1849

 

__________ 

“This is the finger of God…

One hundred and twenty burials yesterday.” 

Harriet Beecher Stowe, describing a cholera epidemic in Cincinnati

__________ 

Who wouldn't like to get rich with a little digging?

Digging for gold - using a "Long Tom" to wash dirt.

Who Might You Want to Tell? 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Discussing the Gold Rush with students was always fun. If nothing else, I found my  kids rarely knew why the San Francisco 49ers were named the “49ers,” or why their team colors were red and…gold. 

    Students often wondered why the first discoverers of gold or silver didn’t keep it secret. I always told them, “Think like yourselves. Who might you want to tell? Would you want to brag, or would you have trouble keeping a secret?” 

    Most students also seemed unclear about what the term “prospector” meant. I used to make fun of myself (I had one date in high school – when a friend’s sister asked me to a dance. I couldn’t dance, either). I would pick some young man, and put the idea to him: You are going to ask out your dream girl. What are the “prospects” or chances she says yes. 

    We also talked about “prospects” in the NBA or NFL drafts. 

ONE STORY I used every year (and I can’t now find the source) involved a rush in the Amazonian jungles of Brazil, touched off in 1985. The first “find” was accidental, when loggers out scouting for sites came upon an uprooted forest giant. In the roots they noticed gold specks – and found several nuggets. 

    A mad rush to the area followed. In one case, miners uncovered a “nugget” the size of a briefcase. (I always reached behind my desk and thumped down my briefcase for emphasis.) 

    I will try to turn up the story in my files: I retired from teaching in 2008; but my memory is that the nugget was worth an estimated $1.4 million. I do recall the miners who found it broke it up, because they feared it would end in a museum and they’d be cheated. But (see below), it would have had to weigh almost a thousand pounds to be worth that much. 

    Gold, of course, is much denser than almost any other element. A gold bar the size of a house brick would weigh about fifty pounds. As of today, as I type this up (11/8/18), gold is selling for $1,228 an ounce. 

    A pound of gold (there are only 12 Troy ounces per pound) would then be worth $14,736. 

    Other terms and details I thought students should know: “vigilante,” “lynching,” “stake a claim,” “pan out.” (The term “stake a claim” comes from the habit of miners driving markers at the four corners of their claims to indicate property had been taken.) 

    The prejudice directed at non-white miners also seemed important to discuss. The Chinese, for example, were not allowed to own land, vote, serve on juries or testify against whites. 

    One immigrant who “struck it rich,” was Levi Strauss, who left Bavaria in 1848 and arrived in San Francisco in 1853. Strauss was soon selling heavy duty work pants to miners, using rivets at points of strain to make them more durable. In 1873 he patented these pants, today known as jeans.

Store in Coloma, California, catering to Chinese customers.
Gold rush days.

*

 

JOHN C. FREMONT left Kansas in October 1848, on his fourth expedition to explore the West. This time, his job was to find a safe winter passage through the Rocky Mountains.

January 27: John C. Freemont writes his wife a lengthy letter, telling her of the terrible trials of his expedition.

 

My Very Dear Wife,

 

I write to you from the house of our good friend [Kit] Carson. This morning a cup of chocolate was brought to me while yet in bed. To an overworn, overworked, much fatigued, and starving traveler, these little luxuries of the world offer an interest which in your comfortable home it is not possible for you to conceive. While in the enjoyment of this luxury, then, I pleased myself in imagining how gratified you would be in picturing me here in Kit’s care, whom you’ll fancy constantly occupied and constantly uneasy and endeavoring to make me comfortable. How little could you have dreamed of this while he was enjoying the pleasant hospitality of our father’s house! The furthest thing from your mind was that he would ever repay it to me here.

 

But I have now the unpleasant task of telling you how I came here. I had much rather write you some rambling letters in unison with the repose in which I feel inclined to indulge, and talk to you about the future, with which I am already busily occupied…[rather than relate] scenes where I have endured much suffering…But as clear information is absolutely necessary to you, and to your father more particularly still, I will give you the story now, instead of waiting to tell it to you in California…

 

    Former letters have made you acquainted with our journey so far as Bent’s Fort, and, from report, you will have read the circumstances of our departure from the upper Pueblo of the Arkansas. We left that place about the 25th of November, without upwards of a hundred good mules, and one hundred and thirty bushels of shelled corn, intended to support our animals across snow of the high mountains, and down to the lower parts of the Grand River tributaries, where usually the snow forms no obstacle to winter traveling. At the Pueblo, I had engaged as a guide an old trapper, well known as “Bill Williams,” and who had spent some twenty-five years of his life in trapping various parts of the Rocky Mountains. The error of our journey was committed in engaging this man. He proved never to have in the least known, or entirely to have forgotten, the whole region of country through which we were to pass. We occupied more than half a month in making the journey of a few days, blundering a torturous way through deep snows, which already begun to choke up the passes, for which we were obliged to waste time in searching. About the 11th December we found ourselves at the north of the Del Norte Cañon, where that river issues from the St. John’s Mountain, one of the highest, most rugged, and impracticable of all the Rocky Mountain ranges, inaccessible to trappers and hunters even in the summer time. Across the point of this elevated range our guide conducted us; and, having still great confidence in his knowledge, we pressed onwards with fatal resolution. Even along the river bottoms the snow was already belly-deep for the mules, frequently snowing in the valley, and almost constantly in the mountains. The cold was extraordinary; at the warmest hours of the day (between one and two) the thermometer (Fahrenheit) standing, in the shade of only a tree trunk, at zero; the day sunshiny, with a moderate breeze. We pressed up towards the summit, the snow deepening, and, in four or five days, reached the naked ridges which lie above the timbered country, and which formed the dividing grounds between the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Along these naked ridges it storms nearly all winter, and the winds sweep across them with remorseless fury. On our first attempt to cross we encountered a poudrerie,  and were driven back, having some ten or twelve men variously frozen, – face, hands, or feet. The guide came very nigh being frozen to death here, and dead mules were already lying about the fires. Meantime is snowed steadily. The next day we made mauls and, beating a road or trench through the snow, crossed the crest in defiance of the poudrerie, and encamped immediately below in the edge of the timber. The trail showed as if a defeated party at passed by: pack-saddles and packs, scattered articles of clothing, and dead mules strewed along. Hey continuance of stormy weather paralyzed all movement. We were encamped somewhere about twelve thousand feet above the sea. Westward, the country was buried in deep snow. It was impossible to advance, and to turn back was equally impracticable. We were overtaken by sudden an inevitable ruin. It so happened that the only places where any grass could be had were the extreme summit of the ridges, where the sweeping winds kept the rocky ground bare, and the snow could not lie. Below these, animals could not get about, the snow being deep enough to bury them. Here, therefore, in the full violence of the storms, we were obliged to keep our animals. They could not be moved either way. It was instantly apparent that we should lose every animal.

 

    I determined to recross the mountain more towards the open country, and haul or pack the baggage (by men) down to the Del Norte. With great labor the baggage was transported across the crest to the head springs of a little stream leading to the main river. A few days were sufficient to destroy our fine band of mules. They generally kept huddled together, and as they froze, one would be seen to tumble down and the snow would cover him; sometimes they would break off and rush down towards the timber, until they were stopped by the deep snow, where they were soon hidden by the poudrerie. The courage of the men failed fast; in fact, I have never seen men so soon discouraged by misfortune as we were on this occasion; but, as you know the party was not constituted like the former ones. But among those who deserve to be honorably mentioned, and who behaved like what they were, – men of the old exploring party, – were Godey, King, and Taplin; and first of all, Godey. In this situation, I determined to send in a party to the Spanish settlements of New Mexico for provisions and mules, to transport our baggage to Taos. With economy, and after we should leave the mules provisions, we had not two weeks’ provisions in the camp. These consisted of a store which I had reserved for a hard day, macaroni and bacon. From among the volunteers I chose King, Brackenridge, Creutzfeldt, and the guide Williams: the party under the command of King. In the case of the least delay at the settlements he was to send me an express. In the meantime we were to occupy ourselves in removing the baggage and equipage down to the Del Norte, which we reached with our baggage in a few days after their departure (which was the day after Christmas). Like many a Christmas for years back, mine was spent on the summit of a wintry mountain, my heart filled with gloomy and anxious thoughts, with none of the merry faces and pleasant luxuries that belong to that happy time. You may be sure we contrasted much of this with the last at Washington, and speculated much on your doings, and made many warm wishes for your happiness. Could you have looked into Agrippa’s glass for a few moments only! You remember the volumes of Blackstone which I took from your father’s library, when we were overlooking it at our friend Brant’s? They made my Christmas amusements. I read them to pass the heavy time and forget what was around me. Certainly you may suppose that my first law lessons will be well remembered. Day after day passed by and no news from our express party. Snow continued to fall almost incessantly on the mountain. The spirits of the camp grew lower. Proue lay down in the trail and froze to death. In a sunshiny day, and having with him means to make a fire, he threw his blankets down in the trail and lay there till he froze to death. After sixteen days had elapsed, I became so uneasy at the delay that I decided to wait no longer. I was aware that our troops had been engaged in hostilities with the Spanish Utahs and Apaches, who range in the North River valley, and became fearful that they (King’s party) had been cut off by these Indians; I could imagine no other accident. Leaving the camp employed with the baggage and in charge of Mr. Vincenthaler, I started down the river with a small party, consisting of Godey (with his young nephew), Mr. Preuss and Saunders. We carried our arms and provision for two or three days. In the camp the messes had provisions for two or three meals, more or less, and about five pounds of sugar to each man, failing to meet King, my intention was to make the Red River settlement, about twenty-five miles north of Taos, and send back the speediest relief possible. My instructions to the camp were, that if they did not hear from me within a stated time, they were to follow down the Del Norte.

 

    On the second day after leaving camp we came upon a fresh trail of Indians, –  two lodges, with a considerable number of animals. This did not lessen our uneasiness for our people. As their trail, when we met it, turned and went down the river, we followed it. On the fifth day we surprised an Indian on the ice of the river. He proved to be a Utah, son of a Grand River chief we had formerly known, and behaved to us in a friendly manner. We encamped near them at night. By a present of a rifle, my two blankets, and other promised rewards when we should get in, I prevailed upon this Indian to go with us as a guide to the Red River settlement, and take with him four of his horses, principally to carry our little baggage. These were wretchedly poor, and could get along only in a very slow walk. On that day (the sixth) we left the lodges late, and traveled only some six or seven miles. About sunset we discovered a light off from the river, and thinking perhaps it might be our express party on its return, we went to see. This was the twenty-second day since they had left us, and the sixth since we had left the camp. We found them, – three of them, – they had been starving. King had starved to death a few days before. His remains were some six or eight miles above, near the river. By aid of the horses, we carried these three with us to Red River settlement, which we reached (Jan. 20) on the tenth evening after leaving our camp in the mountains, having traveled through snow and on foot one hundred and sixty miles. I look upon the anxiety which induced me to set out from the camp as an inspiration. Had I remained there waiting the party which had been sent in, every man of us would probably have perished.

 

    The morning after reaching the Red River town, Godey and myself rode on to the Rio Hondo and Taos, in search of animals and supplies, and on the second evening after that on which we had reached Red River, Godey had returned to that place with about thirty animals, provisions, and four Mexicans, with which he set out for the camp on the following morning. On the road he received eight or ten others, which were turned over to him by the orders of Major Beale, the commanding officer of this northern district of New Mexico. I expect that Godey will reach this place with the party on Wednesday evening, the 31^st. From Major Beale I received the offer of every aid in his power and such actual assistance as he was able to render. Some horses which he had just recovered from the Utahs were loaned to me, and he supplied me from the commissary’s department with provisions which I could have had nowhere else. I find myself in the midst of friends. With Carson is living Owens, and Maxwell is at his father-in-law’s, doing a very prosperous business as a merchant and contractor for the troops.

 

*

 

February 6: Fremont sends a second letter to his wife Jessie, providing added details of the disaster that had befallen her husband and his men:

 

    After a long delay, which had me to the point of resolving to set out again myself, tidings have at last reached me from my ill-fated party. Mr. Haler came in last night, having, the night before, reached Red River settlement, with some three or four others. Including Mr. King and Proue, we have lost eleven of our party. Occurrences, after I left them, are briefly these, so far as they are within Haler’s knowledge. I say briefly, my dear Jesse, because now I am unwilling to force myself to dwell upon particulars. I wish for a time to shut out these things from my mind, to leave this country, and all thoughts and all things connected with recent events, which have been so signally disastrous as absolutely to astonish me with a persistence of misfortune, which no precaution has been adequate on my part to avert.

 

    You will remember that I had left the camp with occupation sufficient to employ them for three or four days, after which they were to follow me down the river. Within that time I had expected the relief from king, if it was to come at all.

 

    They remained where I had left them seven days, and then started down the river. Manuel – you will remember Manuel, the Cosumne Indian – gave way to a feeling of despair after they had traveled about two miles, begged Haler to shoot him, and then turned and made his way back to camp, intending to die there, as he doubtless soon did. They followed our trail down the river, – twenty-two men they were in all. About ten miles below the camp, Wise gave out, threw away his gun and blanket, and a few hundred yards further fell over into the snow and died. Two Indian boys, young men, countrymen of Manuel, were behind. They rolled up Wise in his blanket and buried him in the snow on the riverbank. No more died that day; none the next. Carver raved during the night, his imagination wholly occupied with images of many things which he fancied himself eating. In the morning, he wandered off from the party, and probably soon died. They did not see him again. Sorel on this day gave out and lay down to die. They built him a fire, and Morin, who was in a dying condition, and snow-blind remained. These two did not probably last till the next morning. That evening, I think, Hubbard killed a deer. They traveled on, getting here and there a grouse, but probably nothing else, the snow having frightened off the game. Things were desperate, and brought Haler to the determination of breaking up the party, in order to prevent them from living upon each other. He told them “that he had done all he could for them, that they had no other hope remaining than the expected relief, and that their best plan was to scatter and make the best of their way in small parties down the river. That, for his part, if he was to be eaten, he would, at all events, be found traveling when he did die.” they accordingly separated. With Mr. Haler continued five others and the two Indian boys. Rohrer now became very despondent; Haler encouraged him by recalling to mind his family, and urged him to hold out a little longer. On this day he fell behind, but promised to overtake them at evening. Haler, Scott, Hubbard, and Martin agreed that if any one of them should give out, the others were not to wait for him to die, but build a fire for him and push on. At night Kern’s mess encamped a few 100 yards from Haler’s, with the intention, according to Taplin, to remain where they were until the relief should come, and in the meantime to live upon those who had died, and upon the weaker ones as they should die. With the three Kerns were Cathcart, Andrews, McKie, Stepperfeldt, and Taplin.

 

    Ferguson and Beadle had remained together behind. In the evening Rohrer came up and remained with Kern’s mess. Mr. Haler learned afterwards from that mess that Rohrer and Andrews wandered off the next day and died. They say they saw their bodies. In the morning Haler’s party continued on. After a few hours Hubbard gave out. They built him a fire, gathered him some wood, and left him, without, as Hayler says, turning their heads to look at him, as they went off. About two miles further, Scott – you remember Scott, who used to shoot birds for you at the frontier – gave out. They did the same for him As for Hubbard, and continued on. In the afternoon the Indian boys went ahead, and before nightfall met Godey with the relief. Haler heard and knew the guns which he fired for him at night, and starting early in the morning, soon met him. I hear that they all cried together like children. Haler turned back with Godey, and went with him to where they had left Scott. He was still alive and was saved. Hubbard was dead, – still warm. from the Kerns’ mess they learned the deaths of Andrews and Rohrer, and a little above met Ferguson, who told him that Beadle had died the night before.

 

    Godey continued on with a few New Mexicans and pack mules to bring down the baggage from the camp. Haler, with Martin and Bacon, on foot, and bringing Scott on horseback, have first arrived at the Red River settlement. Provisions, and horses for them to ride, were left with the others, who preferred to rest on the river until Godey came back. At the latest, they should all have reached Red River settlement last night, and ought all to be here this evening. When Godey arrives, I shall know from him all the circumstances sufficiently in detail to enable me to understand clearly everything. But it will not be necessary to tell you anything further. It has been sufficient pain for you to read what I have already written.

 

    When I think of you all, I feel a warm glow at my heart, which renovates it like a good medicine, and I forget painful feelings in strong hope for the future. We shall yet, dearest wife, enjoy quiet and happiness – these are nearly one and the same to me now. I make frequently pleasant pictures of the happy home we are to have, an oftenest, and among the pleasantest of all, I see our library with its bright fire in the rainy stormy days, and the large windows looking out upon the sea in the bright weather. I have it all planned in my own mind. It is getting late now. La Harpe says that there are two gods which are very dear to us, – Hope and Sleep. My homage shall be equally divided between them; both make the time passed lightly until I see you, and so I go now to pay a willing tribute to the one with my heart full of the other. Good night.

 

Bernard DeVoto says of the Fremont Expedition that the detachment of Bill Williams, an old mountain man, who was helping guide them, “probably killed and certainly ate one of their companions. Kit Carson remarked of Bill Williams that in starving times no man should walk ahead of him on the trail…” (5/331)

* 

FINDING GOLD in 1849 was not unlike winning the lottery today. One couple that “struck it rich” deserves special mention. In 2013 a California man and woman walking their dog noticed a can buried near a tree on their property. Inside, they found 1,427 gold coins, dating from 1847-1894. In May 2014 they began auctioning them off, the first going for $15,000. 

    Total estimated value: $11 million.

Coins found in a back yard.
Photograph found online.

 

* 

Off to See the Elephant. 

California was 2,000 miles away from the last American settlements in Missouri and those interested in joining the “gold rush” had to figure out some way to get there. National Geographic (September 2000) had a good story about those who decided to follow the California Trail. 

    It is estimated that 25,000 emigrants used the trail in 1849, another 44,000 in 1850. An outbreak of cholera slowed the flood in 1851. Then, in 1852, 50,000 men, women, and children headed for California. The author estimates that it took an investment of $100-$200 for supplies, and that the trip took from 16 to 22 weeks. Naturally, advertisers in those days were suspect, as advertisers now. The Missouri papers stressed the benefits of traveling by wagon, since Missouri businesses made a great deal of money selling supplies to travelers. Those who went by sea, they warned, arrived, “stiff and indolent” for want of exercise. As a result, the seafarer was “fully prepared to be a loafer, if he was not one before he started.” For those going by wagon, horses, mules, and oxen were needed, oxen preferred as strongest. The typical wagon box was eleven feet long, with stays and a cover rising five feet above the bed. An ordinary wagon could haul a load of 1,600 to 2,000 pounds. Overloading was a problem and when travelers struck the desert or the High Sierra, they started throwing out everything they could to lighten their loads: “bacon, beans, anvils, axes, cookstoves, harnesses, claw-footed tables, and bureaus of carved oak.” (p. 52)

Those who set out for California might never see home again.

A miner is excited to get a letter from home.

People don't change: A miner with a pet bear cub.

 

    The author of the story in NG writes (page 52): 

    The rush for California inspired bombastic fantasies as well as bloated claims. A Missouri inventor built a “wind wagon” equipped with sails designed to whisk the traveler across the plains at 15 miles an hour. Then one Rufus Porter, founder of Scientific American magazine, advertised in 1849 that the best way to California would be aboard his Aerial Transport, a cigar-shaped, steam-powered conveyance slung from a thousand-foot-long balloon. Porter vowed that the machine would take 50 to 100 passengers from New York to California at speeds exceeding 60 miles an hour. The minimum fare: $50, wines included. Travel time: three days. Fortunately, for the distant future of aviation, Porter’s pipe dream never got off the ground.

 

A few quotes from travelers: 

“No pen can adequately describe our start. Half a dozen circuses combined in one would have been tame in comparison. Not one of our 300 mules .... Had ever had a bit in its mouth or a collar on its neck.”  - Bernard J. Reid, 1849 

John Clark remembered crossing the Great Plains: “Great God, I thought, what a sight lay before us….hundreds of teams stretching forward like a great Caravan in line on the dark & winding trace leading toward the setting sun.” 

“It was an exciting scene, the long train half submerged in the wide expanse of water, the splashing and floundering of the mules, the whoops and yells of the men, and the foam and roar of the dashing waters.”  - Isaac J. Wistar, on fording the Platte, 1849 

Another traveler remembered a spring at Alcove Rock, near present-day Marysville, Kansas. There, water “gushed from a ledge of rocks…From which falls a beautiful cascade of water.” Altogether, he added, it was “one of the most romantic spots I ever saw.” 

In those days, the Plains were still labeled “The Great American Desert” on most maps, supposedly as “bare as the Sahara.” 

Some of the Eastern papers were not anxious to see so many people head west. One writer warned that it was “palpable suicide” to attempt the trip.

 

The author for NG notes that “Horace Greeley – the very same Greeley today remembered for advising young men “to go West,” had warned against following the California Trail. “Greeley’s West wasn’t California and Oregon; it was Illinois. In an editorial in July 1843 Greeley scolded the thousand emigrants who had just embarked. Their overland venture, he thundered, had an ‘aspect of insanity’ about it. ‘There is probably not one among them whose outward circumstances will be improved by this perilous journey.’”

 

One night, as his wagon train bedded down, and music could be heard around the campfires, W.S. McBride set down his thoughts in his journal. “I lay here in my tent and hear the merry music and the shuffling of strong men’s feet over the turf. I cannot help but feel a melancholy foreboding….Some of us are no doubt doomed never to reach California.” It is estimated that over the years, 20,000 did not. Diseases that struck the travelers included scurvy, smallpox, tick-borne fever, and cholera. In 1850, two thousand travelers died of cholera before reaching Fort Laramie. Drownings that year, especially crossing the Platte and Green rivers, cost 37 travelers their lives.

 

By 1860, probably no more than 400 travelers had been killed by Indians. Even more Indians had been killed by travelers.

 

The historian Merrill J. Mattes explains that the natives simply failed to realize the danger these pioneers represented. The Indians, he wrote, “had not yet fully comprehended the fact that the migration was the prelude to their downfall.”

 

As in the era of the Civil War, traveling circuses were a thrilling form of entertainment. Seeing a real elephant was the highlight, and on the trail, travelers talked of going to “see the Elephant.” Any mishap might be described as feeling the whisk of the elephant’s tail.

 

At Chimney Rock, Solomon Gorgas sat and watched the wagons roll past. In his diary he called it a spectacle “which the world since its creation never has witnessed.”

 

Israel S. P. Lord wrote of his first sight of “the giant form of Scott’s Bluff, towering in marble whiteness toward heaven ….dome and spire, and tower, and wall, and battlement, and cedar trees scattered over the whole like living moving men.”

 

Niles Searls said Scotts Bluff had a “strong resemblance to an ancient castle.”

 

Lucy Rutledge Cook recalled stopping at Independence Rock. She and a few others in her party “staid there some 2 or 3 hours examining names…I was not certain I knew any of the persons put down though there were many familiar.”

 

One visitor who had stopped at the same spot to chisel his name in the stone, was Lansford Hastings, in 1842. While so engaged, it is said a band of Sioux trotted up and took him captive. Thinking better of it, they soon returned him to his company in exchange for a handout of tobacco. (For the sake of the Donner Party, it would have been far better if the natives and killed him on the spot.)

 

E. M. Primes remembered the difficulty that arose when crossing the salt flats of Utah: “The sun shone very hot and the ground being encrusted over with salt, it made our eyes ache from the reflection. The thermometer stood during the day at one hundred and forty degrees and not a sprig of anything could be seen on the desert.”

 

Edwin Hillyar also remembered the difficulty of this stretch. “About 5 o’clock we saw McCloskey coming back with some water, and those who could raised a shout. My tongue was swollen and clove to the roof of my mouth so I could not speak.”

 

So many animals died crossing the “Forty-Mile Desert” in Nevada that the stink greeted travelers well into the next decade. James A. Pritchard, who went up the trail in 1849, remembered the Humboldt Sink as “a most disagreeable place” and said that any stock that drank the water died “instantly.”

 

Dan Carpenter, crossing the same stretch the following year, wrote, “This is the poorest and most worthless country that man ever saw – no man that never saw has any idea of what kind of a barren, worthless, valueless, d-----d mean God forsaken country there is,...not God forsaken for he never had anything to do with it.”

A large part of Nevada looks like this.
Author's collection, from a bicycle ride across the USA in 2011.

Margaret A. Frink admitted, “One only hope sustains all these unhappy pilgrims, that they will be able to get into California alive.”

 

The desert behind them, most travelers chose Carson Pass over the Sierra Nevada. Searls describes the battle up the pass in his diary for September 30:

 

For eight miles we literally climbed and hauled the wagons by ropes and mules over the jagged rocks which in places were higher than the wagons and perpendicular…. rested a day and then spent another in getting to the first Summit and were caught in a storm of sleet by which forty mules were frozen to death.

 

Soon after, Searls wrote with relief: “The summit is crossed! We are in California! Far away in the haze the dim outlines of the Sacramento Valley are discernible! We are on the downgrade now and our famished animals may pull us through.”  - 1849

 

Wistar spoke of the same joy at reaching California: “Our journey is done, and we hardly know what to do with ourselves….There will be no more Indian alarms, no more stampedes, no more pulling, carrying and hauling at wagons….the gold is here sure enough, for we have seen it.”  - 1849

      

William Henry Jackson, b. 1843, d. 1942, was a bullwhacker on the trail in the 1860s, and did a number of watercolors of the scenes. Later, he became a famous photographer.

Photo by Jackson, c. 1878.
Photo found online.

* 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Here’s a short reading I provided for students. 

    James Marshall had been born in New Jersey. He came to California after first trying his hand at farming in Missouri. There he grew sick with fever carried by mosquitoes and headed for healthier climates. He never made much money from his discovery. Eventually, the State of California granted him a small pension.

           

    Marshall never married and died in 1885.

 

    Henry Bigler worked at Sutter’s Mill where gold was first discovered. Afterwards he used to tell friends he was going “duck hunting” and look for gold on his own. On February 22, 1849, three miles down the American River, he found an ounce-and-a-half (worth the equivalent of $1,842 today)

 

    “Gold fever” was always hard to resist. In spring 1849, a prospector visiting friends in San Francisco told all who would  listen that he had taken twenty ounces of gold out of his claim in eight days of digging. Another fellow who caught the fever remembered his excitement: “Piles of gold rose up before me at every step!” He saw himself in a great marble mansion, with slaves to wait upon him and beautiful young women competing for his love.

 

    The news of rich gold strikes soon swept San Francisco and the nearly deserted streets appeared “as if an epidemic had swept the little town.” Doctors forgot their patients and headed for the gold fields. Patients followed if they were healthy enough. The town council canceled its next meeting and “headed for the hills.” Sailors abandoned ships in the harbor. Even captains left their vessels to rot. U.S. soldiers deserted, too, and officers sent to find them never returned. (Army records indicate that 716 officers and men out of 1,290 soon disappeared.) Farmers left crops in the fields and cows roamed free, eating what they pleased. Ministers, students, unhappy husbands and happy ones, a few good women, and others not so good, gamblers, and criminals of every variety left for the mines to dig for gold or carry on their trades.

 

    No wonder they were crazy with gold fever. A claim on Feather River yielded 273 pounds of gold in seven weeks. A boy named Davenport took 77 ounces from his claim one day (valued today at $94,556) and 90 the next ($110,520). It was said a cook in one of the mining camps cut open a chicken and found a half-ounce nugget the bird had pecked at and swallowed. One prospector dug down and hit a rich pocket of gold dust and nuggets, enough to fill a towel. He decided he had probably taken all he could from his claim and “sold out” to a fellow named Lorenzo Soto. Soto took out 52 pounds of gold from the claim in eight days.

 

    Chino Tirador took so much gold out of his claim that he could barely carry it. He then began selling gold for two silver dollars an ounce, a very poor price indeed. The next day, Tirador discovered that other men had been working his claim at night. He bought a bottle of whiskey and launched a career as a professional gambler. According to one California history, “By ten o’clock that night he was both penniless and drunk.”

 

    Soon the fever spread across the nation. On September 20, 1848, the Baltimore Sun and other papers “back East” began reporting on the incredible discoveries. President James K. Polk soon announced to Congress that rich deposits of gold had indeed been discovered. Men and women were frantic to reach California and fought to gain places on ships heading in that direction. Others could hardly wait until spring in 1849 to set off by wagon. Half the men in Oregon gave up what they were doing and headed south to the diggings. Prospectors from as far away as Chile, China and Great Britain joined the rush. Soon trails and oceans were covered with dreamers headed for Pacific shores.

 

    Thousands never made it. They died in storms at sea or from disease or attacks by Native Americans along the trails. And the Native Americans died in turn. One three-year-old traveler fell out of a wagon and under the wheels and was crushed. Four 49er’s died on the trail when an oak tree split in a storm and a great limb fell on their tent.

 

    As always, luck shined on some and not on others.

 

    In those days, before television, movies and the internet allowed people to “see” the world, the circus was a popular form of entertainment. The most amazing experience of all was to buy a ticket and see an elephant. Now, people headed for California told friends and relatives they were “going to see the elephant.”

 

    In the gold fields new towns sprang up overnight. It is estimated that 90% of the population of these towns was male. Drinking, gambling, and fighting filled the social calendar. Gamblers often got rich by cheating miners at cards and games of chance. One prostitute claimed she had earned $50,000, equal to several million dollars today. Good women were rare; so one groom charged other miners $5 simply to attend his wedding and see his young bride. Theaters and dance halls sprang up in all the towns. A play which included an actual female of good face and figure, or even not so good a face and figure, was sure to sell a fortune in tickets. A female singer could expect thunderous applause and a shower of presents after any concert.

 

    Even the town names tell us something about this strange new land. Some of the best: Hangtown (where miners hanged three claim-jumpers from a tree), Slapjack (slang for “pancakes”), Whiskey, Hoodoo, Muletown, Chicken Thief Flat, You Bet, Jacksass and Pinchemtight.

 

    Prices for food and equipment were always high and most miners never got rich. Those who made only enough in the “diggings” to pay expenses called their work “mining for beans.” One husband returned home from his claim after several weeks. He was happy to have a few ounces of gold.

 

    While he was gone his wife had made more money just by doing laundry for men in the camp.

 

 * 

WILLIAM M. THAYER, in Marvels of the New West, mentions the luck of various miners. In Colorado, a miner down on his luck and in despair, is ready to give up the search for riches. 

    He woke one morning without food or money, and canvassing his situation, he resolved to go out and shoot some sort of game to supply present and pressing necessities. He shot a deer; and the animal, in his dying agonies, kicked up a parcel of dirt that disclosed the presence of gold. The poverty-stricken prospector opened his eyes when this proof of a mine was kicked into his face, made sure of his “claim,” and opened up one of the most profitable lines ever worked in that locality…

 

    In the days of gold-excitement in California, three prospectors jointly engaged in mine-hunting with scarcely any success for months. Good news coming from another locality, they packed up their tools and started. On the way, they found the dead body of a man whose errand into that part of the country was like theirs, without doubt.

 

    “Poor fellow!” said one of the men, “he has passed in his checks!”

 

    “Let us give him a decent burial,” proposed another of the men; “some wife or mother will be glad, if she ever knows it.”

 

    “All right,” responded the third prospector; “it will be a humane deed, to say the least.”

 

    So the three set to work with a will to dig the dead stranger’s grave. Three feet from the surface they found evidence of gold; and the result was that they opened a gold mine there instead of a grave, and buried the stranger in another place. To that date their wits and industry did less for them than their humanity. 

(This story is told in several variations, including one where workmen are digging a cellar.)

 

    A final example involved a prospector in Colorado. He had been unlucky in his search and was depressed and “melancholy,. One day he seated himself upon a large stone, and preceded aimlessly to strike another stone at his feet with his pick. He was ready to give up the search forever, when, to his surprise, his pick revealed clear signs of gold and he found a rich mine. (442-444)

 

* 

“Much Rushing and Little Gold.” 

RALPH K. ANDRIST in “Gold!” (American Heritage) talks of the majority of miners who lived lives of “much rushing and little gold.” (Some notes from this story can be found under 1847 and 1848)

 

    Sutter ended up with “his cattle butchered, his fields trampled and untended, his land taken by squatters, until he had not a thing left.”

 

    After Polk’s announcement, the rush was on. The Argonauts, as they were called (after Jason and the golden fleece) had two water routes; almost all available ships were taken over; the New England whaling fleet was suddenly transporting passengers. As fast as vessels reached SF, their crews deserted and headed for the gold fields, leaving the harbor a forest of masts. Those going by the shorter route, across Panama, died by the hundreds from malaria, cholera and unsanitary conditions. Hiram Pierce, a New York blacksmith, left a wife and seven children behind. He wrote home about “swineish” behavior by the passengers and a ship’s doctor almost always drunk. One night the doctor became tangled in his hammock and was hanging upside down until morning. Another time, “the same worthy took a dose of medicine to a patient & haveing a bone in his hand knowing [gnawing], he took the medicine & gave the bone to the patient.”

 

    Others crossed by land in the spring. Spring found one man ready to jump off for the trip West, armed with a rifle and accompanied only by his bulldog. He was planning to walk to California and had already walked all the way from Maine. Another planned to push a wheelbarrow to the fields. Cholera, brought from Europe to New Orleans in 1848, spread up the river and was carried across the plains by the wagon trains.

 

    In parts of Utah and Nevada the water and grass were bitter with sulfur, alkalai and salt, even poisonous. One barren stretch had to be crossed in one jump, usually lasting 24 hours; at Boiling Springs, halfway, water could be poured into troughs and allowed to cool, and then proved drinkable, albeit unappetizing. Animals, already worn from the trail, gave out during this stretch, what one writer calls “the Forty-Mile Desert.” A traveler wrote, “The forty-five mile stretch is now almost impassable because of the stench of the dead animals along the road which is literally lined with them and there is scarcely a single train or wagon but leaves one or more dead animals, so that it must be getting worse every day.”

 

    One traveler described traveling down the Humboldt

 

and crossing the desert for more than one hundred miles before reaching the Sink…There is no grass of any consequence, the water is slippery stuff resembling weak lye as much as anything: from the Sink to Carson River is a distance of forty miles, the last twelve deep sand.

 

    Estimates put the number of travelers who came over the trails in 1849 at around 35,000. Another 15,000 came round the Horn, 6,000 across Panama. Numbers ran just as high for the next three or four years; but gold fever ran hottest in ’49. (Andrist estimates that tens of thousands of travelers died by the end of the 1850s)

 

    Andrist describes the hard work involved:

 

    For mining involved more than swishing a little gravel and water around in a basin; it was hard, back-straining work. Placer gold, the only kind really known during the gold rush, consists of gold dust and occasional nuggets scattered thinly through sand and gravel (a miner never called it anything but “dirt”). To obtain the gold, it was necessary to wash a great deal of dirt, taking advantage of the fact that gold is about eight times as heavy as sand and will settle to the bottom while the sand is being carried oft by the water. The gold pan, traditional symbol of the miner, was used only in very rich claims or for testing samples of dirt to see whether they were worth working further. In ordinary circumstances, a hopperlike device of wood and perforated sheet iron called a cradle, or rocker, was employed in a two-man operation: while one shoveled in the dirt, the other rocked the device and poured water with a dipper. The dirt was washed through, and the gold was caught in settling pockets.

 

    After 1849, an invention called the long tom was used wherever there was a good supply of running water. It was simply a wooden flume with water running through it; dirt was shoveled in and sluiced through while the gold caught on a slatted bottom. A long tom was worked by several men and could handle four or five times as much dirt per man per day as could a cradle. That meant, of course, that a miner had to shovel four or five times as much dirt into it as he would into a cradle to keep it operating at full efficiency. A man usually had to pay for what he got, even in the gold fields.

 

    The terrain on which the prospectors worked did little to make things easier for them; it was usually difficult. The diggings were chiefly along the tributaries of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, which flowed out of the Sierra Nevada; each river, fork, branch, and creek was eventually followed by prospectors to its source. In the lower foothills the land might be only moderately rocky and hilly at best; near the headwaters rushing streams flowed in the clefts of deep, precipitous gorges whose bottoms were often cluttered with boulders and fallen rocks and choked with jackstraw tangles of dead trees. Even under these conditions, miners persevered at the ever-absorbing task of separating a small amount of gold from a mountain of gravel, and with amazing energy and ingenuity constructed hydraulic works to enable them to move the stream here or there or otherwise exploit it in their search for wealth.

 

    One miner writes home that there are stories of men taking in as much as $16,000 in one day, but such strikes  are “one chance out of a thousand; the average is from ½ to 2 ounces per day….I shall stay up to the mines all winter, if I can make an ounce a day.”

 

    In August, a miner wrote home, saying that agriculture in Northern California was “all at an end” and provisions had to be brought from lands far away. Prices naturally skyrocketed:

 

    I will just give you a summary; Salt Pork here [in San Francisco] 75 cents per lb. at the mines $200 per Barrel. Flour $2.00 per lb. Bread at the mines one to one half dollars per lb. Sugar at the mines $2.00 per lb. tea $4.00. Revolving pistols woth in N. York $11.00 are here worth $55-75 dol. each. Onions 25-50 cents each. Potatoes about $30 per bushel. A ship load of the latter would bring two hundred thousand dollars.

 

     Another miner described his comrades as “the hairiest set of fellows that ever existed.”

 

    Not only did most miners not “strike it rich,” the gold fields could be dangerous. A former schoolteacher wrote home in March 1852, “Seventeen dead bodies were found on one road alone within the last four months and no clue to the perpetrators of this wholesale slaughter has as yet been discovered. California is yet sadly wanting in an effective judicial and constabulary organization.”

 

    As late as 1853, a missionary spoke of the richness of California, but warned, “You can form no adequate idea of the depth of sin and moral degradation to which most of the people are sunk or rather sink themselves…There are a few however, who have not bowed the knee to Baal.”

 

    Still: There were stories of men digging out gold flakes from between rocks with nothing but spoons. In the first days of the rush, Andrist writes, “it was not at all unusual for a man to dig $1,000 to $1,500 worth of gold between dawn and dusk.” A man near Angel’s Camp was hunting for rabbits. He jammed his ramrod down into the roots of a manzanita bush, and turned up a piece of gold-bearing quartz. That day, using his ramrod alone, he made $700. The next day, with better implements, he made $2,000. His third day of digging yielded $7,000. Three Germans, taking a shortcut, struck it rich on the Feather River. They took out $36,000 in four days, without even having to wash gravel, and what became known as Rich Bar was soon swarming with miners. Claims were so rich it was agreed they would be limited to 10 feet square. A company of four men made $50,000 in a single day. By 1852, however, the rush was nearly ended, most of the great spots having been discovered.

 

One miner wrote home in March 1852,

 

    Jane i left you and them boys for no other reasons than this to come here to procure a littl property by the swet of my brow so that we could have a place of our own that i mite not be a dog for other people any longer…i think that this is a far better country to lay up money than it is at home. if a man will…tend to his business and keep out of licker shops and gambling houses. that is the way the money goes with many of them in this country. thare are murders committed about every day on the acount of licker and gambling but i have not bought a glass of licker since i left home…i never knew what it was to leave home till i left a wife and children…i know you feel lonsom when nigh apears but let us think that it is for the best so to be for and do the best we can for two years or so and i hope Jane that we shell be reworded for so doing and meet in a famely sircal once more. that is my prayer.

 

*

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: The journals of Alfred Doten, who left Plymouth, Massachusetts and sailed for California in 1849 also look promising.

 

*

 

May: Sarah Hale, in Godey’s, champions public playgrounds for children. “The sickness and mortality among city children during the hot months are frightful. Many of the diseases are owing to the want of places where these young beings can have free exercise and fresh air.” (Finley, 131)

 

*

 

“TURNING WATER INTO GOLD,” in Smithsonian, tells the story of Julious Poquillon, who developed hydraulic mining in the late 1860s. First, he bought up land along the Yuba River. Engineers built a series of reservoirs, ditches, and flumes to create a 40-mile long stretch of river where snowmelt, propelled by gravity (often dropping as much as 500 feet per mile) could keep water cannons blasting gold-bearing hillsides.

 

    A modern expert tells the author, “A single monitor [cannon] with an eight-inch nozzle like this could direct 16,000 gallons of water a minute. It could tear away 4,000 cubic yards of earth from the hillside every day.” That dirt was dumped into sluices and the waste was dumped into the Yuba River.

 

   Smithsonian describes the results: “Tons and tons of earth, rocks, trees, shrubbery, silt, and a mucky mixture of mud, sand and gravel known as ‘slickens’” filled the river. The Yuba, the Feather and Sacramento rivers all turned muddy brown, and the mud extended all the way to San Francisco Bay. Tens of thousands of men found jobs in hydraulic mining; North Bloomfield in 1875 was a thriving town. But farmers downstream were complaining. In spring, when flood waters came, as much as three feet of “slickens” would cover their rich wheat fields. Fruit orchards were ruined, roads obliterated. Marysville and Yuba City, at the confluence of the Yuba and Feather, flooded repeatedly. The bed of the Sacramento River was raised by 16 feet. In 1875 a particularly bad flood left Marysville streets buried in thick, gooey mud. Even the tracks of the Central Pacific RR were buried. In 1882 a Marysville property owner Edwards Woodruff, filed a suit: Woodruff v. North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company.

 

    Judge Lorenzo Sawyer had come to California as a gold-seeker himself; but in 1884 he ruled for Woodruff. Smithsonian explains:

 

    Hydraulic mining was not illegal, Sawyer wrote, but by dumping its tailings into the river, North Bloomfield not only violated the rights of those downstream but despoiled the landscape and watershed that were not its to destroy. The company could practice hydraulic mining on its own land; but was required to impound the debris. It could no longer simply dump it into the river.

 

Hydraulic mining declined rapidly after that.

* 

THE FOLLOWING STORY is from PrairyErth: 

The High-Noon Wagon. 

    This is happening in north-central Ohio in 1849, and the young white man coming down the road in his four-horse wagon is about to put his cargo and himself at risk with a dangerous and rash yet logical boldness, but the young school teacher he is soon to meet – who will be standing in front of the small farmhouse with the decorative tomato plants (she knows them to be poisonous) – will say some forty years later when she lives in Cottonwood falls, Kansas, I think if I could have looked forward and seen what was in the future, I should have shrunk from it.

 

    It is nearly noon, and the dust rises from the slow revolution of the wagon wheels as they press into the road from the burden lying covered by canvas. Sometimes the canvas moves as the load shifts, and sometimes it speaks softly to curse the road or the entrapped heat, and after every curse comes a shushing, and the burden goes still and jostles on another mile mute and motionless. The young driver, as if addressing his team, calls a word of encouragement, and he sits surprisingly relaxed as if he wished for an encounter, a confrontation that will draw life right to the edge. The wagon jolts, the burden grumbles, and the driver calls, Steady! As if the horses were doing other than plodding in sweating silence. A man can be hanged for carrying such cargo, freightage most carriers transport only in the dead of night.

 

    Then: five horsemen, armed, ride up to block the wagon. They are hunting runaway slaves who have crossed the Ohio River and are heading north. One of the riders, the largest, says in a calm that reveals sureness and strength, What’ve you got in that their wagon? The driver turns to looked at his humped cargo as if to remind himself, and then he faces directly into the squint of the big horsemen and says, I got me here a load of runaway niggers. The riders are used to men quailing before them, and such effrontery is a surprise. One aims a pistol at the canvas and pretends to shoot it, and the men laugh and ride away, and the wagon rolls on, and the burden remains dead still. It is not the last time the driver will speak the truth and be taken for a liar.

 

    The wagon groans up into the yard of William Lyon, whose farmhouse is a station on the Ohio underground railroad. Lyon, a Presbyterian, has been called before a session of his church for his abolitionist work. He knows the wagon driver, Samuel Newitt Wood, twenty-four years old, a Quaker whose parents are also fervid abolitionists; Wood is not a large fellow, weighing but 130 pounds, handsome in a boyish way, his hair deeply brown and thick; he habitually fixes his gaze on people and evaluates them so intensely that he unnerves them. He looks at Lyon’s petite and pretty daughter: her hair parted and drawn back, she stands beside the tomato plants with the lovely fruit she is afraid to eat. Her father uncovers the sweating burden of ten blacks and hurries them from the wagon, out of the high-noon sun and into hiding, and he comments on the risk of transporting runaways in daylight, but Wood believes in frontal challenge and the logic of the unexpected. He is a man whose conscience is not a shield but a weapon. The daughter, Margaret, a relative of Stephen Foster, hums as if her mind is far, far away and not listening to Wood tell of facing down the slavers with a misunderstood truth that saved him and the blacks. Years later in Chase County, she will tell her granddaughter, I said to myself, there’s a brave man – and a smart one period I’ll catch him if I can.   400-401

 

* 

HENRY DAVID THOREAU publishes Civil Disobedience. Quotes follow: 

    “That government is best which governs least.” 

“...if one were to judge these men [legislators] wholly by the effects of their actions, and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads.” 

    “Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.”  

    “The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with the wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well.”

 

“…when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.”

 

    “There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing…”

 

    On injustice as perpetrated by the government – the machine – and the friction inherent in its operation: 

“…if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.” 

Petitioning the government often proves fruitless, the single citizen cannot spend his life battling evil: “…in this case the State has provided no way: its very constitution is the evil.”  

 

    “I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one already.”

 

    “I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name – if ten honest men only – if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America.”

 

    Prison, Thoreau wrote, was “the only house in a slave state in which a free man can abide with honor.” 

    “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to the pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.” 

    Whatever Thoreau says to his neighbors about resisting the government, his neighbors, “dread the consequence of disobedience to it to their property and families.” 

    “I have paid no poll tax for six years. I was put into jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. … I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax.”

 

    “Thus the state never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.” 

    On his night in jail: 

    “It was like traveling into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night. It seemed to me that I never had heard the town-clock…I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village-inn – a holy new and rare experience to me.” 

    He would have remained in protest, he explained, “but some one interfered, and paid that tax.” 

    “I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I lived. I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friendship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly propose to do right; that they were a distinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions, as the Chinaman and Malays are; that, in their sacrifices to humanity, they ran no risks, not even to their property; that, after all, they were not so noble but they treated the thief as he had treated them, and hoped, by certain outward observance and a few prayers, and by walking in a particular straight though useless path from time to time, to save their souls. This may be to judge my neighbors harshly; for I believe that many of them are not aware that they have such an institution as the jail in their village.”

 

    “It is for no particular item in the tax-bill that I refuse to pay it. I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually. I do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man, or a musket to shoot one with…”

Henry David Thoreau.

* 

 

June 29: Harriet Beecher Stowe begins a letter to her friend Sarah Hale. Living in Cincinnati at the time, she describes a cholera epidemic.

 

On Tuesday one hundred and sixteen deaths…

 

July 1. This is the finger of God…One hundred and twenty burials yesterday.

 

July 10: Yesterday little Charley was taken ill, not seriously, and at any other time I should not be alarmed.

 

July 17: Aunt Frankie [a negro servant] died yesterday morning…and our poor little dog Daisy, who had been ailing the day before, was suddenly seized with frightful spasms and died in half an hour.

 

July 23: At last, my dear, the hand of the Lord hath touched us. … Little Charley is gone. … I write as though there were no sorrow like my sorrow, yet there has been in this city, as in the land of Egypt, scarce a house without its dead. (Finley, 129-130)

 

*

 

October 13: The first constitution for the State of California is ratified. Not sure of the source for this description (Book 56?) 

    Meanwhile, California lawmakers set to work crafting a constitution. By unanimous consent, they banned slavery. Then a delegate named M. M. McCarver rose to suggest amending the amendment, adding the words, “Nor shall the introduction of free negroes, under indentures or otherwise, be allowed.” Free Negroes, he warned, were “repugnant” to the people of the state. “They are idle in their habits, difficult to be governed by the laws, thriftless, and uneducated. It is a species of population that this country should be particularly guarded against.” A second delegate supported his contentions, adding that if not kept out of California, free Negroes would pour in. “The whole country would be filled with emancipated slaves – the worst species of population – prepared to do nothing but steal, or live upon our means as paupers.” Eventually, the McCarver proposal was dropped from the state constitution. 

    But racism continued to run in the very veins of the young nation. 

 

*

 

ELIZABETH BLACKWELL becomes the first female doctor in the United States, entering a profession much different than now. Later, she would be joined by her sister, Emily, six years her junior. (They were from a family of nine children.)

 

The New York Times Book Review notes:

 

In 1849, when Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman doctor in America, the medical profession was neither well established nor well respected nor well paid. Germ theory was more than a decade away, and in hospitals for the poor, surgeons in blood-caked aprons went from handling corpses to delivering babies without washing their hands. In wealthy homes, physicians coasted on charisma and connections as much as skill. At all levels of society, doctors had little more to rely on than “purgatives, laudanum and lancets.”

 

    Elizabeth was supremely confident, but no feminist, in the modern sense: 

 

    She did not believe in suffrage and rejected the fellowship of the burgeoning women’s movement. She denounced women as “petty, trifling, priest-ridden, gossiping, stupid, inane,” and desperately in need of leadership from a superior being like herself. …

 

For both Elizabeth and Emily, the path to qualification as doctors was circuitous and frustrating. The idea of a woman studying anatomy alongside men was shocking, but the truer fear lurking under the moral outrage was that female doctors would wrest power from men who were just beginning to enjoy it, as the profession rose slowly in status. Wouldn’t female patients naturally choose to be attended by a woman, if they could – especially in the lucrative business of childbirth? As the dean of one college wrote candidly to Elizabeth, “You cannot expect us to furnish you with a stick to break our heads with.”

 

Finally, in the fall of 1847, Elizabeth’s persistence was rewarded when Geneva Medical College, in upstate New York, punted the decision on her application to its students, who voted to admit her. It was only the first of many doors she had to beat down — to be allowed in the dissecting room, to observe hospital treatments, to gain hands-on experience.

 

    None of the five Blackwell sisters married, prizing careers, one another and their independence too highly, yet their family circle nevertheless expanded. Henry Blackwell, most notably, married the prominent women’s rights activist Lucy Stone, fully supporting her decision to keep her own name, strike the word “obey” from her vows and use their wedding as a platform to denounce the institution of marriage. 

 

* 

DURING the Mexican War, William Tecumseh Sherman was detached for recruiting duty and missed the chance to fight and advance his career. Sherman left California for D.C. in December 1849. There he met General Winfield Scott. Sherman recalled, he “startled me with the assertion that ‘our country was on the eve of a terrible civil war.’” 

    He also felt deeply that he had missed his chance to experience battle. “Of course I thought it the last and only chance in my day and that my career as a soldier was at an end.” (36/36) 

    During the gold rush even servants of Sherman’s commanding officer abandoned their duties to join the stampede to the gold fields. “The general commanding all the mighty forces of the United States on the Pacific coast had to scratch to get one good meal a day for his family.” (36/39) 

(The following year, Sherman married Ellen Boyle Ewing, “the daughter of the man of whom he was the adopted child.”) (36/40)