Gold Rush!

I’d had a hand in building enough ships to know when the tide was turning. The clatter of adzes still rang through the yard but men’s eyes were turning westward.

Through the year of 1848, I watched as some of the ships at the South Thomaston yard were fitted for the California trade, others to be sold in New York, Philladelphia and Boston. Before the year ended, a group of us began to make solid plans to go to California.

It had been put about, when first we made ready to go, that we should join ourselves to the company of Otis Cutler, and take the southern road in by way of Corpus Christi, thence across the Mexican country to the western sea.

The plan was much spoken of in those days, and held out fair promise on paper; but like many such undertakings in that hurried season, it did not stand long once men came to reckon the distance, the expense, and the uncertainty of the thing. Whether Cutler’s party failed to gather as was expected, or whether we lost confidence in the route itself, I cannot say with certainty now; but before we were well embarked in our venture, that design was set aside.

We went instead by steamer to New York, and there, finding others of like mind and no small impatience to be gone, we joined in chartering a small vessel for a Mexican port. It seemed the more direct course, and one that would carry us past a great stretch of inland travel which many judged the hardest part of the journey. From that landing we meant to cross the country to the Pacific, and so take ship again for California. In this way we quitted the notion of following another man’s expedition, and stood upon our own undertaking, as best we might, trusting to judgment, good fortune, and the company we kept.[1]

New York City was the great outfitting place in those early days. Ships for Panama and Mexico were packing on more passengers than they could comfortably carry.

On the 11th of January, 1849, I obtained my passport. The clerk looked me up and down and began jotting things down.

“What is your eye color?” He barked.

“Blue,” I said.

“Your height?”

“Five feet, four and half inches.”

Later when I had my papers in hand, I read the rest of my physical description. I had a medium forehead, nose and mouth, but my chin was large and my face full. Joshua Thorndike signed as my witness, I signed as his.

When our chartered vessel was ready and the last of our provisions stowed, we came aboard. A cold wind was blowing down the East River, sharp as a knife, as we cast off from the wharf. New York slipped astern in a gray winter haze. We set out for a Mexican port, meaning to cross Mexico on mules, then take another vessel up the Pacific and from San Francisco. Our final destination was a place called Dry Diggings in the foothills below the Sierra mountains.

I was twenty-five years old, leaving home waters with a dozen Maine men beside me, all of us bound for the same distant hope.

Running down the coast under reefed topsails and gray skies, once past the Capes the air softened and the trades took hold. We steered south-by-west through the Old Bahama Channel, the sea turning clear as glass and the nights alive with phosphorescence.

Off our starboard beam rose the green hills of Cuba, white surf flashing along the reefs. With water casks running low the captain gave orders to stand in. A boat came out under a lateen sail, and we took the harbor pilot aboard; soon we were safely edging past reefs, the Morro and into a harbor thick with shipping—schooners, brigs, and steam packets of every rig, many bound in one fashion or another for California.

Havana was the most foreign place I had ever seen. The air smelled of molasses, tobacco and hot earth. Boys in straw hats hurried along the quay with baskets of oranges and pineapples calling up their prices the moment a new ship came in. But beyond the bustle of the waterfront I saw gangs of enslaved men driving carts, hauling crates, or swinging cane knives under the sun, overseers on horseback watching their pace.

We took on fresh water, meat, tropical fruit and stretched our legs while the crew loaded the stores. The city was loud and bright: mule carts rattling over the paving stones, women behind lace fans gliding beneath the colonnades and church bells marking the hours from morning to dusk. Beauty and sorrow seemed bound together everywhere the eye landed.

We cast off before sunset, the harbor falling away astern in a wash of gold light. Once clear of the Morro, the massive sixteenth-century Spanish fort built on the rocky headland at the harbor mouth, the trades filled our sails again and we resumed our course for Mexico with the long run of the Caribbean ahead.

We held west through the Yucatán Channel and into the Gulf, six weeks out from home when the peaks above Veracruz came into view. The harbor lay hot and bright, the air thick with lime and salt. Ships in port were loading barrels of fruit and coffee, stacks of hides stiff with salt,[2] and bags of cochineal and logwood bound for Boston’s dye houses.[3] The vessels themselves smelled of citrus and leather—the scent of another world’s trade.

Our party turned inland with our smaller freight and our own ambitions, up through the wet heat toward Xalapa, past the old stone bridge they call Puente Nacional, and on over the high country to the capital. It was all climbs and fog and wheels in ruts. From Mexico City we turned south for the Pacific, the road falling away in switchbacks till the air grew warm again — a long trek of five hundred miles, coast to coast.

We made Acapulco at last, dropping down from the high country in a cloud of dust and humid air. The bay opened before us like a kettle of blue fire, hemmed by steep green hills and alive with ships and masts. Coasters and whalers swung at anchor, their sails drying in the sun. Along the beach, canoes and lighters ferried barrels and hides through the surf while men shouted in Spanish, English, and half a dozen other tongues. The air smelled of salt, fruit, fresh-cut timber and the sound of hammering carried through the ocean breeze.

I had built ships and sailed to many a domestic port, but I’d never seen a harbor so beautiful and alive. Even the wind seemed to hum with trade. We stayed only long enough to catch passage to San Francisco, no small feat as it seemed half the world was heading to California.

Eventually my party found passage on a small brig, her decks crowded with freight and men bound for the diggings. She was sound enough, but the voyage was a slow one. The wind set against us near every day, and the current pulled south as if to turn us back. We crept along the coast, calling at Mazatlán for water, then at San Blas to take on fruit and a few strays who’d missed the last ship. Between ports the heat pressed like a hand, and the pitch ran from the seams at noon. Nights were better—stars close enough to think you could touch them, and a breeze off the land that smelled of sage.

Now and then a whale sounded off the beam, or a flight of pelicans crossed the wake. We passed the mouth of the Colorado and saw nothing but a long haze where the desert met the sea. Farther north, the fog came down, and when it lifted, the coast showed itself bright and verdant from winter rains—tall grasses and streams flashing through the folds of the hills. After the baked country behind us, it looked like Eden.

By then we’d been four months out of the harbor of Thomaston, with near four thousand miles behind us—sail, hoof, and wheel—and still another sunrise between us and San Francisco.

We came up on the Golden Gate in light morning fog.[4] Hills of green, shoreline gleaming but the entrance of the harbor was a forest of masts—ships from every ocean riding idle, their crews gone to the diggings. Above the shore, the town had a few buildings, but tents outnumbered sticks and mortar. Smoke from hundreds of cook-fires streamed skyward and we could hear the hammers across the water. So this was San Francisco.

From the bay it looked as if the place had been dropped there overnight—sails turned into roofs, hull planks into walls, every rag of canvas pressed into service. Tents and shanties climbed the sand hills clear to the dunes, their guy-lines snapping in the wind.

On land, the noise was constant—hammers, shouting, the jangle of harness. Every man seemed in a hurry to stake something, whether it was a claim, a shop or a tent. Prices were madness: a single egg fetched a dollar, a pickaxe ten. I already knew what enterprises I would be entering. Precious cargo sold within the day, save for what we’d be taking into the foothills, and while I’d been told I’d make a handsome profit, it was the kind a man could claim he’d earned—every inch of sea, every wheel rut and mountain miles that lay behind it.

When the sunlight faded, the town burned with lanterns and laughter. The wind off the bay carried the smell of pitch, frying meat, voices and music. It wasn’t quite a city yet, but they had a hotel and we took a room for a few days’ rest and exploration.

The next task was getting upriver. Every man in the harbor was after the same thing—passage to the gold fields—and the steamers were jammed to their rails. Some were proper side-wheelers out of New Orleans; brought in around Cape Horn in pieces and put back together on the Sacramento River. Others were nothing but patched riverboats arriving as the steamers had, their boilers creaking like old bones. You could pay twenty dollars for a ticket to Sacramento City and stand the whole way, shoulder to shoulder with men, mules, and barrels of flour, but our party chose passage on a barge that would be towed by a steamer.

We loaded a wagon at the harbor, then headed to the barge on the Sacramento River. Only after the hold was full and the decks piled high with barrels and casks, we caught a tow. The tidal river ran slow through tule marsh and driftwood, the steamer stopping at every grove to bring on more cordwood. Sparks rose from the stacks like fireflies each time the wheels started again.

The further we travelled the stronger the current was, pressing us back as though it meant to hold us in the delta. When we came in late on the second afternoon, the landing was a clamor of smoke and shouting—steamers, scows, small schooners, barges tied three deep to the bank. Men swarmed the levee with drays[5] and wagons, hollering for freight.

The town of Sacramento sat flat between the Sacramento and American Rivers, both running high and clean with water—one wide and slow from the valley we’d just ventured, the other bright and fast from the mountains. Every patch of dry ground had a tent or shanty on it, some with fresh-painted signs: Hotel, Provisions, Exchange, Guns & Groceries. Canvas roofs flapped in the breeze and plank walks kept a man’s boots out of the muck. Mules brayed, oxen groaned and above it all ran the constant thud of hammers—every man racing to raise a wall before someone else claimed the spot.

Prices were still climbing. A pickaxe fetched twelve dollars, a pound of nails two, and an egg a was a dollar and a quarter— but I’d been warned that most were rotten. Some of the men coming from the gold fields, hollow-eyed from dysentery and scurvy weren’t heading home, just intending to provision. They were dropping like flies, and we’d passed fresh graves at every bend coming up the river. It would have tempered my enthusiasm if I’d not been so full of it.

It took two days hiring wagons and men fit to handle them. The freighters charged by the pound and we all swore that we had never seen such madness—teams straining to the east, loads piled higher than the canvas would stretch. The road to the hills was little more than ruts and rumor, crowded from dawn till night with wagons, oxen, and men on foot.

We followed the south fork of the American river, camping where we could find water and grass.Wagons broke down daily, and the trail was littered with split axles, spilled flour and more graves, but sometimes the view toward the Sierra opened up as pristine a sight I’d seen. When night came you could look down the valley and see campfires in both directions.

It took us four days to reach Dry Diggings, climbing through green foothills where the grass shone like new coin and the creeks ran cold from the high snowfields. We came in with the last light, tired but in good order, our gear intact and our rifles slung where we could reach them. You didn’t travel that country careless. Robbers followed the miners’ trails as faithfully as the freighters did.

Dry Diggings sat in a hollow of oak and digger pine, called such because before miners overran the place, the Indians harvested pine nuts below the trees. We heard the sound of picks carrying across the ravine before we ever saw the first tent. Canvas shelters clung to both sides of the gulch like gulls on a ledge—some faced with split pine boards, others nothing but stained sailcloth over crooked poles. Smoke pooled low over the camp, thick with bacon grease, damp wool, and the sourness of too many men living too close.

The place earned the name Dry Diggings because the best ground lay a little off the creek—rich, but high enough that a man had to haul every bucket of water uphill to sluice it. You could tell the veterans from the greenhorns by the size of their shoulders and the way they cursed the climb. By afternoon the trails from the creek shone like worn leather from all the boots carrying water up and washing the tailings down.

By the time we got there the name of the town had changed though. Law came slow to the foothills, and justice quicker than sense. A man could be hanged here for theft, or for nothing more than being in the wrong place at dusk. Pistols showed themselves easily; so did temper.

Near the center of camp stood a great oak with a branch that thrust out over the main trail like an arm pointing west. Someone had stripped the lower bark smooth with use. You didn’t need to be told its purpose—every man who passed it felt the weight of its shadow. Three had swung from that limb in a single week a few months before we got there. No one whispered the story. They said it plain and Dry Diggings became Hangtown.

A man could buy anything here for four times what it was worth and sell it again for more. Every other tent had a sign slapped on the ridgepole: Restaurant. Liquors. Fresh Meat. Smithy. Boots Mended. Cards. Whiskey went by the thimbleful, nails by the handful. I stepped over sluice boxes, tailings, and men dead drunk in the dust, listening to shovels biting stone and the coarse laughter spilling from the grog shops.

We were a company of Maine men—shipbuilders, carpenters, fishermen, and farmers—and we acted like it. No one slept alone. We set our tents in a half-circle with the creek at our backs, posted a watch each night, and cooked our meals in one fire pit. Come morning, we picked a level plot near the upper crossing and raised a cabin the way we’d raise a boat shed at home. By dusk we had walls chest-high; by the following noon a roof of shakes; and by nightfall on the third day we could bolt the door against whatever prowled outside.

We kept the work divided: two or three men guarding the store and minding camp, the rest at the diggings. A company that sized itself right and trusted its members stood a far better chance than any lone man with a pan and a pistol.

By week’s end the store was up—a stout shed of pine logs—with stock on the shelves and coin enough in the box to steady my nerves. It made me think I’d done a sensible thing coming west, even if the place was raw enough that it carried a rough name. It was only one of thirty feverish camps in new-made El Dorado County, about 135 miles northeast of San Francisco and twice as far from civility as any map could show.

The store took at least some of the gamble out of our endeavors. Merchants made more gold than most miners, yet the diggings pulled at a man just the same. Every pan that clattered in the creek and set our feet heading up the hillside sent something stirring inside. And every night, as shots cracked across the ravine or some poor fellow shouted about his claim being jumped, it was plain enough that surviving here took more than luck.

Looking back, I think the hardest part wasn’t getting to California—it was learning how to live if you stayed. The country took hold of you fast, asked what you were worth before you caught your next breath, and showed no mercy to any man who answered wrong.

NOTES

1 Edward Small Graves Obituary, Rockland Courier-Gazette, April 19, 1904. The obituary account states only that the party sailed from New York to “a Mexican port,” from which they crossed to the Pacific before continuing on to California. Contemporary routes of this kind most commonly made landfall at Veracruz, the principal Gulf port of entry, from which established roads led inland to Mexico City and onward to the Pacific at Acapulco or San Blas. A landing at Tampico is also possible, though less frequently used for trans-Mexican crossings.

This route differs from the one reported in the Lime Rock Gazette of January 4, 1849, which placed the party with the company of Otis Cutler on a southern overland approach by way of Corpus Christi and northern Mexico. The two accounts likely reflect an early intention to join that expedition, later abandoned in favor of a more direct sea-assisted crossing undertaken independently.

2 The Mexican and California hide and tallow trade supplied New England’s tanneries and shoe factories. Hides were bought along the coast for about one dollar apiece and sold in Boston for nearly three, sailors calling them “California banknotes.” They were dried, salted, and shipped by the tens of thousands, stacked like cordwood in the holds of returning vessels.

3 Logwood — the heartwood of Haematoxylum campechianum, native to the Yucatán and the Caribbean — was boiled and treated with iron or alum to make deep blues, purples, and blacks. Together with cochineal, a crimson dye made from insects scraped from prickly pear cactus, it was among the most valuable natural dyes in the textile and leather trades of New England.

4 The name Golden Gate predates the bridge by nearly a century. It was first used in 1846 by U.S. Army officer and explorer John C. Frémont, who likened the strait leading into San Francisco Bay to the Golden Horn at Constantinople. Frémont predicted it would become “a golden gate to trade with the Orient,” and the name was in common use among sailors and emigrants by 1849.

5 A dray is a heavy, low wagon without sides, built for hauling freight short distances—barrels, crates, or mining supplies—usually drawn by horses or oxen. Drays were a common sight along the Sacramento levees and in the mining camps, where they carried goods from the riverboats to the stores and diggings.