The Bonanza King Read online

  Just as suddenly, the sun could shove the fog seaward and reveal glorious views of the headlands north of the bay, the sparkling harbor, the hills above the small settlement in an oak grove on the bay’s eastern shore not yet incorporated as “Oakland,” and the distant summit of Mount Diablo. Summer tended to be foggy and gray, but during fall and winter, spells of crystalline sunshine could run for weeks, astonishing those who originated in New England or in the upper Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys. Days of steely rain broke the winter sunshine and rendered the hodgepodge town into a quagmire. Miserable mules, horses, and oxen hauled the hacks, carts, drays, and carriages of commerce through slimy, muddy streets. Wooden planks paved the best streets, an expensive proposition considering the price of lumber often exceeded fifty cents per linear foot, but business boomed along paved streets, and San Franciscans cared about business more than anything else. San Francisco had many two-, three-, and a few four-story brick buildings lining the narrow streets of its downtown core, and many still built of wood. New arrivals couldn’t help but fixate on the city’s wealth. Gold glittered everywhere, in astonishing quantities, the likes of which easterners never saw. Immense sums changed hands. Gold dust passed for currency, weighed on scales kept in every store, restaurant, and saloon, as did privately made gold slugs and octagonal $50 ingots struck by the recently established U.S. Assay Office, foreign coins in denominations both large and small, and what few of the $10 eagles and new $20 gold double eagles of legitimate United States coinage had managed to make it to the coast. In California, all of it was good, as long as it was gold. Californians believed only in gold. The state’s 1850 constitution forbade the use of paper banknotes.II

  Ironically, considering the quantity of gold coming out of the ground, lack of genuine United States coinage dragged on the young state’s economy. Gold dust and privately coined slugs circulated at a discount due to inconvenience and fears of lesser-than-advertised weights and purity. Residents incessantly petitioned the federal government to establish a branch mint in San Francisco, which it finally did in 1854. Banking houses and commercial establishments took deposits of gold dust, slugs, and ingots, stored the metal in heavy iron safes, and made cash loans on good security at usurious interest due to the shortage of coin and the high probability that the supported ventures would fail.

  Confirming the warnings of the hometown clergy, much of the gold in San Francisco flowed toward businesses with shaky moral underpinnings. Gambling, theatrical productions, whoring, and drinking thrived like nowhere else in America. Drunks staggered through the San Francisco streets at all hours. Nearly every mercantile establishment sold intoxicating liquors, and the city’s most impressive buildings housed the gambling “hells” around Portsmouth Square. For life on the coast, a pile of wagered gold gleaming on a gaming table surrounded by hard-eyed men couldn’t have been a more perfect metaphor.

  Wild speculation drove San Francisco business, on cargoes just landed or expected to arrive, and in real estate, despite uncertain ownership. People won and lost fortunes every day, and the roulette wheel of San Francisco existence created a unique dynamic between rich and poor. As the city’s first historian observed, “The sand-shoveler and the millionaire may change places tomorrow, and they know it; so the former does not usually cringe nor the other strut when they meet.”

  For all the excitement of San Francisco, John Mackay hadn’t come to California for city work. He’d come west to mine gold. He decided to try his luck in “the northern mines,” or “the wet diggings,” the gold country north of the American River, where water, the one essential ingredient of gold mining, was more abundant. Mackay lugged his outfit to the rich mines around Downieville, a remote, booming mining community tucked into the steep canyons lining the North Fork of the Yuba River about one hundred miles north of Sacramento. A population of around three thousand made Downieville one of California’s largest interior towns,III and a dastardly act perpetrated by the town’s own people the previous summer had gained Downieville a fair measure of “infamous notoriety.” Late on the night of July 4, 1851, a successful, popular, and almost certainly drunk American miner smashed into the house of a married woman, Josefa Segovia. She stabbed him to death during or after the assault, or for threatening one, which, had she been Caucasian, would have almost certainly excused the killing. Segovia, however, was of Mexican extraction and not entitled to the same considerations. A vigilante court convicted Josefa Segovia of murder the next morning and hanged her from a Yuba River bridge. She remains the one and only pregnant woman ever lynched in California. The act haunts Downieville to this day.

  Thanks to “good diggings” nearby, the town survived the disgrace. Those gold-rich diggings had formed through passing eons as water eroded dirt and rocks from higher in the hills. Among that eroded material were small yellow flecks of “the precious needful,” “the circulating medium,” or “the necessary” stripped from gold-bearing quartz veins or the beds of ancient rivers, relics of a distant geological time when the California landscape differed from its modern form. As the water flowed downhill, the gold particles and the other eroded material settled out of suspension and accumulated as gold-impregnated sediments deposited in the gulches, ravines, streamways, and riverbeds of the Sierra foothills. Miners called those deposits “placers” (pronounced plassers), a term adopted from Spanish that described small concentrations of a heavy and valuable mineral—like gold—mixed with much larger quantities of lighter dirt, gravel, or sand. The quality of any given diggings varied with the concentrations of gold the local placers contained and the ease with which the gold was separated from the worthless material around it. “Placer mining” was the labor-intensive art of making that happen.

  All placer gold-mining techniques hinged on gold’s extraordinary density, nineteen times denser than water and almost twice as dense as lead. To pan for gold, the most basic mining method, a miner swirled water around the inside of a pan full of promising dirt and allowed the moving water to slosh the lighter sediments over the pan’s lip, leaving denser material behind—some of which would, ideally, be gold. Rockers (also called “cradles”) allowed miners to wash a greater volume of dirt—and therefore recover a greater volume of gold. Abundant water made possible the use of “long toms,” narrow rectangular U-shaped troughs made of wood about one foot wide and one foot high and usually between six and twenty feet long, and “sluice boxes”—up-sized long toms that processed more dirt but required even more water. At the end of a long day of digging and washing, the men “cleaned up” the captured gold. To capture the smallest particles of “fine gold,” miners often deposited mercury above the riffle bars. The mercury formed an amalgam with the gold. Later, they separated the substance to constituent ingredients in a “retort,” a distilling apparatus that allowed heat applied to the amalgam to boil off the mercury, condense and collect the mercury vapor for reuse, and leave behind the gold. (Miners commonly called mercury “quicksilver.”)

  Since one of the first great needs in California after the gold discovery was some political framework to arrest the devolution into brute-force anarchy, the men in each geographically logical area banded together, formed a local “mining district,” and codified rules to govern their one important interest: gold mining. The specifics varied between districts, but in general, the men designed the rules to give each person a fair chance at the gold so long as he didn’t infringe on the rights of his fellows. First and foremost, mining district rules allowed an individual to “claim” a specific location for mining purposes. A mining claim conveyed no permanent ownership—nobody wanted to own the land for fear of one day being forced to pay taxes on it—but a claim did give its holder the exclusive right to extract precious metal from within its confines, provided he complied with the district rules. The claims were small, no larger than one man could reasonably work—on rich placers, sometimes as small as ten-foot by ten-foot squares, although larger on lesser quality diggings. Claims had to be visibly marked by
stakes, cairns, or tools left in sight—a shovel or pick struck in the ground usually sufficed—and they had to be worked at least one day a week. If not, the owner forfeited his right to mine the claim, leaving it subject to “relocation” by someone more industrious. Claims could be bought and sold, but district rules typically didn’t allow a person to hold more than two claims at the same time—one by purchase and one by location. The rules usually allowed the man who discovered a new placer—“the original locator,” a universally honored man—a double-sized claim as reward for his exploratory zeal. Claim holders could hire helpers for fair wages, but rules usually banned slave, peon, indentured, or tricked labor (that last rule created to stop men hiring Indians and paying them with beads, glass baubles, and trinkets), and they initially banned corporations. The miners elected a district “recorder” to enter the claims in a local record book upon receipt of a fee, and arranged for juries of miners to adjudicate disputes.

  A miner prospected for “good diggings” by removing the overburden of worthless dirt atop promising sediments and testing the deepest gravels with a gold pan. If the sediments “panned out” an acceptable return (five to eight grains of gold dust per pan would “pay”), the man staked a claim, or “located,” dug down to bedrock, since crevices directly atop the bedrock—“the ledge,” as the men named it—almost always held the richest gold deposits, and washed the sediments through a rocker, long tom, or sluice box, always hoping for the flash of a big strike. Mackay learned to mine gold watching the doings of other men.

  As the miners exhausted the streambed placers, they explored farther afield and found paying placers in nearby flats, gulches, and ravines. Additional searching revealed significant quantities of gold in the beds of extinct rivers whose courses wound their way through bluffs, ridges, flats, and hillsides without connection to the modern drainages.

  Gold mining was hard, dirty, and repetitive, like digging an endless ditch. Miners quickly learned to appreciate the search for gold as Mother Nature’s grand lottery scheme. A man could easily dig an entire season, carry and wash hundreds—even thousands—of buckets of gravel, and finish poorer than when he started, while the men working mere feet away on adjacent ground hacked open a “glory hole” and carried off more wealth in a morning than a man could earn in a decade working for wages. That ugly truth stood at odds with the old Puritan notion that honest toil earned a just reward. Gold mining was like gambling, it was gambling, and the hope of making a “raise” kept the men at the hard labor, gouging and crevicing along the bedrock or up to their knees and thighs in the cold streams, not knowing what the next stroke of the pick or shovelful of gravel might reveal. That trying to grub color from the ground could be simultaneously incredibly exciting and stupefyingly dull was one of California’s many ironies. Nobody knew a sure way to judge a claim other than to dig it down to bedrock and find out. Miners considered locations that returned an ounce of gold per day extremely valuable, and such “ounce diggings” changed hands for many hundreds of dollars, even when stacked against the risk that the claim would “play out” before one recovered the investment. California’s more fortunate men raised enough gold to cover the price of their food with a decent sum left over, but the state’s speculative mania often convinced miners to plow one season’s “clean up” into a larger-scale venture the next year—often a “river-turning” operation done in company with other miners that required the pooled investment of capital. To turn a river, a group constructed a wing dam, which would divert the river’s entire flow into an expensive lumber flume or ditch. The current in the by-pass channel turned pumps that drained the water remaining in the river’s deepest holes, and with the riverbed finally exposed, the men set to work washing the sediments at the bottom of the deepest pools, the ones in which they expected to find the richest deposits. Such endeavors required months of industrious, intelligent labor to bring to fruition.

  Sometimes the investments paid handsome dividends, but in making what was essentially a double-or-nothing gamble, the miners exposed themselves to the vagaries of gold’s uneven distribution and California’s misunderstood climate. Some river-turning schemes didn’t find enough gold to cover their expenses. In other instances, sudden floods from early autumn rains overwhelmed the wing dams, ditches, and flumes. The rivers raged back into their natural channels just as the consortiums hustled to expose the deepest and most valuable sediments, the ones needed to make the river-turning operations profitable. Such failures drove the invested miners back to square zero and ruined the merchants who had been extending them credit in anticipation of a late-season payoff.

  The new state teemed with business opportunities ancillary to the mining boom. Men seized on all manner of schemes: They opened stores; ordered steam engines shipped through San Francisco from the East Coast to power sawmills or run hoists and pumps; imported seed or fruit stock for agricultural endeavors; built ferries and roads and charged tolls; opened saloons and grog shops; and fronted gambling operations. Some businesses thrived, many busted. As the Marysville Express told it at the end of the decade, “There are but few persons who have lived long in California whose experience cannot recall at least one instance of the sudden failure of what they considered a ‘dead thing.’ ”

  Fortunately, in California, failure carried no special stigma. A bankrupt man rolled up his sleeves and went back to work, that was all. Pacific Coast society expected a man to have the sand to go “all in” in pursuit of the main chance—that was the whole point of being there. The entire California project was a speculative endeavor. In the rest of the nation, a bankruptcy dogged a man for his entire career. In California, many of the richest men had been busted several times, and all of them knew they might well be broke again tomorrow.

  Aside from gold by the shovelful, miners next desired news from home. The manifold shortcomings of the U.S. Postal Office—described by Sacramento City’s Placer Times in December 1849 as “a shadow of an apology for the transmission of letters and newspapers”—opened a business opportunity. Miners in the remote camps would pay generous sums to have letters carried to and from the post offices in San Francisco and Sacramento. From one man and a mule string carrying letters and high-value provisions to the camps, “express” operations evolved to fill another great hole in the mining economy—the need to send money home. Trustworthy operations that could handle the difficult logistical and security considerations grew into stagecoach lines that transported passengers and high-value freight. They bought gold dust at a discount (typically 5, 8, or 10 percent of its value), stored the dust in iron safes, transported it to San Francisco, shipped the gold to the Philadelphia Mint—which struck it into coin—and credited the corresponding sum into a hometown bank account. Attracted by the enormous volume of gold and the correspondingly large value of the trade, New York banking houses established California affiliates that bought out smaller express companies and took over their operations. Adams & Company and Gregory & Company dominated until Adams & Company failed in 1855, after which Wells, Fargo & Company rose to prominence.

  Although in aggregate, tens of millions of dollars of gold emerged from the dirt of California, on the individual level, intense physical misery constituted gold mining’s only certain return. In summertime, the sun pushed down through a hot, pale sky, and the miners sweated through scorching afternoons. The rivers dwindled. The streams vanished. The season turned and the men shivered through cold weather, standing in swollen, icy streams, soaked to the skin. They suffered heat exhaustion and hypothermia, hernias, and strained backs. Minor wounds became tetanized or gangrenous. Diarrhea, dysentery, and cholera tore at their intestines. They fell sick with diphtheria, pneumonia, smallpox, typhoid, tetanus, and typhus and scratched at the bites of fleas, ticks, and lice. Detritus, garbage, and excrement fouled the crude camps. Enormous rats thrived. Cave-ins of poorly shored shafts or “coyote holes” buried inattentive or unlucky men. Undermined boulders shifted, crushing fingers, toes, and limbs, sometime
s whole persons. Provisions were scarce, simple, and extortionately expensive. Those who didn’t invest in fresh food developed scurvy, which, despite centuries of seafaring, still wasn’t properly understood as a vitamin deficiency. Miners cooked rough meals in greasy pots over open fires. Few troubled to make leavened bread. They wore sturdy boots, coarse, durable canvas trousers, wide belts, slouch hats, gloves, and blue or red flannel shirts until they rotted from their bodies. Before the Gold Rush, most men in the United States kept clean-shaven faces. In California, many wore beards. Wild, unkempt whiskers symbolized independence and freedom and whiffed of rebellion, and as California captured the American imagination, the gold rushers’ bristly custom caught on nationwide—the West Coast’s first contribution to American fashion. Absent the rudiments of civil society, minor disputes erupted into violence. Stabbings, shootings, and murders roiled the camps, as did “jumping,” meaning claim jumping. Absent difficult-to-organize miners’ courts—nobody wanted to lose valuable mining time suffering through kangaroo legal proceedings—a man had to be willing to fight to hold his ground against an interloping thug. For better and often for worse, “Judge Lynch” handled most of what passed for justice in the early California mining camps. A fair fight excused most transgressions, but a man caught thieving another’s dust could expect no mercy. “When caught in the act, up they go, and that’s the end of it,” one man wrote his family.

  For many of the new Californians, alcohol offered the only relief. Ardent spirits, so scandalous in Puritan society, were everywhere at hand. In the fall of 1851, a rare string-straight woman at a remote camp in the northern mines not far from where Mackay had gone to work noted that little could be accomplished in California without “the sanctifying influence of the spirit.” As one miner reported, “The thoughts of the people are entirely preoccupied with drinking, gambling, or getting gold out of the earth.”