Lost Brothers and Dreams

I had not been home long when word came that San Francisco had yet another devastating fire.

The new blaze had taken ten full blocks and pieces of half a dozen more—City Hall, the Jenny Lind Theatre, even Sam Brannan’s house,— the very place where the first gold had been shown to the world. Millions of dollars thrown to ash, and dreams with them.

The fire had run before noon—starting in a little frame house on Pacific Street, then driven south and east by the sea breeze until the whole waterfront glowed like a forge. I pictured the plank sidewalks burning from within, as they sometimes did, as if the very ground were betraying the city.

For all its noise, its greed, its rough ways, I cared for that city.

News like that follows you. It settles heavy on the chest. I thought of the carpenters and merchants—men I had known—standing once more in the ashes, scarcely weeks after the last great fire.

Worse news was to come to us. We received news that Josiah, only days from reaching San Francisco, had fallen ill aboard the Gold Hunter and died in Mazatlán Harbor on June 1st. Our hearts were broken. Mother dressed in black, the lintel was draped in bunting. I’d find father weeping in the field, thinking he’d lost both of his twin boys. It was a long time before we learned that Josiah was buried on Creston Island in the English burying ground.[1]

In those days I found myself wandering to all the places of my childhood. Owls Head was welcoming—I had aunts, uncles and cousins there and it was place where my grandparents, George and Sarah (Dean) Emery had a farm and where they were buried.

More often than not though, I was helping Father with the farm, taking an odd sense of pleasure in it—one I didn't possess as a youth. In the heat of the afternoon I rode to the shipyards, sometimes lending the boys an experienced hand. On Fridays, Father and I would take Mother to Rockland. There was produce and dairy to sell and while Mother gossiped in the shops, Father and I inquired at the wharf for any word or sighting of Nathaniel.

Though stinging with grief and worry, the best of times were the evenings at my mother’s table. Lobster—though considered peasant fare—graced our plates as often as fresh Atlantic cod. She could boil it or broil it, and the table would be laid with an abundance of vegetables from her garden. Family and friends filled the house and yard. When the blueberries came on, the pies came from the oven by the half-dozen, so plentiful that my waistcoats grew snug.

As much as I had missed my people, I had missed the certainty and variety of food.

I visited family and friends. One in particular was Deacon Samuel Dean, a cousin—preacher and farmer both—who wished to hear more of my tales of El Dorado. Others had heard enough of them.

Samuel and his wife Melia, had taken little Mercy K. into their home when her parents, Captain James Hathorn and his wife, Rosanna Kalloch could no longer reconcile their differences. Samuel and Melia had lost two little girls who’d be about my age if they had lived. Mercy K. fit into their household while still able to be near both of her parents. She made sure to tell me that she was almost fifteen, held on to every word I would say and asked good questions.

My brother George and his wife Lucy had a growing household, but the sea had claimed my brother-in-law, Captain Benjamin Thompson, leaving my sister Elizabeth a childless widow.

Mary and William were living in South Thomaston with three little girls. Margaretta and her husband Oliver Butler had a farm in Appleton and three young ones. Sylvania and her husband Henry Hopkins were living in Thomaston, having buried their only child— a three year old son, Herbert the year before.

Sophia and Louisa were twenty-one and nineteen, neither married and thick as thieves.

Nathaniel returned at last, gaunt and shaken. He was inconsolable, my parent’s grief renewed for a time, but Nathaniel’s sorrow sunk him.

Each time that Dad called me a roving fellow, Mom begged me to stay in Maine and find a wife, lest I end up dying on my way back to California or at by the hands of ruffians. Each time I said “Hangtown” she shuddered.

With my affairs settled and the harvest in, I left Maine again, this time with Asa Combs of South Thomaston, Ralph Chapman, and George Hall of Rockland. We sailed to Boston, took a steamer to New York and booked passage on the Atlantic steamer, Daniel Webster. It was the ship's maiden voyage and we left New York on October 21, 1851.[2]

On the Caribbean Sea to the Nicaragua crossing we stopped at the island of Jamaica and I showed Ralph, Asa and George around the town of Kingston. We ate too much, laughed more, and before dusk returned to the wharf.

After two days running west of the Spanish Main, the water changed color beneath the bow, turning from deep blue to a muddy green that told us land was near. It was early morning when the lookout called the coast. We stepped to the rail to see the low line of jungle rising straight from the sea.

We had reached Greytown, Nicaragua.

The captain ordered the anchor dropped just outside the bar where the surf was breaking white. Long dugouts lunged through the surf and began circling us like gulls around a trawler.

Ralph came up beside me and rested his arms on the rail, studying the place with a doubtful eye.

“Well,” he said after a moment, “there’s no mistaking we’ve left Maine behind.”

George laughed. Asa only shook his head. I could not fault either reaction. The heat settled over the ship like a wet blanket.

They called it Chagres fever[3]—and it came over me before we reached San Carlos. I was delirious when my companions carried me onto the lake steamer. At La Virgen, we stayed only long enough for me to be able to ride a mule. I wasn’t sure I would live long enough to see the Pacific, but I did.

The passage north on the Pacific Mail steamer North America was respite from the jungle heat and humidity, and eleven days later we sighted the familiar hills of San Francisco, arriving on November 28, 1851.[4]

We stepped ashore onto a new-built wharf—planks so fresh they still smelled of sap. It wasn’t the stout pier I had last walked, but a rough, hurried thing hammered together since the fire, standing on pilings that had escaped the worst of it. San Francisco had no choice but to rebuild its landings at once. A port that stopped breathing would die, and this place was too hungry to quit living.

After the big fires, they carted the ashes straight to the tide, tipping wagonloads of rubble into the shallows, rebuilding the waterfront out into the bay. The shoreline crept outward month by month—new ground rising underfoot where only water had been. Ships anchored farther out; more than one master found his keel brushing mud where deep water had welcomed him the year before.

A few unlucky hulls, scorched and sagging, lay caught in the shallows—storeships abandoned during the fire, their decks stripped to beams. Warehouses I had bought from were still pits of brick dust and twisted iron.

But beyond the wharf the city itself was rising, and Portsmouth Square was being rebuilt—with as much brick as wood and wide streets as firebreaks. The city had adopted building codes and had a fire brigade too.

The city was alive in its own wild way. Hammers rang, bricklayers hustled, and iron-fronts more common than wooden ones. Rafts of Oregon lumber lay stacked along the shore. Every street echoed with the sound of rebirth—determination louder than ruin.

I walked the length of the new wharf slowly, still weak from fever but steadied by what I saw. San Francisco was torn to the bone, yes, but fastening on new flesh. The place was a contradiction—half graveyard, half miracle—and maybe that suited me more than I liked to admit.

The Algoma was missing. I heard she had been taken ashore on Goat Island and capsized on a flood tide—a fine vessel worth fifteen thousand dollars, gone to waste.[5]

We bought supplies and started up the Sacramento River in the following morning, beginning the four-day journey to Hangtown. The log cabin and store was still standing. The shelves were thinned but I’d brought enough merchandise to fill them. The Sierra was still harsh, parched, but it was home of a sort, and I meant to make the most of the time it gave me. I settled back into life in Hangtown and prayed that raine and snow would return. We all did.

By February of 1852, we got what we hoped for—and more besides. The storms came down from the high country like an army marching out of the clouds—day after day of iron-gray sky, the wind rattling the shutters, and snow piling deeper than any man in town had ever seen. At first we cheered it. Every flake felt like a promise kept. The creeks would run again, we said. The sluices would sing. California was shaking off the drought at last.

But hope turned to caution, and caution to dread. The snow didn’t stop.

Up on the ridges it buried cabins to their chimneys. Pack trains vanished in the passes. Men who’d gone up into the diggings before the storms found themselves trapped in claims they could no longer reach or leave. In town the drifts climbed over the hitching posts and pressed against doors until you had to shoulder them open. The roads—what passed for them—were impassable. Freight wagons stalled for weeks in Sacramento, waiting for a break in the weather. A man could walk ten miles in any direction and never see the trace of a trail, just an endless white that had swallowed our world.

It was a good winter for water—but a hard one for the living. The miners said the gold would come down with the thaw, and maybe it would, but that did nothing for the men snowbound in the hills—cold, hungry, and praying their roofs would hold. Even in town, we learned to ration flour and beans, not from want of money but because the supply lines were frozen solid.

I stood outside my shop more than once, looking up at the mountains hidden behind heavy clouds, and wondered whether the country was testing us or trying to bury us. Snow was a blessing, aye—but sometimes blessings come with sharp edges.

One thing was sure: when the thaw finally came, the whole Sierra would roar—and it did. Floods came and gold washed into the creeks.

Mining on the American River, 1852. Public Domain.

With the drought ended, sawmills were erected, and with them, our town began looking permanent. Wagons and pack trains clattered in from the ridges each morning; Hangtown was bustling with commerce, and miners came down each evening. Main Street swelled with people until it seemed the whole Sierra had emptied itself into that gulch. We had a post office, a fire brigade, and Pony Express riders thundered through town. A merchant who kept his word and his ledger straight could make a clean living without chasing every rumor of gold into the high country, but I had a good assistant in the store and didn’t need a rumor to lead me to where the gold was.

The only problem that dogged me was Chagres fever—it never truly leaves a man. It steps back, that is all, waiting for another turn. I learned its ways in Panama, and knew its footfall the first time it came on me again. It always started the same: a shiver at the base of the spine on a warm day, when no man had business feeling cold. Then the ache behind the eyes, and a taste in the mouth like iron. By sundown the cold turned to heat, and I’d shake so hard my teeth felt loose in my head. Sweat poured out of me until the blanket under my back was soaked through.

There was no sense fighting it. When a spell hit, I’d drag myself upstairs when I could and take to my bed, letting the shaking run its course. Then came the heat, fierce as a kiln. I’d vomit until only green bile hit the pan. Headaches, and a weakness that hollowed me clean out—I was hardly able to lift a ledger or carry a small sack of flour. It could take a day, or it could take three. You never knew which. You just had to sweat it out.

If I was out in the diggings, the boys had to look after me until I was back on my feet. I’d head back to town to regain my strength.

The doctors did what they could. They’d bleed a man if they couldn’t think of anything else, though I never let them take much from me. Quinine helped if a person could get their hands on some. Mostly they told me to rest, keep warm when the chills came, and cool when the heat rose. One said I ought to take more broth and stop working the diggings. Another said to soak my feet in hot water with mustard. A third said the spells would ease as I got older, but I was only thirty.

When the fever let go of me, I worked as though making up for lost time. Still, I was making good money.

My dear mother, Louisa Emery Graves, died on March 29th, 1852, at sixty-two years of age. Father wrote that the gentle, sweet light of the home had gone out with her. It had been a two months before the news reached me. I wept as if she had died the very day that dreadful letter came. By evening I sought company at my usual saloon, not for cheer, but for noise enough to quiet my thoughts.

Wagons came in from Sacramento and the river towns, and others went east toward Carson Valley. Hangtown sat where the roads met—a kind of crossroads for miners headed higher into the hills or farther toward Nevada. You could stand in the doorway of my store and see freighters heading both directions, the dust rising behind them all day long. I was having fewer attacks and thought I was coming clear of the Chagres, but the winter of ’53 changed everything. I had three spells in as many months, each one worse than the last.

While my health was precarious, San Francisco was rebuilding even if still fighting fires.

That was where a doctor told me the truth of it. He sat by my side and said if I stayed much longer in Hangtown—with its dust, its heat in summer, its cold creek water, and the brutal winters; with all that the store and the goldfields demanded—the fever would take me for good. He wasn’t unkind about it. He said the Sierra wasn’t meant for men with damaged lungs and blood that still remembered the Isthmus. He said I’d done well to last as long as I had.

I sat with that a long time after he left me. I wasn’t ready to be done with California. I was a successful miner and the store kept me in profit besides. Some days I almost felt like the young man who’d sailed out of Thomaston four years before. The idea that I might have to leave—to quit the gold fields entirely—felt like losing a limb. A man doesn’t come all that way to stand behind a counter. The hills still called to me—the creeks, the color in a pan. But the fever had its say. Each spell took more out of me than the last and I knew deep down that the doctor was right. If I didn’t leave California soon, I’d be buried there—and I certainly wasn’t ready for that.

I stayed on until late July of 1853 with enough gold in my purse to prove the years hadn’t been wasted. The truth is, I left because I had to. The fever chased me out as surely as if it had grabbed me by the collar.

NOTES

1 Portland Press Herald, July 21, 1851; Maritime Heritage Project, “Gold Hunter,” June 12, 1851; https://maritimeheritage.org/passengers/Gold-Hunter-12June1851.html; Rockland Courier-Gazette, 18 Mar. 1904.

2 The New-York Daily Times ran California-bound passenger lists by sailing date; it shows Oct 22, 1851 departure – SS Daniel Webster (published Oct 23, 1851); California Bound, SFgenealogy, https://legacy.sfgenealogy.org/californiabound/cb207.htm

3 Chagres fever was the 19th-century term for malaria contracted along the Chagres River during the Panama crossings of the Gold Rush years. The disease, transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes, produced violent cycles of chills, fever, and sweats, often proving fatal to travelers. Quinine was known but scarce and costly on the Isthmus. Thousands of Forty-Niners succumbed to the infection while attempting to reach the Pacific, and many survivors carried recurring attacks for the rest of their lives. See A. Bates, Emigrants to Oregon and California: A Guide to Overland Travel (New York: Harper, 1853), 17–18; Matthew Parker, Panama Fever: The Epic Story of One of the Greatest Human Achievements of All Time, New York: Doubleday, 2007), 23–27; and U.S. Surgeon General’s Office, Medical Statistics of the United States Army, 1839–1855 (Washington, D.C., 1856), 214–216.

4 Louis J. Rasmussen, San Francisco Ship Passenger Lists, Vol. 3 (Coloma, Calif.: the author, 1967), 448 pp., covering arrivals November 7, 1851–June 17, 1852; entry for E. S. Graves; digital image at Ancestry.com (accessed March 2025); California Bound, SFgenealogy.

5 The photograph frequently reproduced with the caption “Hangtown – 1849 (Now Placerville, California)” is a later view of the settlement, likely taken between 1852 and 1854. The density of frame buildings, graded streets, and commercial signage indicate a more mature town than existed in 1849, when Hangtown was still dominated by tents, log huts and brush shelters. Such images were often mislabeled by early 20th-century publishers seeking to evoke the Gold Rush era. Image from postcard reproduction, “Hangtown 1849.”

6 San Francisco Call, vol. 67, no. 165 (12 Nov 1890), “Vessels Lost in the Bay and Vicinity in the Early Days.”