The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (4 page)

In July, the acting military governor of California, Colonel Richard B. Mason, decided to heed the advice of his aide Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman that they go to the Sierras and “see with their own eyes” exactly what was happening. So, leaving Monterey, the two officers toured the gold country. They met with Sutter. They also encountered Sam Brannan, who as a “high priest” was busy collecting tithes from Mormon miners. The miners, in turn, were obviously finding gold. Upon returning to Monterey, Mason had Sherman draft a glowing report for him to sign. Calculating the value of the gold at $16 an ounce, the report claimed that men could earn more in a day than soldiers made in a month. It also predicted that gold from the Sierras would “pay the cost of the war with Mexico a hundred times over.” Along with the report, Sherman convinced Mason to send a tea caddy with over two hundred ounces of gold.
²⁰

Mason’s messenger, Lieutenant Lucien Loeser, left California on August 30, via Panama. Two weeks later Mason decided the news was too important to be entrusted to just one man. So he sent a second messenger, with a duplicate copy of the report, via Mexico. The second messenger arrived first, on November 22.

By this time, even President Polk had begun to believe that something important had occurred in California. The president, moreover, needed all the good news he could get. The war against Mexico had gone well militarily, but not politically. One army under General Zachary Taylor had invaded northern Mexico and scored a smashing victory over superior Mexican forces at Buena Vista. Another army under General Winfield Scott had captured Mexico City, the enemy capital. Still another army under Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny had taken Santa Fe and then California. The fighting had lasted hardly a year, cost the nation less than two thousand lives on the battlefield and some eleven thousand from disease, and made heroes by the dozen.

To Polk’s dismay, however, most of the glory fell to Whig generals, who were using the war to gain the presidency. Moreover, Whig newspapers and Whig politicians, while extolling the gallantry of Whig generals, had lambasted him for leading the nation into an unjust war. He indeed had pushed for war, claimed that Mexico had invaded Texas, shed American blood on American soil. But the documents he had provided Congress justifying his call for war hadn’t supported his interpretation of events. Dissent had been unrelenting. What, critics asked, was the president up to? What was his hidden agenda? Was the war just another subterfuge to expand slavery? In the House the fledging congressman Abraham Lincoln of Illinois had called on him to pinpoint where blood had first been shed—was it on American or Mexican soil? Indeed, Lincoln and others had treated him as a war criminal, and Horace Greeley of the
New-York Tribune
had labeled him the “Father of Lies.”

So it was fortuitous that just nine days before Mexico had been forced to sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which officially ended the war, a carpenter from New Jersey found several pieces of gold in the Mexican Cession. Polk on December 5 thus made the most of Mason’s report in his annual message to Congress, repeatedly emphasizing the “abundance of gold” and predicting that California and the other territories taken from Mexico would “add more to the strength and wealth of the nation” than any previous acquisitions. And two days later, when Loeser finally arrived, Polk put the gold, tea caddy and all, on display at the War Office.

By this time, people from all over the world were pouring into California. Some five thousand Mexicans had already marched across the Sonora to California. Thousands of Chileans and Peruvians had journeyed northward. Hawaiians and Tahitians had also come. So had dozens of British convicts, sentenced to labor in Australia. The word had even reached France, where within the year thirty-six ships would be outfitted and deliver some two thousand Frenchmen, and where Louis Napoleon, hoping to get rid of malcontents, would establish a national lottery and succeed in eliminating four thousand of his subjects.
²¹
Above all, the Chinese came on the credit-ticket system, crossing the Pacific on clippers, often in as little as thirty days. Within five years, some forty thousand had arrived in San Francisco.

Polk’s message added to the hubbub and spurred thousands of his countrymen to join the rush to California. From mid-December to mid-January, sixty-one sailing vessels, averaging fifty passengers each, left New York, Boston, Salem, Norfolk, Philadelphia, and Baltimore for the gold region. Many more left New Orleans, Charleston, and other ports. In February 1849, another sixty ships set off from New York, seventy from Philadelphia and Boston, eleven from New Bedford. In Massachusetts alone, 124 gold rush companies were formed. And by year’s end, some eight hundred ships, barks, brigs, schooners, and steamers, carrying forty thousand passengers, left the East Coast for the gold country.
²²

Most initially went by way of Cape Horn. It was the old, established way. It was also the Massachusetts way. Boston and Salem seamen had been doing it for forty years. Handling transport for some six thousand migrants, all but 22 of the 124 Massachusetts companies chose to go around the Horn. To meet the demand, Boston and Salem merchants rapidly put together a fleet of old, patched-up whalers, schooners, brigs, and steamers. The largest was the
Edward Everett,
which weighed seven hundred tons and carried 150 passengers. The smallest was the schooner
Toccao,
which weighed twenty-eight tons and carried only 5 passengers.
²³

The trip was harrying. It was over well-charted water, but getting around the Horn was still the “dread of all mariners.” Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman, among others, learned that the hard way. In 1846–47, it took him 196 days to get to California. The New York Volunteers made better time, reaching California in 161 days. Not much had changed by 1849. The passengers on the
Leonore
were the luckiest. They got to California in 149 days, the fastest time yet recorded. More typical was the
Edward Everett,
which took 174 days. The 30 men who booked passage on the brig
Pauline
had no luck whatsoever. It took them 40 grueling days just to get around the Horn, and by the time they reached San Francisco, they had been at sea for 241 days.
²⁴

Nearly all the passengers were men with deep pockets. Women and children were a rarity, and on most ships the only poor men aboard were the members of the crew. The cost of a berth on every ship was steep, as much as most Americans made in a year, and on some ships more than they made in two or three years. To get onto a ship, a workingman thus had to have financial help from family and friends. Then he had to buy into one of the many gold rush companies that were formed. Usually called trading and mining companies, and sometimes mining and trading companies, they were generally run by men who knew a lot about trading, nothing about mining. The cost of joining was sometimes as low as $300, but more often $400, $500, $600, or $700, as the demand for passage ebbed and flowed. One Boston company, the North Western Trading and Mining Company, charged its members $1,000 each.
²⁵
Then, once the organizers collected enough money, they purchased a boat and supplies and hired a captain and crew, and off the company sailed.

Advertisement, barque
Emma Isidora.
Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

In joining a company, the gold seeker also had to agree to abide by the company’s bylaws. One basic rule was to heed the dictates of the officers of the company, who were usually listed by name and title and sometimes elected by the members. Another was to regard the company as “a band of brothers” and to always back each member in a crisis. Still another was to behave “like a gentleman,” to act honorably, and to never partake in such shameful acts as drinking excessively, gambling, fighting, or frequenting prostitutes in South American ports. The latter prohibitions, in the judgment of one historian, probably were just boilerplate, written to reassure wives and loved ones back home.
²⁶

Whether boilerplate or not, the rules gave way quickly once the men hit the high seas. One company, which consisted of twenty-five Harvard men, paid no attention to the rules whatsoever. They treated the whole trip as a time to frolic. According to their own records, they drank excessively, fought frequently, and chased after prostitutes in Rio de Janeiro. Twelve of these hell-raisers managed to get themselves into serious trouble. Four missed the boat in Rio, and eight had a falling-out with the ship’s captain and were left behind. Only thirteen of the original twenty-five reached San Francisco.
²⁷

Other gold seekers reached San Francisco only because of their captain. That was true of passengers on a New York ship, the
George Washington.
While the boat was docked off the Brazilian coast, some thirty men went ashore, irritated the locals, and got into a drunken brawl. When it was over, two passengers were dead, one had a broken leg, and ten were wounded. The Brazilians suffered even heavier casualties, two dead and fourteen wounded. Some three thousand Brazilians then surrounded the rest of the passengers and wouldn’t let them go. Finally, three days later, the ship’s captain threatened to “resort to arms” and got their release.
²⁸

More often, when faced with unruly passengers, the captain simply left them to fend for themselves. The most famous incident of this sort involved not drunken men but a woman, one of the few to travel around the Horn in 1849. The woman was Eliza Farnham, a well-connected New Yorker who had written extensively on female superiority and had been the head of the women’s division at Sing Sing prison. In late 1848, Farnham learned that her husband had died in California and had left her a farm. She quickly decided to go to California with her two children and her maid. Then, while mulling over travel plans, she had an inspiration. What California needed, she surmised, was “real” women. The place was becoming a hellhole without them. So she created her own company, the California Association of American Women, and tried to recruit 130 “intelligent, virtuous and efficient” women “not under twenty-five years of age” to accompany her. The cost for each would be $250, a bargain price. Once in California, they would marry miners and thus civilize the place.
²⁹

To carry out this mission, Farnham had the help of some of New York’s leading reformers and politicians. Horace Greeley, the editor of the
New-York Tribune,
backed her. So did William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the
New-York Evening Post,
as did Henry Ward Beecher, the pastor of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church. In all, thirteen prominent New Yorkers supported her undertaking. They, too, saw it as an opportunity to “accomplish some greater good.” Yet the only women she could get to go were three of her friends, and two of them were married.

Despite this failing, Farnham and her friends left New York in July 1849 on the ship
Angelique.
Once at sea, Farnham locked horns with the ship’s captain. Deeming him a brute, she refused to accept his authority and battled him constantly. When was he going to do something about the “dreadful quality” of the ship’s drinking water? Why did he allow his steward, “a lazy, lying, worthless creature” and “a mulatto” to boot, to take up with her maid? Who was to look out for her children? The battle continued around the Horn. Finally, when the ship docked in Valparaiso, the captain let her go ashore to find a replacement for her lovesick maid. Then off he sailed, taking with him her two children and leaving her “destitute, in a city of strangers.”
³⁰

Farnham’s friends predicted that the captain would pay for this treachery. They were wrong. Instead, her sad tale provided fodder for scores of barroom jokes—and a reminder that it was dangerous to run afoul of a sea captain.

In sailing around the Horn, Eliza Farnham, the Harvard men, and most trading and mining companies opted to take the old, established way to California. In 1849, however, there was another route that cut months off the total trip if all went well. Some six thousand gold seekers took it.