The Bonanza King Read online

  Among the thousands of immigrant families in New York City, the Mackays struggled forward in anonymity, and for their first two years in the United States, the family did reasonably well. Mr. and Mrs. Mackay scraped together enough money to send their ten-year-old son to school. In that, John Mackay was lucky. Only about half the school-age Irish children then living in New York City received any education at all.

  Disaster struck the family in 1842. John Mackay’s father died of a cause lost to history. The catastrophe forced eleven-year-old John Mackay to quit school and work to support his mother and sister. Mackay could read, write, and figure, but he would never receive another day of classroom schooling. A taciturn lad who spoke slowly and awkwardly, fighting a stutter, he’d regret his lack of formal education for the rest of his life.

  In an age devoid of social safety nets, when circumstances forced Irish boys not yet old enough to apprentice to earn money to help their family survive, most of them started selling newspapers or shining shoes. No resident of Frankfort Street would have been surprised that John Mackay fell into the world of the New York newsboys after his father’s death—most of the city’s newspapers had their headquarters on Park Row a few blocks west of the Mackay family lodgings.

  For a job so near the bottom of the capitalist ladder, selling newspapers forced the young boys to accept a whopping ton of risk. Most New York dailies sold for two cents, and newsboys made a half-cent profit on every sale. However, wholesalers forced the newsboys to purchase their supply outright, for 1.5 cents per paper, and the newsboys couldn’t return unsold stock. Any newspapers they didn’t sell therefore cut a significant chunk from their earnings. The newsboys called it “getting stuck,” and they hated it. The more fortunate ones, like John Mackay, knew how to read, since basic literacy conveyed a major selling advantage. A literate newsboy could scan the leading stories and make a snap judgment about how many papers he’d sell. Ones who couldn’t read had to find a trusted ally to perform the service.

  Newsboys bought their stock of morning papers before sunrise and immediately hit the streets crying the headlines, their clear, young voices among the all-pervasive sounds of the New York streets. Astute newsboys tailored their cries to their intended marks, touting commercial news at the approach of a Wall Street sharp or social happenings to a fashionable lady, and they all led a rough-and-tumble territorial existence. Newsboys staked claims to the best street corners and selling locales and fiercely defended their fiefdoms against interlopers. Fistfights were common, and John Mackay both received and administered his fair share of thrashings.

  Midmorning, newsboys who had exhausted their stock grabbed a bite to eat and then hustled odd jobs—perhaps sweeping street crossings or carrying packages for tips at a ferry terminal—until the late papers dropped in the afternoon. They’d repeat their selling routine into the evening. An average newsboy, on an average day, earned twenty-five to fifty cents. A good salesman, on a good day, hustling hard until he’d sold his last paper, took home between sixty cents and a dollar. A day with incendiary headlines might earn a newsboy as much as two dollars.

  Selling newspapers was an endless grind, but the newsboys reveled in their self-sufficient autonomy and liberty. Each boy worked on his own account, suffering no boss. Off-duty, they crowded the rowdy galleries of the Bowery and Chatham theaters, notorious aficionados of low entertainments and equally ardent spectators at prizefights and cockfights. A love of musical and dramatic productions and sporting entertainments, engrained as welcome relief from his sharp-elbowed New York upbringing, would persist for the rest of John Mackay’s life. The man he thought the greatest in the world was innovative newsman James Gordon Bennett, founder and owner of the New York Herald, a Scottish immigrant whom Mackay often watched hustle through City Hall Square with a bundle of newspapers tucked under his arm. Unnoticed, Mackay peddled Bennett’s newspaper on New York’s dirty streets.

  John Mackay sold newspapers and scrounged odd jobs for four or five years. The Mackays eked out a living with John’s earnings and whatever money his sister and mother made in the needle trades or domestic service, but poor Irish immigrants struggling to scratch together a living was hardly a unique story in Manhattan in the middle 1840s. And street-level competition was about to get a whole lot more ferocious, because on the other side of the Atlantic, disaster had hit Ireland.

  • • •

  The nutrition of Irish tenant farmers and their families depended almost entirely on potatoes. Over the course of just a few days in the late summer of 1845, Ireland’s millions of subsistence farmers watched in horror as the leaves of previously healthy potato plants blackened, curled, and withered. Dug potatoes emerged from the ground full and healthy, but quickly shriveled to repulsive, inedible slime. The disease ravaged about half of the island’s potato crop in 1845. The next year, the blight destroyed nearly every potato in Ireland. An Gorta Mór, The Great Hunger, gripped the land.

  Potato yields didn’t recover for five long years. The population of Ireland collapsed. Starvation and disease killed a million and a half Irish men, women, and children out of a prefamine population of about eight million. Another million fled the country, most to the United States, where they inundated the port cities of the eastern seaboard.II Fully 650,000 wretched Irish men, women, and children settled in New York City during the famine years.

  Predictably, the influx provoked a backlash among native-born Americans. Anti-Catholic Yankees regarded the newest wave of destitute, starving refugees as “Saint Patrick’s vermin.” Many businesses—and some entire industries—refused to hire Irishmen. Conditions could hardly have been more difficult for a young Irish immigrant struggling to gain a toehold on an American adulthood. The first waves of famine immigrants arrived just as John Mackay reached the age at which he was old enough to apprentice. Without means or a secondary education, he needed a trade to carry him into adulthood, and the surge in anti-Irish sentiment made it harder to find a suitable apprenticeship. At the time, shipbuilding was one of New York’s most lucrative industries. An almost unbroken string of shipyards extended along the East River shoreline from just below Corlear’s Hook at the bend in the East River to the end of Twelfth Street. All were within reasonable walking distance of the family lodgings on Frankfort Street. Somehow, Mackay caught on as an apprentice ship’s carpenter at the William H. Webb shipyard, located on the East River between the ends of Fifth and Seventh streets. In that, he’d already accomplished something unusual—shipbuilders generally refused to employ Irishmen.

  How Mackay overcame that obstacle isn’t clear. Whatever the reason, Webb provided an excellent opportunity. As Mackay advanced through the four or five years of his apprenticeship, his earnings would swell from fifty to seventy-eight cents per day. Although that didn’t greatly exceed newsboy earnings, an apprentice pulled in a guaranteed daily wage, and when Mackay had finished his term of service, as a qualified ship’s carpenter in an industry that seemed to promise lifetime employment, he could expect to earn two dollars per day, twice the amount earned by a common adult laborer. And of all of New York’s shipyards, Webb might have been the best place to learn the trade. Mariners considered William H. Webb the world’s best naval architect. Webb’s merchant packets, tea clippers, and sidewheel steamships brought new standards of engineering precision to a profession previously considered more art than science.

  Out in the world beyond the shipyard, the United States had been fighting a war against Mexico since the spring of 1846. Major hostilities ground to a halt in the fall of 1847. U.S. forces had defeated and scattered Mexico’s armies and controlled most major Mexican cities. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo formally concluded the war on February 2, 1848. Its provisions gave the United States uncontested control of Texas, recognized the Rio Grande as the international border, and, in exchange for $15 million, ceded to the United States Mexico’s two northernmost provinces—Alta California and Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico. The “Mexican Cession” added 1.2 million squa
re miles to the United States—a landmass roughly equivalent to the size of western Europe—that included parts of the modern states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming, and the entireties of Utah, Nevada, and California.

  Unbeknownst to both the Mexican and United States governments, nine days before they inked the treaty, an event of monumental import had occurred in California, in the obscure valley of Coloma in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the South Fork of the American River. At Coloma, millwright James Marshall supervised construction of a sawmill intended to serve the appetites of “Sutter’s Fort,” the hub of an agrarian colony managed by Swiss immigrant John Sutter centered at the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers (at the site of the modern city of Sacramento). In the morning of January 24, 1848, a glimmer in the gravel of the mill’s tailrace caught Marshall’s eye. He pinched up a pebble of yellow metallic substance about half the size of a pea, then picked out a second piece. Marshall’s heart thumped; he was certain he’d found gold. Biting, hammering, boiling in lye, dousing with vinegar and nitric acid, and a specific gravity test proved the substance. Nothing in North America would ever be the same.

  Within days, Marshall’s employees were using their free time to hunt gold flakes in the riverbed. Good, hardworking Mormons, they finished constructing the mill before quitting. John Sutter’s agrarian dream evaporated like fog as more and more of his employees abandoned wage labor in favor of gold mining. On March 2, several veterans of the Mormon Battalion—a volunteer unit that had marched to California from Iowa during the Mexican War—who had been working for Sutter since their discharge, struck a fabulously rich gold deposit at what became known as “Mormon Diggings” or “Mormon Island,” a bar of sand and gravel at a bend in the South Fork of the American River about fifteen miles below the sawmill. In the best pockets, the men scooped out gold dust by the glittering handful. Somehow, the Sierra foothills had kept their treasure hidden through seventy years of Spanish and Mexican administration.

  Rumors of the gold strike reached the small outpost of San Francisco soon thereafter. A sleepy village sited at the northeastern tip of a long peninsula that divided the waters of the wild Pacific from the deep bay into which drained the Sacramento River, San Francisco had about eight hundred residents in early 1848, and it boasted two weekly newspapers, the Californian and the Star. The first public mention of the discovery appeared on the back page of the Californian on March 15, in a paragraph titled “GOLD MINE FOUND.” Wild stories circulated thereafter. The Star’s editor went to Coloma to investigate in April, but returned unimpressed, his exploratory party having traveled in company with John Sutter and unearthed only a few flakes of the desired metal. Attempting to check the story’s momentum, the Star’s May 6 issue declared “the gold fever . . . all sham.”

  As of mid-May, skepticism held much of the population in check—until a Mormon named Sam Brannan took matters into his own hands. Brannan had arrived in San Francisco two years before, leading a group of 245 Mormon exiles who had made the long voyage around Cape Horn from New York. Brannan’s eye for business opportunity exceeded his religious ardor, however, and by May 1848, Brannan knew the gold excitement was no “humbug,” as went the then common term for fraud, trick, or sham. Miners down from the Sierra foothills paid for provisions at the store he’d opened at Sutter’s Fort with gold dust, and he’d personally visited Mormon Island. Brannan had decided to make money outfitting and provisioning miners, and he wanted more of them in the goldfields. On May 12, 1848, Brannan strode up San Francisco’s Montgomery Street, swinging his hat with one hand. In the other, he held aloft a quinine bottle filled with gold flakes, and he yelled, over and over, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!”

  Brannan held the proof in his hands. In California, the rush was on.

  Sam Brannan had already bought every pick, shovel, and pan he could find. He became California’s first millionaire. Church elders expelled him from Mormon fellowship three years later.

  The crucial detail was that nobody owned anything in the California interior, not the land, timber, or water, and certainly not the gold. (Everybody took it for granted that the native tribes inhabiting the area could be muscled aside.) Historically, kings, queens, and governments had reserved gold mines for themselves; California possessed no such entities. No laws regulated mining—or much of anything else—in California, and considering the recently expelled Mexican administration and the light hand of U.S. control, no entity possessed a shred of enforcement capability. For practical purposes, California had no government at all. California was a tabula rasa salted with gold, and gold mining required no capital investment except the effort to pick it up. On May 29, the Californian said, “The whole country, from Los Angeles to San Francisco and from the seashore to the base of the Sierra Nevadas, resounds with the sordid cry of ‘gold, Gold, GOLD!’ while the field is left half planted, the house half built, and everything neglected but the manufacture of shovels and pickaxes.” That was the Californian’s last issue. The newspaper’s employees vanished into the goldfields. The Star survived another fortnight, until June 14. The gold excitement carried off its staff, too.III

  California’s social order collapsed. Virtually the entire male population of California’s coastal strip bolted for the goldfields. Deserted ships swung at anchor in San Francisco Bay. Tied to the pace of sail, steam, and steed, news of the gold discovery spread like disease, at the speed of human contact, reaching the Oregon Territory, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Australia. Everywhere it touched, adventurous and avaricious souls contracted “the yellow fever,” dropped their business, and made haste for California.

  • • •

  On the other side of the continent, John Mackay and everyone else had no inkling of the momentous upheaval convulsing the Pacific Coast. The biggest event in the spring of 1848 for those whose lives orbited the Webb shipyard was a fire that swept the yard on April 8. The blaze started in a nearby stable and quickly spread, torching an office and storage loft. A pile of ship’s timbers caught fire. On the stocks nearby, ready for launch, stood the magnificent sidewheel steamships Panama and California, sister ships intended to inaugurate passenger, mail, and freight service between the Isthmus of Panama and the newly acquired territories on the Pacific Coast. Only the prodigious efforts of firemen and police saved the ships.

  News of the gold discovery broke slowly in New York. Not until August 19, 1848, would careful readers of a two-column article describing “Affairs in Our New Territory” on the front page of the New York Herald be able to linger over a few surprising sentences, printed far down the second column, that mentioned a “gold mine discovered in December last . . . in a range of low hills forming the base of the Sierra Nevada”—assuming their perusal had survived dull tidbits touting California’s resources of quicksilver, silver, coal, copper, saltpeter, sulfur, asphaltum, limestone, soda springs, and salt.

  Such an arid story didn’t provoke excitement. A much more incendiary article appeared a month later, on Monday, September 19, 1848, when the Herald published a letter from the Pacific Coast that described “gold for the gathering” and said that “he that can wield a spade and shake a dish can fill his pockets,” and admitted “only one serious apprehension, that we are in danger of having more gold than food.”

  The rival Tribune printed a more official item the next day—a letter written from Monterey, California, on July 1 by former U.S. Consul Thomas O. Larkin and endorsed by Commodore Thomas Jones of the U.S. Navy. According to the letter, gold mining had stopped virtually all other work in California. “Three-fourths of the houses in the town of San Francisco are shut up,” Larkin wrote. On an inspection tour, Larkin had found more than a thousand people “digging and washing” for gold on the north and south forks of the American River. Larkin had also spent several consecutive days with eight miners working a branch of the Feather River. They operated two crude rockers, and every day he was with the e
ight men, Larkin witnessed each of their two rockers produce twelve to sixteen ounces of gold.

  Considering gold’s value of $18 an ounce, each rocker was clearing $216 to $288 per day. Those were astronomical sums. Each man on the crew earned between $54 and $72 every day—fifty to seventy times the daily wage of the average unskilled laborer then working in New York.IV

  Through September, October, and November, a steady stream of California stories captured public attention, but didn’t provoke wholesale migration: California was too far away, and the details seemed too farfetched to credit; nor could anyone discount the risk of hoax, error, or fraud—nineteenth-century newspapers regularly bent facts to boost sales, and prudent citizens kept an ever-skeptical eye on the nation’s army of shady promoters relentlessly touting the latest and greatest in land and stock sales, patent medicines, and newly created mechanical devices ripe for investment.

  Popular skepticism changed on December 5, 1848, when President James K. Polk delivered his State of the Union address. The outgoing president’s accounting began with a self-congratulatory discourse on the “peace, plenty, and contentment” that “reign throughout our borders” and the “sublime moral spectacle . . . our beloved country” presented to the rest of the world. Polk, who had contended with rabid domestic opposition to the recently completed war with Mexico and faced a Congress bitterly divided over how to handle the admission of the new territories, whether as slave or free-soil, then segued into an extended justification of the benefits the conquests accrued to the United States. One of which was California. “The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officials in the public service who have visited the mineral district and derived the facts which they detail from personal observation.”