Gold Fever

One Man's Adventures on the Trail of the Gold Rush

Steve Boggan

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781780746975
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

Gold. For centuries people have been entranced by the riches it promises; thousands have gone wild in their search for it and surely there will be many more.After the Financial Crisis, the price of gold reached peaks never seen in history. All over the world, particularly in the United States, people with no experience of prospecting began shopping for shovels, pickaxes, gold pans, tents, generators, and all manner of equipment they had no idea how to use. And off they went mining.In 2013, Steve Boggan decided he wanted a piece of the action, flying to San Francisco to join the 21st century's gold rush in a quest to understand the allure of the metal – and maybe find some for himself, too. Meeting a selection of colourful characters dreaming of striking it rich, he gets a crash course in small-scale prospecting while learning about the history and economics of gold.He also takes us back in time to the original gold rush, two centuries ago, tracing the path of the first intrepid 49ers who trekked thousands of miles, risking death for the chance of unimaginable wealth. Written with Boggan's characteristic charm, Gold Fever is a hugely entertaining travelogue and a moving insight into a key period in the creation of modern America.

PART I

‘Nature herself makes it clear that the production of gold is laborious, the guarding of it difficult, the zest for it very great, and its use balanced between pleasure and pain.’

Diodorus Siculus, Greek historian, first century BC

1

The Luck of James Wilson Marshall

The morning sun rose over the South Fork of the American River shortly before six, setting into relief the pointing figure of James Wilson Marshall, an ordinary man with extraordinary luck. Cast in bronze ten feet high on top of a thirty-one-foot granite plinth, Marshall looks almost embarrassed in his floppy hat and breeches, his left arm outstretched for all eternity, index finger aimed at some specific place of inscrutable interest far down below.

‘Okay, okay, it was there,’ he seems to be saying. ‘Now can I put my arm down?’

You can’t actually see the spot to which Marshall is pointing from his hilltop perch; trees and geography obscure the view. But if you’ve made it this far, as far as Coloma in El Dorado County, California, then you probably already know it as the exact location where, on 24 January 1848, he found gold. In a fleeting moment far less dramatic than the monument that celebrates it, Marshall simply looked down into a ditch and saw some yellow and shiny objects.

‘I picked up one or two pieces and examined them attentively,’ he later recalled. ‘And having some general knowledge of minerals, I could not call to mind more than two which in any way resembled this: sulphuret of iron, very bright and brittle; and gold, bright yet malleable. I then tried it between two rocks and found that it could be beaten into a different shape, but not broken.’

Marshall took the nuggets to William Scott, one of his workmates, and, appropriately tongue-tied, said simply, ‘I have found it.’

‘What?’ inquired Scott.

‘Gold,’ said Marshall.

‘Oh, no! That can’t be.’

Marshall looked into the palm of his hand. ‘I know it to be nothing else,’ he said.

The men were in the middle of nowhere but word seeped out and so began the most infamous gold rush in history, a frenzy of hopes born and dashed, of greed and fever, lust and death. In just eighteen months, the population of San Francisco – the nearest sea port – had grown from a few hundred to twenty-five thousand. Within two years of Marshall’s discovery, California had become part of the United States, its admission a political watershed that would affect the balance of power between the pro-slavery South and the free North and eventually lead to civil war.

Over the next seven years, more than three hundred thousand chancers would pour in to slake their thirst for gold. Some of them would strike it rich; most wouldn’t. And tens of thousands would die trying.

Looking up at the bronze figure of Marshall in the early morning heat – the day was already sweltering but it would reach 107 degrees by mid-morning – I began to wonder whether my timing was a bit off, perhaps by as much as two hundred years. After rushing to extract gold from the ground, I had begun to look into the practicalities of such an enterprise and learned mostly this: these days it is very hard to find gold. It is even harder to find in any significant quantity.

Before Marshall’s discovery, California was a land mass (almost twice the size of the UK) that had been largely ignored and little-settled by the pre-eminent colonial powers of the day. It had an indigenous Native American population of around 150,000 when the Gold Rush began, a number that would be reduced by illness, starvation and murder to around thirty thousand by the time it ended.

The remaining population, numbering a few thousand, comprised Californian-born Mexicans, Americans who had survived perilous journeys from the east, Mormons escaping persecution, a sprinkling of escaped slaves and a handful of adventurous Europeans who had found favour with the Mexican authorities when the country declared independence from Spain (with California included in the territory) in 1821.

Among these Europeans was a German-Swiss adventurer called John Augustus Sutter, who had managed to persuade the Mexican governor of California to grant him almost fifty thousand acres of land in the verdant valley of the Sacramento River, a couple of hundred miles north-east of what we now call San Francisco; it had previously been called Yerba Buena. So desperate were the Mexicans to tame California that it was not unusual for them to give away large tracts of it.

Central to Sutter’s empire was a settlement he had built and named after himself – Sutter’s Fort – in modern-day Sacramento. It was to this fort, close to the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers, that settlers, trappers and traders would beat a path and from which they would spread out far and wide to populate the countryside, a land he called New Helvetia, using the Latin Helvetia for Switzerland, the country in which he was raised.

Sutter already employed dozens of men and owned thousands of head of livestock when, in the autumn of 1847, he commissioned James Marshall, a carpenter from New Jersey, to build him a saw mill forty miles east of the fort near the South Fork of the American River where there was particularly good lumber in the shape of enormous ponderosa pines. With this lumber would come building, expansion and power. He made Marshall a partner in the enterprise and sent him off to build the mill at Coloma in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, with a handful of Mormons and Native Americans for labour.

So when Marshall returned to Sutter’s Fort with news of the gold find a few months later, Sutter was less than pleased. He was smart enough to know that this was not good news for him; if word of the discovery leaked, his lands would be overrun by prospectors, his workers would run off to look for gold and his dreams of an agricultural and ranching empire would lie in ruins.

One can only imagine the shushing, cussing and vows of silence that were issued that cold day in January 1848 but they counted for nothing. Gold has a way of working on the tongues of men and making them slack-jawed, even when it is to their detriment. Word of the discovery passed around the small group of workers whom Marshall had employed in Coloma and so Sutter agreed to let them prospect in return for their silence. But then, as now, few men with gold in their pockets can resist boasting about it.

Within a couple of months all the settlers in the Sacramento Valley had heard of the discovery. This in itself was not enough to spark a gold rush; most were farmers who either didn’t believe the reports or couldn’t care less about them. Even the two weekly newspapers that existed in San Francisco, the Californian and the California Star, mentioned only in passing the discovery made that winter.

It wasn’t until spring that the first flames of the Gold Rush were lit, and it can be said with absolute certainty that one man and his actions – outstanding in their deviousness – fanned them.

His name was Sam Brannan, the twenty-nine-year-old proprietor of the Star, a Mormon who had been despatched by the movement’s founders to consider California as a possible home for the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. By a remarkable stroke of good fortune, Brannan had recently established a general store at Sutter’s Fort. When some of the early miners went into his shop and offered to pay for provisions in gold, he went to Coloma, acquired a jar full of flakes and nuggets from them and returned to the fort, where he stocked up with shovels, picks, canvas, pans and everything necessary for mining operations. And then he travelled with the jar of gold to San Francisco.

There he ran through the streets shouting, ‘Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!’ and watched calmly as the gold he carried drove the small population into a frenzy. Having cornered the market in the region’s mining equipment, he sauntered back to his store and began fleecing his gold-crazed customers. Gold pans that he had bought for twenty cents were sold for fifteen dollars, the equivalent today of 450 dollars each. Within a few short months he was the fledgling state’s first millionaire.

The news brought by Brannan wreaked havoc. By mid-May it is estimated that seventy-five per cent of all the men in California had abandoned their livelihoods and homes and headed off to the goldfields of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. There were no doctors to treat the sick, no labourers to till the land and no merchants to sell food or goods. It was the same story from San Diego in the south of California to Sonoma in the north.

Before suspending publication due to the exodus of its reporters and printers, the Californian railed: ‘The whole country from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and from the seashore to the base of the Sierra Nevada, resounds to the sordid cry of gold! GOLD! GOLD!!! while the field is left half planted, the house half built, and everything neglected but the manufacture of shovels and pickaxes and the means of transportation to the spot where . . . the average for all concerned is twenty dollars per diem.’

To put that into perspective, Americans ‘back east’ were earning about a dollar a day.

As news began to spread in newspaper reports all over the world, men – for it was almost universally men – left their ploughs, professions and families and headed to California. The first arrivals came by ship up the western edges of the continent or across the Pacific from the Orient and Australasia. Then followed miners overland from the Midwest and by sea from the east coast and Europe, braving the malarial jungles of the Isthmus of Panama or the gigantic swells of Cape Horn to reach their destination, journeys that would take between five and eight months. They came from China, Argentina, Australia, Britain, France and Ireland, from New Zealand, Russia, Mexico, Peru and Chile, from the four corners of the earth.

And when they arrived, the ships’ crews left with their passengers to look for gold. By July 1849 more than five hundred abandoned vessels lay idle in the port of San Francisco. There was no one left to sail them.

2

Coloma

Very few people live in Coloma because it is essentially a large outdoor museum. If, as I did, you were to roll into town just after dawn, with mist rising over the grass and the American River, you would most likely see deer foraging near the road opposite reconstructions of John Sutter’s saw mill and James Marshall’s old shack.

If Marshall could actually see what he was pointing at from his hilltop plinth half a mile away, he would surely blush. They have given him his own park, the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, to be precise, complete with a second monument near his find, an old miner’s cabin, a tea shop, some authentic jail ruins, a gun shop, a Chinese exhibit (for there were many Chinese in the 1849 Gold Rush) and a small but informative indoor museum.

I strolled along a trail on the west bank of the river to a large square stack of rocks embroidered with the words ‘Sutter Mill’ in yellow pebbles, close to where Marshall found his gold. It was lying in the mill race that channelled water into the wheel that powered the mill. It is an idyllic spot. The river is shallow but fast-flowing, as clear as a deer’s eyes. On the far bank, perhaps a hundred yards away, the pines that attracted Marshall to Coloma still grow, rising gently to an endless blue sky. When he first arrived, the area was known as Culloma, from the Nisenan tribe’s word cullumah, meaning ‘beautiful’. It changed its named to Coloma in 1851 but it remains beautiful to this day.

I looked into the river and saw myriad shining objects that could have been gold. How wonderful, I thought, to reach into the crystalline waters and pick up a few nuggets. But I had read about fool’s gold, iron pyrite that mimics the precious metal, flashing seductively from the river bed but crumbling to the touch. All that glisters, I thought.

As I walked away from the river, my concerns over timing were weighing on my mind. I had rushed to Gold Country in a chaotic and unplanned manner and I now realized that this was a mistake. The weather is almost always good in California, I had wrongly thought, and, as a person from a cold climate, too much heat is rarely a consideration. I wiped the sweat pouring down the back of my neck. It was seven o’clock on a July morning and the temperature was already in the mid-nineties.

My research had led me to a series of videos posted on the internet by a prospector named Nathaniel Burson, a young and mild-mannered individual who, unlike the prospectors of yore, did not have a wild and crazy beard, did not present himself in red long johns, unlaced boots or dog-eared hat – and who made the discovery of gold look easy. I had tracked him down to his home in Arizona and begun to seek advice by email, principally asking whether prospecting in July would kill me. He said it would not. I would be working in or near cool rivers and that would bring down the ambient temperature. But, already swoonin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Imprint Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Gold Country Map
• Gold Rush Routes
• Prologue
• Part I
• Part II
• Postscript
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions