The Age of Gold (30 page)

The one servant Jessie was able to retain arrived under a cloud. This woman appeared at the door with babe in arms, and inquired hesitantly whether Jessie needed a cook. Jessie said she did. “Would you take one from Sydney?” the woman asked. Jessie didn’t understand the question at first. The woman explained that her ship from Australia had arrived the day before, and she already had been turned down for work on account of the suspicions surrounding that colony of felons. Jessie nonetheless said she would hire the woman. When the woman asked why, Jessie responded, “Because your baby is so clean, so well-kept, and looks so well. He answers for it that you are clean, patient and kind.” The woman promised that Jessie would never regret hiring her. “And I never did,” Jessie recollected.

Despite the inconveniences, Jessie’s new life suited her quite satisfactorily. During the dry season—from late spring to fall—she, John, and Lily traveled out from Monterey in a special six-seated carriage built in New Jersey and shipped around the Horn. The vehicle comfortably slept the three of them, and they would ramble north to San Francisco and then south to San Jose, stopping at ranches or simply under the stars. When draft animals to pull the carriage proved—like so much else in that time and place—hard to procure, the Benton name worked its customary magic. John had been reduced to hitching pack mules to the carriage, and predictably they balked in the harness. He tried to buy a harness-trained team from some passing Texans, only to have the Texans say they liked the team themselves and had no desire to sell. Jessie, however, overhearing one of the men address another, thought she recognized the name. She told John to ask the man if his mother was from North Carolina, and if her name was
Caroline. The surprised man said yes to both questions, prompting Jessie to explain that the man’s grandfather was an old friend of her father’s. On learning this, the man insisted that the Frémonts have the mules.

Jessie had never known such carefree pleasure.

But the wealth on which this idyll rested was fragile. Small armies of argonauts were invading the Mariposa, stripping the richest placers of their gold. Frémont would have required an army of his own to defend the deposits. The best he could come up with was his contingent of Sonorans, who protected his interests (and theirs) by mining faster and better than the squatters. Unfortunately for him, before a year had elapsed the Sonorans decided to return to Mexico, putting Frémont’s income in jeopardy. The Sonorans reckoned that they had had enough of mining, in both the positive sense of having made the money they came for and the negative sense of suffering mistreatment at the hands of Anglo miners who resented the competition. An American traveling west across northern Mexico, encountering a group of Mexican miners returning east and south, summarized their situation: “They all appear to have plenty of money with them and speak very hard of the Americans that are in the diggings. We think the Americans have drove them out.” These particular Mexicans may or may not have included Frémont’s former partners, but they almost certainly shared those miners’ experiences.

The animus against foreigners in the mines would become a theme; for now it represented a disruption of the Frémont cash flow. Yet John, who handled the business of the mines—to the eventual dismay of the more astute
Jessie—adopted the attitude that what came easily went easily. So casual was his approach that on the day of settling up with the Sonorans he declined to travel to the Mariposa himself. He simply sent a messenger with the key to the storehouse and told the Mexicans to gather up as much gold as they were owed. “This they did with scrupulous honor, not taking an ounce more than their stipulated portion,” Jessie had to admit.

JEAN-NICOLAS PERLOT was among those who mined the Mariposa without Frémont’s permission. (French-speakers felt some of the antiforeign animus, but not nearly as much as Latin Americans and Asians.) It was at least a little ironic that Perlot did so, for it was Frémont’s fame in France that attracted many of the French companies to the Mariposa. Most, however, laid plans to head for that district without appreciating its remoteness or the difficulties of getting there. For Perlot these difficulties were compounded by the dissolution of La Fortune. Through corruption or simple mismanagement—human failings that afflicted many of the mining associations—Perlot’s company had fallen into debt and then bankruptcy. Supplies that were supposed to reach Perlot and the others in California never arrived, and the company’s cash was soon exhausted. “The blow was terrible,” Perlot wrote. “There we were, thrown on the shore like castaways, without money, without resources, in an unknown land whose language we did not understand. Each one asked what would become of him and found no reply.” The company disbanded, with several members forsaking their dreams of gold for work on farms near the coast. Perlot, however, persevered. “I wanted, at the very least, to get to the placers and to try them, cost what it might.”

The cost proved more than he guessed. The Mariposa was part of what were called the “southern mines,” separated—somewhat arbitrarily—from the “northern mines” above Sutter’s Fort by the Mokelumne River. (After gold was discovered even farther north, the mines around Coloma were sometimes called the “central” mines.) While the route to Sutter’s was well marked, the road to the Mariposa was substantially less so. Those with cash could pay for transport by boat up the San Joaquin River to Stockton, the
gateway to the southern mines. Those without, like Perlot, walked. Locals warned him that the journey would be very arduous. “It was a matter of covering two hundred and six miles (sixty-eight leagues) across an uninhabited and pathless land, of avoiding Indians, bears, panthers, wildcats, coyotes, and snakes of all kinds, including rattlesnakes.” The French consul at Monterey cautioned Perlot against attempting the trip. “But I made him understand that my mind was made up.”

The journey was as trying, in its briefer way, as anything the overlanders from the eastern United States endured. After traversing the Coast Range, Perlot and the few former members of La Fortune who accompanied him had to cross the forbiddingly immense and barren Central Valley. “Not a cloud impaired the clarity of the air, and the view stretched unbroken as far as the limit where the earth and sky seemed to unite and mingle. It was the first time I found myself on a plain where the earth’s curvature alone ended the view…. This limitless plain was covered only by a thin grass which the ardor of the sun had already almost dried out. Here and there, sand covered great surfaces where the print of no step was visible, perhaps because the wind, in lifting this sand, ceaselessly leveled the ground.” Perlot spied a river, a silvery stream that beckoned them forward. But with every step the river retreated, finally revealing itself to be a mirage.

After crossing the valley, Perlot’s small band lost their way in the foothills of the Sierra. They encountered an odd pile of dirt, like an overgrown molehill, then another, then a dozen, then a score. “These hillocks became so numerous to the right and left that the trail almost resembled the path in a cemetery; only the tombs and the crosses were lacking.” Each man asked himself the meaning of these strange excavations, when all at once the answer became gruesomely clear. “We saw a piece of clothing hanging out from one of these graves; we approached and saw that some animal, in digging, had exposed the leg of a corpse buried fully clothed. Instinctively, we pushed the earth back with our feet, having no other instrument, and covered this half-devoured leg.” Perlot later learned that the dead, who numbered three or four hundred, had starved the previous winter after heavy rains had prevented provisions from reaching the Mariposa
mines and the miners had waited too long before coming out. That they were buried, if only after a fashion, owed at least partly to a plea Perlot discovered nailed to the trunk of an oak. “It was written in longhand, in English, in French, and in Spanish. It begged the passersby, whether they were arriving at the placers or returning to the coast, to be so good as to bury the dead they might encounter on their way. ‘God has willed,’ it said, ‘that civilization should begin, in this place, with this duty which a man owes to his kind, to his brother, in order that he may never forget it. Every man believing in a God knows that to bury the dead is a duty. I entreat you to fulfill it, you who are civilized.’”

After further struggle, Perlot and his friends reached the Mariposa. They were exhausted, hungry, and destitute. They wished to gather gold but lacked the money to purchase pans and shovels. Having left France with the dream of becoming independently wealthy, they found themselves reduced to wage labor. “We were mercenaries,” Perlot lamented. “We no longer belonged to ourselves.”

Instead they belonged to a trio named McDonald, Thomson, and Dick, who—without asking leave of Frémont—were setting up a long-tom. The group’s first task was excavating a ditch to the device. The labor was backbreaking. “Two workers threw out the dirt, one to the right, the other to the left; the two others, placed in the middle, threw it from the other side of the trench which was only four feet wide; when a stone or a rock was too big, it was rolled to one side or else was allowed to fall into the trench.” After two days the excavation was finished and the washing began. Shovelful by shovelful, Perlot and his companions threw the dirt they had excavated into the long-tom, where the diverted water coursed over it. Their bosses collected the gold that caught in the bottom, and on Saturday evening, at the end of a backbreaking week, Perlot and the others received their pay: for each man, a little more than half an ounce of gold for each day worked.

L
ABORING FOR WAGES
wasn’t what Perlot had intended, but it kept body and soul together. Not every argonaut was so lucky. Hugh
Heiskell, after conquering the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Humboldt River, the Carson Desert, and the Sierra Nevada, died at the very entrance to the goldfields. Doubtless the fatigue and unbalanced diet of the overland journey had lowered his resistance to disease; certainly the unsanitary conditions at Weaverville, the first gold camp many of the emigrants encountered, and the place where Heiskell and his Tennessee company decided to winter, were the source of the infection that claimed him. Cholera was the likely culprit, although the single account of Heiskell’s death—a letter written by his cousin Tyler, who had gone for supplies to Sacramento, the town that was gathering beside Sutter’s Fort—prevents a positive identification of the cause of death. “I did not see him during his illness, nor did I know but what he was well till I got back from Sacramento,” Tyler explained to Hugh’s parents. “The distance is 60 miles, and the means of communication in no regular way, and any message or note seldom reaches its destination. He had the medical attention of Dr. White, whom I consider inferior to no other, but availed not to saving his life. The attention of a good nurse was wanting to some extent, though his friends who were with him did all they could—most of them being sick.”

Tyler assured Hugh’s parents that their son had met his end bravely. “He was conscious that his time had come for him ‘to depart hence and be no more on earth forever,’ and remarked but a short time before he expired, ‘Doc, I will die.’” (Obviously Tyler had this from White.) “Though it is the severest affliction in human life,’tis a consolation to Christian parents to know and be assured that an affectionate son, though dead and far from his home and friends, was prepared to meet the dreaded hour.”

F
ATE IS OFTEN ARBITRARY
, but Heiskell’s death epitomized the unusual arbitrariness of life in Gold Rush California. A man could surmount every challenge of the two-thousand-mile trail and still be felled at the mouth of the mines. All he had to show for his courage and perseverance was a stone over his grave; all his loved ones had, if they were lucky, was a letter recounting his final moments.

Heiskell’s death also revealed the abysmal living conditions in the
mining camps. Like Heiskell, most of the overlanders went more or less straight to the mines from the trail, and so the mining camps—as the towns that sprang up around the placers were called—represented their first encounter with community life in California. But this was community life of a kind none had experienced in the East. The populations of the camps were less transient than that of San Francisco—these, after all, were destinations, not a way station—but they were unsettled just the same. The frenzy to be digging was even more compelling than in San Francisco, for before the argonauts’ very eyes the best placers were being snatched up. To waste a moment for such mundane chores as washing clothes, building latrines, or even cooking decent meals was to jeopardize all they had struggled so hard to accomplish. Tomorrow we bathe; today we dig.

The result was predictable: regular outbreaks of disease, made worse by the weariness and reduced resistance of those who had been so long under strain. Cholera was familiar, but no less deadly for its familiarity. Scurvy and other diet-deficiency diseases became common. And when the miners got sick, they could hardly count on medical attention. Hugh Heiskell was fortunate to have a physician look after him, even if Dr. White’s ministrations failed to prevent his death. Doctors willing to be doctors were as hard to find in the mining camps as chambermaids at the coast; like nearly everyone else who had come west, they wanted to look for gold. When they did deign to see patients, their services were very expensive. “Physicians are all making fortunes in this country,” one miner moaned. “They will hardly look at a man’s tongue for less than an ounce of gold! I have known doctors, although they are scarcly worthy of the title (for most of them here are quacks), charge a patient as much as $100 for one visit and prescription.”