. Then they tied Murrieta to the
same tree and whipped him while his brother's body swung back and forth from the branch above.
After burying his brother's body that night, Murrieta swore he would never rest until he spilled the blood of his enemies. One by one, over the following weeks, the men who had attacked him were found dead at their campsites. And from that point on, no American miner was safe from Murrieta's fury.
At least, this is how the story went in a book called
The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murrieta, the Celebrated California Bandit,
published in 1854 by a Cherokee Indian author named Yellow Bird. Yellow Bird claimed to have collected the tale from local sources. He must have made up the dialogue, though, and probably some of the details too.
But he definitely didn't make up the person. There really was a miner named Joaquin Murrieta who moved with his family from Mexico to the California mines in 1850. Murrieta family members report that Joaquin and his brother were attacked just as the book described.
Murrieta shows up in California newspapers too, which printed story after story about “the notorious outlaw, Joaquin.” The papers described Murrieta as a vicious killer who led a band of bloody thieves, including a three-fingered sidekick named Manuel “Tres Dedos” Garcia. But to Mexicans he became a heroic figure, a Robin Hood battling back against gold-grabbing Americans.
Soon after the governor of California offered a five-thousanddollar reward for capture of Joaquin Murrieta, a company of rangers surrounded what they believed to be his gang. They shot the men, cut off Joaquin's head, put it in a jar of brandy, brought it back to town, and charged people a dollar to see it. They didn't seem to mind that people who knew Murrieta said it was not his head.
For years after this, people continued to claim they had seen the mysterious Joaquin—or to have been robbed by him. What really happened to Joaquin Murrieta? No one knows.
N
ow back to the diggings, where it was getting harder and harder for miners to make a living. Most of the easy-to-find gold had already been found.
“I have no pile yet,” one miner wrote home. “But you can bet your life I will never come home until I have something more than when I started.”
Most of the miners felt that way—it was embarrassing to go home empty-handed. But the longer they stayed, the more homesick they got. “I feel bad sometimes when I think of home,” James Maxfeld wrote to his wife in Massachusetts. “Then again, come to think of how dull it is at home, I do not want to be there.”
Four months later Maxfeld was a changed man. “I want to be home,” he wrote. “I would give anything I have got for the privilege of having a kiss from you.”
Another miner expressed his loneliness in his diary: “Got nearer to a female this evening than I have been for six months. Came near fainting.”
No wives or girlfriends, very little gold to be found, ridiculously expensive food and supplies, backs aching from working bent over, legs swelling from standing in freezing streams … all this was enough to cure most miners of gold fever. Miners expressed their disappointment in new songs like “The Lousy Miner,” which was often heard in 1850s California:
It's four long years since I reached this land,
In search among the rocks and sand;
And yet I'm poor when the truth is told,
I'm a lousy miner,
I'm a lousy miner in search of shining gold.
There was still plenty of gold out there, but it was stuck in the rocks deep underground and getting it required expensive equipment. By the mid-1850s big companies were taking over the gold mining business from individual miners.
William Swain was one of thousands of miners who decided it was time to give up. “I have made up my mind that I have got enough of California and am coming home as fast as I can,” he wrote. Gone were his dreams of marching back to his family with a fortune. “I shall get home with only $700 or $800,” he warned his wife. “But I am thankful for small favors.”
Historians estimate that of all the people who came to California in search of gold, only one in twenty left the diggings richer than when he arrived. Swain was just happy to get home, especially when he saw that the entire town had come out to greet him. “I have been many miles and seen many places,” he said, “but this is the finest sight I have ever seen.”

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