The Age of Gold (7 page)

As it happened, the American officers arrived just in time for the first celebration of the Fourth of July in the (so far brief) American history of California. Sherman depicted host Sutter, at this time the most prominent man in California:
His personal appearance is striking, about forty or fifty years of age, slightly bald, about five feet six inches in height, open, frank face, and strongly foreign in his manner, appearance, and address. He speaks many languages fluently, including that of all Indians, and has more control over the tribes of the Sacramento than any man living…. Sutter presided at the head of the table, Governor Mason on his right and I on his left. About fifty sat down to the table, mostly Americans, some foreigners, and one or two Californians. The usual toasts, songs, speeches, etc., passed off, and a liberal quantity of liquor disposed of, champagne, Madeira, sherry, etc.; upon the whole a dinner that would have done credit in any frontier town.

From Sutter’s Fort, Sherman and Mason proceeded up the American River. At twenty-five miles they reached Mormon Island, so called from the three hundred Mormons—some from Marshall’s company at Coloma, the rest other veterans of the Mormon Battalion—who were digging for gold in the sand and gravel of the streambed. Here Sherman met Sam Brannan, “on hand as the high-priest, collecting the tithes,” Sherman recorded. Obviously the diggers were finding gold, which was making Brannan rich—which in turn was annoying some of the Mormons. One of them approached Colonel Mason. “Governor, what business has Sam Brannan to collect the tithes here?” he asked. Mason replied, “Brannan has a perfect right to collect the tax, if you Mormons are fools enough to pay it.” By now the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had been ratified and California formally annexed to the United States; Mason added, “This is public land, and the gold is the property of the United States. All of you here are trespassers, but, as the Government is benefited by your getting out the gold, I do not intend to interfere.”

Far from interfering, Mason—via the hand of Sherman—accelerated the search for gold. On their return to Monterey, Mason had Sherman draft a letter to Washington confirming the reports of the gold discovery. “The most moderate estimate I could obtain from men acquainted with the subject was, that upward of four thousand men were working in the gold
district, of whom more than half were Indians, and that from $30,000 to $50,000 worth of gold, if not more, was daily obtained,” Sherman wrote.

To corroborate this testimony, Sherman suggested to Mason that they send some gold along with the letter. Mason agreed, and Sherman bought enough dust—over 200 ounces—to fill a small oyster-can (or tea caddy, as others interpreted the squarish metal container). The letter and the oyster- can left Monterey at the end of August, in the keeping of a special courier, a Lieutenant Loeser, whose orders were to get to Washington as quickly as possible.

But travel was slow. Lieutenant Loeser caught a ship bound south past Mexico and Central America for Peru. He waited in Peru for a second ship, bound back north to Panama, which he crossed by mule. A third craft carried him to Jamaica, and a fourth to New Orleans. From there he telegraphed ahead to Washington, saying he had arrived and was bearing an important message. But he didn’t reach the capital himself—with the letter and the load of gold—till late November.

Loeser’s arrival prompted an announcement by President Polk of the momentous discovery in California, an announcement that is often interpreted as the starting pistol for the Gold Rush. In a narrowly American sense it was, for in the months that followed Polk’s announcement, a flood of American adventurers headed west, determined to fill their pockets with gold and their lives with the miracles sudden wealth would bring.

But in fact the rush to California had already begun. In terms of the most common means of long-distance transport—that is, by sea—every country that bordered the Pacific Ocean was closer to California than were the states of the American union. New York was sixteen thousand nautical miles from San Francisco, compared to two thousand for Acapulco and Honolulu, four thousand for Callao, six thousand for Valparaiso, and seven thousand for Sydney and Canton. While Lieutenant Loeser was struggling
east, the word of James Marshall’s discovery rippled out the Golden Gate (previously named with fortuitous aptness by John Frémont) and spread north, south, and west across the greatest of the world’s oceans. In every port that heard the news, it set hearts racing. People dropped what they were doing, bought passage for the golden coast, and headed out upon the waves. They didn’t all get there before the rush from America hit, but they did ensure the international character of the invading force.

T
HE NEWS REACHED
South America almost before Loeser left Monterey. In May 1848 the supercargo of a Chilean ship at San Francisco heard the stories of gold on the American River and immediately offered $12 per ounce for as much dust as anyone would bring him. This commercial officer knew his business, for his price was substantially above the $8 to $10 local merchants were paying for gold (Sherman paid $10 per ounce to fill the oyster-can), yet comfortably below the $17 gold sellers were getting in Valparaiso, where his ship was headed.

The ship was the brig J.R.S., owned by (and initialed for) José Ramón Sánchez of Valparaiso; its regular trade was hides and tallow, which heretofore were California’s principal exports. (Richard Dana’s
Pilgrim
was similarly engaged in the hide-and-tallow trade.) How much gold the supercargo acquired is unknown; if he ran short of cash to make good his promise, owner Sánchez had sufficient credit in San Francisco to supply the shortfall. The J.R.S. weighed anchor on June 14, cleared the Golden Gate, and reached Valparaiso on August 19.

Within hours the news that it carried California gold traversed the Vale of Paradise for which the town was named, and flew to Santiago, a hundred miles inland. Within days merchants were consigning cargoes for California; gold seekers were purchasing passage north. Two dozen hopefuls filled the berths of the
Virjinia
, which got away first. By chance another ship arrived from San Francisco just as the
Virjinia
was casting off; the additional gold it carried confirmed the earlier evidence of California’s riches and further inflamed the dreams of the
Virjinia
’s argonauts.

“The gold nuggets were the authorized ambassadors of those riches,”
wrote Vicente Pérez Rosales, in line for one of the next boats north. “Their fame acquired the proportions of the calumny of the
Barber of Seville
, and aroused in the minds of the tranquil Chileans an explosion of such feverish activity that, ignoring the voices of prudence, led thousands of adventurers to the rich honeycomb where so many hopes perished. For those who gave credence to the existence of California gold, the only imprudent ones were those who did not rush off.”

Pérez Rosales was too old for such stay-at-home imprudence. Forty-one when the news arrived from California, he was descended from parents who were patricians under the Spanish and rebels under José San Martín and Bernardo O’Higgins. During the Chilean war for independence they sent young Vicente to France to school; he returned to pursue what he thought would be a life of genteel, if perhaps radical, letters. But family bankruptcy overturned his plans, and he was cast upon his own practical talents. These proved more varied than most of those who knew the sheltered young man would have guessed. He dug gold in the Chilean Andes and rustled cattle, crossing into Argentina to round up the animals, then driving them back to Chile by precipitous paths only he and his fellow outlaws knew. After increased settlement brought too many witnesses to the backcountry, he abandoned the mountains for the cafes of Valparaiso, where aspiring but impoverished intellectuals like himself could talk for hours over a single cup of coffee. They read Rousseau and argued Locke, and printed their opinions on a press fitted with type purchased from the heirs of Benjamin Franklin. Upon hearing of the gold in California, Pérez reflected that however much the intellectual life nourished the soul, it left the body—at least
his
body—hungry, and he decided to join the adventurers heading north.

“Four brothers, a brother-in-law and two trusted servants constituted the personnel of our expedition to California,” he recorded.

Their ship was a French bark, the
Stanguéli
, which was so crowded that Pérez and his companions had to leave their common equipment for the next vessel. The departure evoked equal measures of anxiety and anticipation. “California for the Chileans was an unknown country, nearly a desert, full of dangers and infested besides by epidemics of disease,” Pérez wrote. “There we had no friends or relatives to lend a hand; personal safety could be found only at the barrel of a pistol or the point of a dagger; and nevertheless, the risk of robbery, violence, sickness, death itself, were secondary considerations before the dazzling promise of gold.”

The passengers were ninety men, two women (including a prostitute named Rosario Améstica, a favorite among the men), four cows, eight pigs, and three dogs (besides the seventeen sailors and the captain and pilot). Most seemed ordinary enough, but two attracted the special attention of Pérez Rosales. One was a gentleman named álvarez, a Chilean by birth, eccentric to the point of paranoia. Though rich and able to afford the first cabin, he refused it, saying the Frenchmen operating the boat were all thieves and would not feed him as well as he could feed himself with the food he brought aboard. The other noteworthy passenger was “a Frenchman of such massive hips that, to enter the passageway through the narrow door that communicated with the cabin, he always had to turn sideways. For this we gave him the mischievous name
Culatus
[Big Butt].”

The ship set sail just after the solstice of the Southern Hemisphere summer, and for the first month the passengers and crew sweltered north
toward the equator. On January 18, 1849, Pérez Rosales entered in his diary: “Until today our only torment has been the exasperating monotony and the suffocating heat.” Amid the torpor the ship crossed the equator; none could rouse themselves to celebrate.

Yet before the mast, the steerage passengers were restive. “álvarez is at the heart of the matter,” Pérez wrote, “for it seems that his provisions, poorly distributed, will not last until the end of the voyage. We fear a mutiny on board.”

Next day the ship sighted another vessel, which upon approach proved to be an American whaler. The Yankee captain dropped a boat, which rowed over to the
Stanguéli
. The captain was friendly and modest; the sailors who accompanied him were eager for faces and voices other than their own. The sailors grew more than eager upon perceiving one face— and form—in particular; they “nearly fainted with envy to see among us the charming Rosarito.”

The captain told how he and his men had been thirty-nine months at sea without once touching land. (Either the Yankee captain, in the telling, or Pérez Rosales, in the retelling, may have been exaggerating; whalers often went long without landing, but rarely that long.) He savored the luncheon set before him: the soft bread and fresh meat, which he had almost forgotten after three years of hardtack and salt pork. The Chileans were lucky, he said, and doubly so to be off for the goldfields to win their fortunes. But he added, with the sigh of the homesick, “I do not envy your luck, for I am on my way to embrace my children.”

The Americans continued south toward Valparaiso, carrying the Chileans’ good wishes and their hastily scrawled letters; the
Stanguéli
proceeded slowly north. The restiveness in steerage persisted, until on the last day of January, when Pérez Rosales and the other cabin passengers were dining with the officers, a seaman burst into the saloon and frantically whispered a message to the captain. The captain turned to his messmates and declared, in a voice of alarm, “We have a revolution on board! álvarez is leading it, and if you don’t help me, we are lost!”

Pérez and the others literally leaped into action. While the others hurried to their cabins to retrieve weapons, Pérez hastened to deck to summon
some additional passengers. Together they managed to subdue álvarez before the mutiny spread. “This is no small luck!” Pérez remarked, pondering what the insurrection might have become. The prisoner was chained and kept under close guard.