Life in Hangtown

Early on I met a familiar face—William Pierce Harrington of Rockland, Maine. He had set out with fourteen men, sailing first to New York, then Panama. They found five thousand souls stranded at the Isthmus waiting in misery for a steamer to California. When his party dissolved, Harrington joined another and eventually reached San Francisco. He worked the Big Bar on the Colusa River for three months before dragging into Hangtown and willingly took a job assisting me with the store so I could spend more than just a spell at the diggings.[1]

The days began with the clang of hammers and the smell of bacon grease. Before sunrise the whole ravine was awake—wagons creaking up from the river, mules braying, men shouting prices over the noise. Every patch of ground sprouted a tent or a shack: canvas stretched between pine poles, roofs of split boards weighted with stones. Some had counters nailed together from packing crates; others sold liquor straight from the barrel.

The creek ran cold and clear. Some were lucky, most were not. They came to my store for flour, shovels, candles, and nails and left muttering about the price. Whiskey cost more than salt pork but few complained once the cork of the barrel was out. At night the fires burned in rows, the whole camp shimmering with golden light, laughter and brawling. Once in a while a pistol shot cracked the dark, but most nights ended with the sound of someone singing—homesick, drunk, or both.

One night they brought in a fellow caught rifling another man’s sluice boxes. He swore he was starving, and maybe he was. Still, the vote went as it always did. At first light it was over—quick and silent except for the creak of the rope.

I remember thinking how thin the line was between a man’s good name and the end of it. By breakfast the picks were ringing again, and no one spoke of it. Out here, you worked, you slept and you tried not to give the world cause to remember your face for the wrong reason.

You could tell who’d been too long in the hills. Their eyes sunk deep, their beards gone ragged, their breath sour as rot. A man might strike it rich in the morning and be buried by sundown.

One evening a young fellow stumbled into town from the upper diggings. No more than twenty, maybe—his beard barely come in. He’d been living on flour paste and coffee grounds, too sick to work but too proud to beg. His gums were black and his teeth loose, his skin the color of tallow. The old hands knew the look—scurvy, plain and fatal as any bullet.

He said he’d struck color, then lost his equipment to theft and his luck together. I found him leaning against my ragged doorpost, lips split from thirst, shaking so hard I heard a few coins rattling in his pocket. I made him a place near the stove, brought him hot water, vinegar, and greens—nothing that would cure him fast enough. I had to cut his trousers away. His legs had turned a dark, bruised purple, swollen. The flesh had broken open at the knees and ankles, leaking blood as thin as rust water. My first guess was right—he had scurvy.

I knew the sickness. I’d seen it in Maine, when ships came limping home from long voyages. Men who’d gone too many months without fresh food would stagger down the gangplank with their legs like bruised oak and their gums bleeding. Some lived if they took lemons or vinegar in time. Most didn’t. We called it the sailor’s curse, though the doctors had another name—scurvy.

There was no reason men should be dying of it in California, not with rivers full of fish and land enough to plant gardens around Sacramento. The miners lived on salt pork and beans, flour fried in bacon grease, and coffee black as tar. The fresher the food, the dearer the price and most reckoned their gold would stretch farther on another pick or another pan. So they dug till their teeth fell out and they called it bad luck.

When the fever took the young man I’d taken in out of pity, he whispered for his mother. I learned his full name and he died before dawn. Harrington and I wrapped him in canvas and buried him on the hill with a dozen others, each marked by a single board, a name, a date no one would remember.

That’s what gold fever did—it took a man piece by piece before the earth took him whole. For every lucky strike there were fifty graves, and most lay nameless in ground too thin to hold a prayer.

As for me, I had a bad case of the fever myself. My forays in the placers proved valuable, and the store prospered while the rough brand of frontier justice thrived beside us. Law hadn’t caught up with the camps yet, so men kept order as best they could. When thieves were taken—or worse, claim-jumpers—the Committee was called together: freighters, merchants, anyone with something to lose. I was among that ad hoc band of vigilantes. We’d meet by lantern light, hear what could be heard, and vote before dawn. Nobody thought himself cruel, just practical. We called ourselves the Committee of Vigilance and decided who would be whipped and who would die.

We name the oak the Old Civilizer.[2] I won’t defend it but order had to begin somewhere. People kept their peace out of fear of hanging from that tree.

The first claim we worked steadier than most lay up a narrow ravine above Hangtown Creek. The banks were cut with a hundred shallow holes, half of them filled again by the last storm. You could still see where men had built rough cradles from packing boxes, the boards warped and split. The ground was stiff clay mixed with gravel. Every shovelful had to be carried to the rocker, poured through the screen, and washed down with cold creek water. I worked from dawn till I couldn’t see the shovel blade in the dark, some days the only thing that glittered was frost in the morning.

By mid-summer it was too hot to breathe. The sun baked the mud until it cracked, and the flies came up from the creek by the thousands. Then, before the week was out, the sky would open and pour down three days straight, turning every path to a ditch and every ditch to a torrent. We’d chase our tools, our pans, and sometimes whole sluice boxes downstream, cursing the weather like it was a man who’d cheated us.

Come winter of ’50, the diggings went quiet in a way no one expected. The cold came down from the high country, but the rains never followed nor did much snow. Day after day the sky stayed a hard, brittle blue, and the creek that had been our lifeline in summer shrank until a man could step across without wetting his boots.

A sluice box is nothing but lumber without water. By December the boards were dry as tinder, the riffles dusty, and the tailrace empty. Men stood around staring at their idle gear as though willing the water to return. More than one argument broke out over the right to a trickle no bigger than a dog’s path.

Dust hung over the ravine like woodsmoke. You could see it rising from the trails where men hauled buckets up from what little pools remained, working themselves sick for a pan that barely covered the bottom. Old hands shook their heads and said California was testing us early.

We Maine men shifted to what the ground would give. When the sluices failed, we moved into the banks and worked where the clay still held some damp. We tunneled steady, cribbing up the walls with pine logs, grateful just to keep our hands in moist earth instead of dry gravel. A man could breathe easier underground—the dust didn’t reach you there.

The cabin in Hangtown held through the season, warm as any place could be in that parched cold. We kept a man on guard each night, for thieves grew bold when the diggings went idle. Hunger and bad luck make strange companions, and more rifles were cocked that winter than pans were washed.

By February the whole foothills looked scoured—bare trees, dusty air, creek beds running thin as twine. But the gold didn’t vanish. It merely hid, and men with patience or muscle—or both—could still coax it out.

Looking back, I think that dry winter taught us more than any fevered summer did. It showed who could adapt, who could endure disappointment without losing heart, and who would stick by his fellows when the easy work dried up. California rarely gave a man what he asked for. That winter, it asked what we were made of.

The store kept up a steady profit and a storekeeper had to travel. Every four to six weeks I rode down to Sacramento and took the steamer for San Francisco. You had to be there when the holds opened—coffee, boots, lamp oil, tools, sugar—if you waited out a week, the prices could double. I came to know that harbor as well as any sailor, and I saw the city change with every trip. When I had arrived in 1849 the city was quaint but with each visit I watched it grow. By early 1851 you could no longer count the masts of abandoned ships crowded the bustling waterfront.

Fires had plagued the city since the boom. A man could leave San Francisco for a month and come back to find his favorite street gone to ashes. I took stock of the harbor still choked with abandoned ships—hulks stripped of rigging and left to rot, but the sight of it still stunned me. Imagine my surprise when I saw the bark Algoma among them, neglected and half waterlogged, her hull sagging under the tide. My Aunt Mary's husband, William D. Graves was a part owner of the ship, and I'd had a hand in building her. I inquired of the Harbor Master and was told that she was owned by the Algoma Mining and Mercantile Company had sailed around the Horn then taken up in the Panama trade. At present, her owners were quarreling in court while the Algoma's seams opened in the sun and she had taken on water. Twice the harbor master had her towed to prevent collision with other ships.[3] It would be someting to write home about.

The drought continued and Hangtown Creek shrank to a trickle. Without snow melt to feed the creeks, men packed up and headed for the deeper forks of the American where a little water still moved. Some left the country altogether. Business in town slowed to a crawl. A storekeeper could feel the life of the place ebbing out one empty bucket at a time. There was scarcely enough water to wash a pan, let alone chase a sluice. Without gold there was no money, and without money, little trade. Harrington—who’d opened a store of his own—was forced to close up and try again in Marysville, closer to San Francisco.

Primitive injustice and hardships of nature notwithstanding, I still meant to make California my home.

Late one windy evening of May 3rd, a rumored arsonist set fire to a paint and upholstery shop near Portsmouth Square. Fanned by wind it devoured eighteen blocks of the city. Wooden sidewalks became kindling and the flames ran wild.

They called it the Great Conflagration because it was the largest fire ever to devastate a city in the states and territories. When folks speak of San Francisco now, they talk as though it grew up neat and natural, with brick fronts and straight streets. But the city I knew in ’51 was a different creature entirely—half tinder, half gold fever, liable to go up in smoke at the drop of a spark. And that May fire did more than scorch the town. It near broke California in two.

I didn’t see the flames start—I was inland—but the news traveled fast. Eighteen blocks gone in a night. Warehouses, wharves, stores, countinghouses, hotels, express offices, saloons, and whole rows of dwellings—burned to the ground. The wind off the bay drove the fire through the business district like a scythe. The wooden sidewalks acted like fuses. The tarred roofs went up like gunpowder. Men said the heat could blister your face at fifty yards.

Thankfully, some of the wharves survived, but the fire took the very things that made a port function. Bonded warehouses—where cargo was weighed, stored, and accounted for—were nothing but smoking cellars. The customs house burned, the freight offices burned, the insurance houses burned so thoroughly that every contract inside them disappeared. Without those, a ship might as well unload onto the tide itself.

Merchants who had stocked their shelves on credit found their ledgers burned and their creditors vanished. Whole firms failed without a scrap of paper left to prove a transaction. Gold dust was the only currency a man could trust, and even that lost some of its shine when there was no safe place to weigh or store it.

Even before the fire, miners grumbled that they couldn’t get a thing for love nor money. And with two winters of little snow in the mountains—the creeks shrunk to ruts—you had hundreds of men sitting idle in the diggings, no water to wash their dirt and no means to buy supplies even if they had found color. Some took to the roads in search of better camps. Others drifted down to Sacramento and now they were flocking to San Francisco hoping to find wages in the rebuilding.

As soon as word reached Hangtown of the complete devastation of San Francisco’s business district, I knew it was time to go home and settle my affairs. The drought had dragged on for the two years I’d been there, grinding the diggings to a halt, and now the fire had taken the very heart of commerce. With the port and its warehouses still burning, it was only a matter of weeks before my own business would be brought to its knees.

I had my clothes laundered, packed what I needed, and went down to San Francisco to book my passage.

The city was still smoldering when I reached it—half the waterfront in ashes, wharves burned to stumps. The warehouses where I’d always bought my goods were nothing but smoking pits, their iron hinges and nails cooling in puddles of melted glass. The air stank of tar and wet charcoal, and men picked through the ruins.

I stood there a long while and knew the truth of it. I wasn’t leaving California because business was poor; I was leaving because there was no business left to be done. Fire had taken the port, drought had taken the diggings. The rains would return and San Francisco would rebuild—anyone could see that—and I intended to be back in time to see it.

NOTES

1 History of the State of California and Biographical Record of the Sacramento Valley, California, by James M. Guinn (Los Angeles: Chapman Publishing, 1906), 479 — biography of William P. Harrington; Federal Census, Year: 1850; Census Place: Placerville and Vicinity, El Dorado, California; Roll: M432_34; Page: 325A lists Eward S. Graves and William P. Harrington, both traders.

2 Edward S. Graves’s obituary (Rockland Courier-Gazette, 1910) records that nine desperadoes were hanged during his tenure on the Hangtown Committee of Vigilance. Other accounts of Placerville’s early vigilante justice vary, but this contemporary source is the only one linking Graves directly to those events; Ed Graves’ obituary is reprinted in Chapter Eleven.

3 Seaports - Sea Captains, The Maritime Heritage Project: Mining Company Vessels from America's Eastern Seaboard; 49’ners Round the Horn, by Charles Schultz, 1999; p. 11; San Francisco Call, vol. 67, no. 165 (12 Nov 1890), “Vessels Lost in the Bay and Vicinity in the Early Days.”