The Age of Gold (50 page)

Provisioning the miners required resourcefulness. One winter Stanford ran low on vinegar, which the miners used to flavor their beans. Checking
his stocks, he discovered he had plenty of whiskey, which he substituted for the vinegar. The new dish tickled the taste buds of the miners and won Stanford a happy following.

In 1855 he briefly returned east to fetch his wife. Jane had refused to rough it in a mining camp; the ill health of her father afforded a second reason to remain east. But then her father died, and Stanford promised to move his business to Sacramento, and she could no longer say no.

Yet it wasn’t just Jane that prompted Stanford’s move to Sacramento. The gold-bearing gravel that had brought the miners to Michigan Bluff ran under the town, and in their insatiable quest for gold the hydraulickers turned their water cannons on the town site. Stanford had to leave or be washed away.

In Sacramento he erected the finest structure his profits from Michigan Bluff could buy. He built on the levee, above the floodplain of the Sacramento River. And, to avoid that other scourge of California urban life, fire, he built of concrete. The result was what the
California Times
called a “new and magnificently extensive fire proof store.” Doing business as Stanford Brothers, the firm advertised itself as “Importers and Wholesale Dealers in Provisions, Groceries, Wines, Liquors, Cigars, Oils & Camphene, Flour, Grain and Produce, Mining Implements, Miners’ Supplies, Etc.” It explained, “By Importing our own Merchandise, and one of the Firm being constantly in the Atlantic States, shipping Goods by clipper vessels, expressly for this market, we offer superior inducements to the Country Dealer or Trade in general, and invite an inspection of our stock. Prices will be found as low as those of San Francisco. Orders put up with the utmost care and dispatch.”

General stores had long been the crossroads of American communities, and Stanford’s placed him in contact with all manner of people. Most supplied merely their patronage, others information, still others new opportunities. More than a few of Stanford’s customers came to the counter short of money; in its place they offered stakes in their mines. Stanford accepted the most promising offers and became a miner in spite of himself.

With his mounting success, Stanford gained a higher public profile. As profiles went, it was distinctive but not particularly impressive, at least at
first glance. Stanford was a square man with a square head set firmly on square shoulders. (The beard and belly he would grow in later life rounded him a little, but not enough to erase his essential orthogonality.) And Stanford’s character seemed to match his appearance: he met life square- on, without pretense or even obvious enthusiasm. He utterly lacked the self-promoting flamboyance of Sam Brannan, for instance; none who knew Stanford could have imagined him engaging in a stunt like Brannan’s braying about gold from the plaza of San Francisco. Yet this very lack of flamboyance in Stanford could be reassuring, and that square body and blockish head inspired confidence that here was a man who, once he found his direction, would plow through every obstacle in his way.

As matters happened, he found his direction soon enough. Some of his customers wanted to elevate public literacy by establishing a subscription library; Stanford signed on as a charter member and trustee. The library’s membership comprised the most important business figures in Sacramento, including Charles Crocker, a brawny former blacksmith who had failed at mining but was prospering in dry goods; Collis Huntington, an erstwhile peddler who, while stuck on the isthmus in the same crowd as Jessie Frémont, amassed a modest fortune arbitraging between the locals and the emigrants; and Mark Hopkins, a vegetarian with a prematurely white beard who had started around the Horn with a captain even more brutal than Robert Waterman (so brutal he provoked a successful mutiny at Rio de Janeiro), and who completed the journey to become Huntington’s partner in hardware.

Beyond books and business, the quartet discovered a common interest in railroads, specifically a railroad connecting California to the rest of the Union. This interest drew them to the nascent Republican party. While opposition to slavery was the primary glue that held together the odd assortment of Whigs, Free-Soilers, Know-Nothings, and northern Democrats who converted to Republicanism, a secondary cement was the old Whig enthusiasm for federally funded improvements to transportation. Foremost of these, now that California was part of the Union, was a railroad to the Pacific. Naturally, a Pacific railroad appealed to California businessmen, who—in addition to sharing the general California sentiment in favor of
swifter transport east—favored whatever would spur the growth of the state and thereby its commerce and presumably their profits. Stanford, Crocker, Huntington, and Hopkins found a cause in the railroad to California, and an instrument in the Republican party.

The California Republicans were a cozy group at first. “In Sacramento, where I resided,” remembered Cornelius Cole, an original member, “the party at its inception was extremely limited in numbers. No record, I venture to say, can be found of a political organization starting out with fewer adherents. There were C. P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, Edwin B. and Charles Crocker, all personal as well as political friends of mine. There were not for some time, besides these, as many as could be counted on one’s fingers.”

Being a California Republican wasn’t easy. The state was dominated by Democrats with ties to the South, who tarred their new rivals with the brush of abolitionism. “We deprecate the formation of a Republican party in this State,” declared the
Sacramento Union
, at that time California’s most influential paper. “Its organization will be followed, in our view, by a long train of evils to the people; it will unnecessarily divide the people of the State upon a sectional issue in which they are not directly interested.” A competing paper was less diplomatic. “The convention of nigger worshippers assembled yesterday in this city,” the Sacramento
State Journal
declared. “This is the first time that this dangerous fanaticism has dared to bare its breast before the people of California…. There is dangerous meaning in the spectacle of political degradation now before us….It is high time all national men should unite in saving California from the stain of abolitionism.”

W
ILLIAM SHERMAN DIDN’T
like Republicans at this stage of his and their histories, deeming them a disruptive force in national life. And his tightly wound temperament could hardly have contrasted more with that of the phlegmatic Stanford. Yet such was the attraction of gold—or rather, of the opportunities gold created—that Sherman could no more resist throwing over his career as a soldier than Stanford had been able to resist
abandoning a career in law. Like Stanford, although less successfully, Sherman during the 1850s became a California businessman—in his case, a banker.

After helping to get the rush to California started by sending Lieutenant Loeser to Washington, Sherman himself went east at the beginning of 1850 with dispatches for the War Department. Already he could see the changes the Gold Rush had wrought: his eastward journey, via steamship and the isthmus, took a mere 30 days, compared to the 196 days his outbound journey around Cape Horn had required in 1846–47.

Sherman had a second, more personal reason for traveling east. He was going to get married. His bride was Ellen Ewing of Ohio, who also happened to be his foster sister. This unusual match was the result, in part, of the death of Sherman’s father when the boy was nine; his mother, lacking the resources to feed and clothe her children, farmed the older ones out to neighbors. Red-haired William—until then called Cump, short for Tecumseh, the great Indian chief, whom his father greatly admired—went to the family of Thomas Ewing, a lawyer and aspiring politician. (The early death of his father, and now the effective loss of his mother, doubtless had something to do with Sherman’s sober demeanor throughout life. The change of his name—the Ewings insisted on a Christian name in front of his pagan appellation—made the change in his life all the more evident.) Sherman grew up with the Ewings, and fell in love with his foster sister. Meanwhile, Thomas Ewing became a senator, and then secretary of the interior under Zachary Taylor. The Sherman-Ewing wedding consequently attracted various Washington luminaries, including President Taylor and senators Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Thomas Benton. The honeymoon journey introduced Ellen to some Sherman relatives in Ohio before returning the newlyweds to Washington in time for the Fourth of July celebration at which the overheated Taylor ingested too many frozen cherries, triggering the stomach troubles that led to his death.

In the East, Sherman gradually realized that California had spoiled him for army life. He had seen men far less capable than himself make far more money than he could ever hope to make in the military. “In these prosperous times, salaried men suffer,” he told his brother John. Accordingly
he cast about for other opportunities. Through the Ewings he met investors intrigued by the prospects California presented, and impressed by Sherman’s intelligence and experience. Two St. Louis bankers, James Lucas and Henry Turner, inquired whether Sherman might be willing to return to San Francisco and head up a new bank. They offered a generous salary, with a partnership interest that was bound to grow. Sherman was tempted, yet didn’t wish to abandon his army commission carelessly. He pondered the offer at length, then applied to the War Department for a six- months’ leave of absence to travel to San Francisco and test matters on the ground there. “You may depend on it that I will not throw away my present position without a strong probability of decided advantage,” he told John.

Arriving back at San Francisco in the spring of 1853, Sherman was amazed at how the city had changed in his absence. The cove—the sheltering place for ships that had provided the original raison d’etre for Yerba Buena—had vanished beneath the advancing streets, which now pressed far out into the bay. New wharves extended even farther, although, without the wind- and wave-breaking effects of the cove, the shelter they offered was inferior to what their predecessors had supplied. The sand hills behind the old village had largely been leveled; even more-stubborn prominences like Telegraph Hill had been severely diminished by continued blasting. The tents and flimsy wooden structures that dominated the city’s architecture in the early days had been replaced by imposing edifices of brick and stone—as a consequence of which, Sherman soon learned, fire was far less a threat than previously. Or so, at any rate, judged the insurance companies based in New York and London that now offered fire insurance at rates Sherman discovered to be comparable to those in the East.

The tone of city life had changed almost as much as the city’s visual appearance. Gold dust no longer served as money, and the small scales that merchants had used to weigh customers’ payments were now mere curiosity pieces. Coins clanked across the counters: American dollars and quarter-dollars, English crowns and shillings, French francs, Mexican dollars and double-reals, Dutch and German florins and guilders, even Indian rupees. The federal assay office in the city stamped gold coins in denominations
of ten and twenty dollars, and special “slugs” worth fifty dollars— although San Franciscans anticipated that when the local branch of the United States mint, authorized the previous year by Congress, opened, it would replace the assay office in this regard, besides rendering the foreign coinages unnecessary. Not surprisingly in light of his prospective profession, Sherman paid particular attention to the bank drafts that underwrote larger transactions than the coins allowed: drafts drawn against Page, Bacon & Co., the city’s leading bank with deposits of nearly $2 million, in its proud granite building at the corner of California and Montgomery, and against the other financial houses in the same neighborhood.

The city had lost much of its frantic character. By the standards of the East, San Franciscans were still in a hurry, but, in contrast to the early days, they weren’t uniformly in a hurry to get somewhere else. The population of the city continued to grow rapidly—this was obvious from all the construction. But a solid core of the population had stabilized. The metal foundries, flour mills, and boatyards of the Happy Valley neighborhood supported a contingent of workers who had discovered that mining wasn’t everything they had hoped it would be. The cobblers, upholsterers, harness-makers, jewelers, painters, bakers, printers, and tailors located around the commercial district provided goods and services one might have found in any city—and at prices that, while still often high by eastern standards, were no longer extortionate. A steady market for fruits and vegetables, and the diminishing allure of the mines, had given rise to a truck-farming industry on the city’s outskirts and across the bay that furnished San Francisco’s tables with everything easterners ate—and more, on account of California’s equable climate.

On this visit Sherman might or might not have encountered a Bavarian-born dry-goods merchant named Levi Strauss, who had just arrived from New York and was setting up a business to sell supplies to the miners and their fellows-in-toil. Eventually Strauss’s supplies would include distinctive canvas pants first called “waist overalls” but later “jeans”—and finally “levis.”

On the other hand, Sherman could hardly have avoided noticing the Pioneer Steam Coffee and Spice Mills on Powell Street, where sails from
abandoned whaleships caught the bay breeze and powered a wind-driven grindstone. The company was the brainchild of New Yorker William Bovee, who discovered that miners would pay top dollar for coffee they didn’t have to roast and grind themselves; the sails were the work of Bovee’s partner, a teenager from Nantucket named James Folger, who would buy the coffee company and rename it for himself.

For all the changes, the city was still recognizably San Francisco. If many of the gambling hells had given way to billiard parlors, that was at least partly because the gambling had moved upscale and downtown: to the banks, which supplied credit for all manner of ambitious mining and commercial ventures, and made fat profits on interest rates of 3 percent per month and more. Sherman, surveying the situation, decided that banking was for him. “My business here,” he wrote John, referring to the banking business, “is the best going, provided we have plenty of money.”