The Age of Gold (35 page)
Authors: H.W. Brands
The
11/10/2008s
’ correspondent inquires whether they have reached the bottom. By no means, the guide replies: they are only 160 feet below the surface. They descend farther, past 200 feet, to nearly 300. The correspondent
inquires whether the quartz still pays off, this deep. “Yes,” the guide says. “The deeper we get, the richer the quartz becomes.”
The correspondent stops to ponder what drives men to such depths.
Except from the lights in our hands all is dark, and as still almost as the tomb, with the exception of the distant creaking of a pump, and the steady dripping of some water at our elbow. Rock here, there, and everywhere…. Men have been picking and drilling and blasting through solid rock: by day and night, in winter and summer, led forward by the talismanic power of gold, or at least the hope to obtain it.
The guide says it’s time to return to the surface. As they catch their breath after the long climb back up, they observe the loads of ore that have been pulled, bucket by windlass bucket, from the depths they’ve just visited. The ore is loaded into another set of railway carts and rolled to a nearby mill. There the chunks of ore are dumped on the ground, where men with sledges break them into pieces no larger than a human fist.
But this is not fine enough, for the quartz still clings jealously to the gold. Workers shovel the ore into the hopper of a several-armed stamping machine. Each arm consists of a massive, vertical wooden post, much taller than a man, mounted in a frame so that it can slide up and down freely. A cam connected to a rotating shaft, itself connected to a steam engine, raises each arm, then allows it to fall. The bottom of each arm is sheathed in cast iron; together with the wood, the iron gives the whole arm a weight of perhaps a thousand pounds. Beneath the iron of the arm is a cast-iron bedplate, upon which the ore tumbles from the hopper. As they rise and fall, the several arms together shake the earth and set the hillsides rumbling with their muffled thunder; the ore upon which their weight is brought to bear is ground to powder.
This powder is given a first washing to claim the gold knocked free so far. A sluice separates the gold from the quartz. The process is made more efficient by the application of quicksilver—mercury—to the sluice; gold
has a greater affinity for quicksilver than for quartz, and readily forsakes the latter for the former. (This part of the process has been borrowed from the more sophisticated placer miners, who have learned to employ mercury in their own sluicing devices.)
To improve the efficiency still further, the powdered ore left over from the first step of crushing and separation is crushed a second time, by a second pulverizing device. This machine is the soul of simplicity and has been in use for centuries in Mexico. Called an
arrastra
(from
arrastrar
, “to drag”; also called “rastra” and other corruptions), it consists of a circular bed of stones over which is dragged—by mule-power—another stone. The powdered ore, mixed with water to form a paste, is ground exceedingly fine. (Other
arrastras
are powered by steam engines. A variant employing a wheel that rolls around the circular bed is called a “Chili mill”—after the country, Chile—of its origin.) For an average batch of ore weighing five hundred pounds, the grinding takes three to four hours.
The reporter describes the final part of this step of the operation.
About three quarters of an hour before the whole is thoroughly ground, a sufficient quantity of quicksilver is added; but the amount is regulated by the richness of the quartz in the process of grinding. If, for instance, the five hundred pounds of tailings placed in the rastra is supposed to contain about three quarters of an ounce of gold, about one ounce of quicksilver is generally used—or about twenty-five per cent more of the latter than the former. Some judgment is required in this—too much quicksilver being a disadvantage, inasmuch as the amalgam [of the gold and quicksilver] should be kept hard to make it effectual in saving the gold.
Water is added to the mix to produce a slurry, which carries off the quartz, leaving the gold and quicksilver to sink to the bottom. More ore is added, and the process repeated. At intervals varying from a week to a month, the
arrastra
is entirely drained, and the gold and mercury retrieved. The amalgam of these two elements is heated in an enclosed furnace, or retort.
The mercury vaporizes first, leaving the gold behind. A condensing column captures the mercury for reuse.
To the
Hutchings
’ correspondent, quartz mining guarantees the future of California. The placers dwindle, but the veins that gave rise to the placers are inexhaustible. “As California is one vast network of quartz leads, a thousandth part of which have never even been prospected, and as the bottom of a single lead has not yet been found, it is not an uncertain venture to say that this department alone is capable of giving employment to several millions of people.”
B
UT WHAT KIND
of employment? That was the question that confronted most miners sooner or later. As the scale of mining operations increased, the opportunities for individual miners diminished. The placer miner with a washbowl was the epitome of personal initiative; he succeeded or failed on his own ambition, energy, and luck. While only a few enjoyed the kind of luck many had taken for granted on leaving home, the rest sorted themselves according to their ambition and energy. Some maintained their independence, but as placer mining gave way to river mining, hydraulic mining, and quartz mining, most of those who stayed in the goldfields found themselves working for wages for someone else.
Many did not stay in the goldfields. Argonauts who had something to go home to often left within a season of their arrival. William Swain spent the spring and summer of 1850 on the Feather River, but by the end of the year he was headed back to New York to his wife and daughter. “I have with me about $500 in gold dust and about $10 in specie,” he wrote to his brother. “I also have a very fine double-barrel fowling piece which I should take great pride in bringing home with me, if I should get home.” This last was no sure thing, as Swain was traveling via Panama (reversing the route of Jessie Frémont) and had heard worrisome tales of the Chagres fever. To make matters worse, cholera had broken out on board Swain’s ship, and he himself felt shaky at the time of writing. Yet though his California dream had failed to come true, he didn’t regret the journey. “I have seen many hardships, dangers and privations, and made nothing by it, i.e., accumulated
no property; but if I arrive home with my health, I shall ever be glad that I have taken this trip. Absence from my friends has given me a true valuation of them, and also it has taught me to appreciate the comforts and blessings of home.”
Those argonauts who stayed in California often did so because they had less to return to. Jean-Nicolas Perlot succeeded no better on the Mariposa than Swain did on the Feather River, but without wife or child or job back in Europe, he saw little reason to risk recrossing the Atlantic. Not that Perlot was immune to homesickness—far from it. During his first winter in the mines, while rain halted work, he walked to the town of Mariposa after hearing that a company of Belgians who were leasing one of Frémont’s quartz mines had arrived. Perlot hoped the newcomers might have word of his hometown, perhaps of his parents or siblings. “But they were ignorant of all but the existence of my native place, and consequently could give me no news.”
Indeed, the Belgians at first refused to believe that Perlot could be a compatriot of theirs. “He a Belgian! Never in his life!” protested one, put off by Perlot’s unkempt appearance. “What the devil! There is no savage like that in Belgium!”
“I see that you have a high idea of the Belgians, and I’m not one to contradict you,” Perlot responded. “But wait a bit. You arrived two days ago, and you are staying at the hotel. You have a fine new greatcoat, nicely polished boots, neatly combed hair, and you are freshly shaven. But your company will hardly last, and doubtless you will become a miner. Wait until you have led like me the life of the placers for nine months, spending the day in a ditch, your pick in your hand, the night under a live oak, cooking your own stew, yourself providing for all your needs; then you will see what will become of your greatcoat, your hair, your beard, your face. You will realize that under these conditions a man, even a Belgian, can well have some resemblance to a savage.”
To such was the placer miner reduced—and to forever chasing rumors of rich strikes over the next ridge. On this same visit to Mariposa, Perlot heard of some newly discovered deposits at a place called Bear Valley. He
determined to have a try at them, and with a temporary partner named Thomas set out at once.
We had no need to ask the way; the news, spreading rapidly, of the discovery of the new mines had produced among the population of the area an extraordinary effervescence. From all points of the horizon, men on foot and on horseback were heading for Bear Valley; it was necessary only to keep them in sight. The riders passed with all the speed of their mounts. Several, in the hurry of their departure, had improperly cinched their mule, and it sometimes happened that the saddle turned and so came to rest under the belly of the beast. We saw one, among others, to whom the accident happened, and who, resaddling his mule in haste, left at the end of the train without noticing that he had put the saddle on hindside beforemost.
Perlot and Thomas moved as quickly as they could drive the mule— saddled correctly—that carried their provisions. Though they had learned to discount rumors, they couldn’t help being enticed by reports relayed back up the trail by their fellow hopefuls, to the effect that a single pit in Bear Valley was yielding thousands of dollars of gold.
Topping the last ridge, they looked down on a valley swarming with miners. “All around the pit of which they had told us, and in a radius of a thousand paces, the land was claimed in the name of one or another; a square of twenty-five feet on a side indicated each claim. We saw, on all sides, miners with pick or shovel in hand, occupied in digging.”
Venturing to the celebrated pit itself, Perlot saw a hole six feet wide by fifteen feet long by ten feet deep. The Mexicans who had discovered it were indeed becoming rich. The hundreds of more recent arrivals were betting their time and labor that it wasn’t an isolated deposit.
Yet with each shovelful that came up, the uniqueness of the Mexicans’ strike grew increasingly obvious. “It was a pocket in the rock, and nothing more,” Perlot concluded. “The nearest neighbors had no more chance of
finding one like it on their claims than the ones farthest away.” Thomas agreed that their hopes were forbiddingly slim.
Even so, they had to try. “We wanted to get it out of our minds.” They staked a claim, and for two days dug hard and deep. On the third day they declared themselves convinced, and gave up the quest.
The denouement of the Bear Valley boom summarized the plight of the placermen.
Except for the happy proprietors of the famous pit, who had worked it as far as thirty feet in depth and had found twenty-two thousand dollars there, the others had been no luckier than we. Fifteen days after the discovery, there were more than four hundred miners occupied everywhere in turning the soil….At the end of a month there remained twelve of them: those who were working in the pit in question.
Perlot clung to his independence, but he found himself increasingly isolated in doing so. As the larger operations moved in, the last of his fellows from La Fortune gave up hope of making daily bread by his own efforts. “Bérenger left me and went to work by the day for one of these companies; he earned four dollars a day. I bought back from him his share of the provisions we had left; then I found myself alone.”
Plutus rattled his money bags, and straightaway the world ran to gather the falling pieces. The meanest yet most powerful of gods waved his golden wand, and lo! the desert became a great city. This is an age of marvels, and we have seen and mingled in them. Let the pioneer rub his eyes: it is no mirage, no Aladdin’s palace that he sees, but real, substantial tenements, real men and women, an enduring, magnificent city.
—Frank Soulé, San Francisco journalist
Amid their digging for gold, the immigrants confronted another challenge, one most of them hadn’t considered before heading for California, but which proved even greater than the problem of how to get the gold from the ground. They had to build a society, to fashion the civil and political institutions that would allow this heterogeneous horde to live cheek by jowl, hip to knee, without murdering one another more often than necessary. It was a formidable task, the likes of which had rarely been attempted, and probably never at such a pace on such a scale. The newcomers all shared a desire to get rich, but the Americans and Latin Americans and Europeans and Australians and Asians shared precious little else. How could they hope to construct a coherent society from such a congeries of peoples? How indeed, especially when the one thing they shared militated against social coherence? The vast majority came to California not to make lives but merely livings, not to sink roots in the new land and build homes but to strip the land and return to their real homes. And what were the newcomers to do with the people who preceded the invasion: the native Indians and Californians, who had their own ideas about how to organize society? What were the natives to do with the newcomers?
Compounding California’s problems were the problems California created for the rest of the United States. Upon the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, nearly everyone in America assumed that the peopling of California would be a slow process, as the peopling of the territories acquired earlier by the United States had been. Fashioning governments for those earlier territories, and admitting them to the Union as states, had sometimes stretched the imagination of America’s political leaders; but the feat had always been accomplished, not least on account of the ample time allowed for it. The Gold Rush guaranteed that time would
not
be allowed in California’s case. Within the year of President Polk’s announcement of the gold discovery, California contained more people than many existing states, and those people demanded admission to the Union. They got what they demanded, but not without setting off a fight in Congress and in the country at large that shook the republic to its foundations.