Authors: H.W. Brands
Eight miles upriver from the mouth, Jessie and Lily were transferred to a smaller boat operated by the steamship company for its own officers and executives. In slack water the crew—consisting of blacks and Indians, but more mild-mannered than those in the canoes—rowed the boat upstream. Intermittently, and more the higher they went, the paddles had to be traded for poles. With great effort the crewmen pushed the craft against the current, often entering the water to propel the boat past a sunken tree, sandbar, or other obstruction.
By the time they approached Gorgona, on the third day of the ascent, the crew spent more time in the water than aboard. Richard Jacob determined to help, as Jessie related.
We were near to the close of the last day’s journey, within an hour of Gorgona, when my brother-in-law, being young and strong and
a Kentuckian, in his impatience at the delay on one of those sand spits, jumped into the water and dragged the boat, in spite of the men, who told him that it would kill him.
We did get off sooner than usual through his help, and he was very triumphant about it, when suddenly his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell prostrate from sunstroke just as we reached Gorgona; and throughout that whole night the physician with the engineering corps was doubtful if he could live.
In fact he did live, but the doctor declared that he must return to New York and civilization if he hoped to recover completely. Jessie insisted that he follow orders, which he did, not least because he realized he henceforth would be even less help, and more hindrance, than he had been so far. Predictably he implored Jessie to join him in the return; so did everyone else she encountered, who said it was impossible for her to continue unescorted.
“Quite secretly to myself I said so too when I began to see what the emigrants suffered,” she conceded later. At Gorgona the traffic across the isthmus began to back up badly. Hundreds of people were camped on the hillsides above the village, huddling in tents, awaiting transport the rest of the way to the coast. Though the great majority were men, some were women and children; the suffering of the ladies and babes evoked in Jessie both sympathy for them and fear for herself and Lily.
But as often as the fear arose, Jessie’s stubbornness stamped it down, and she pressed forward. The alcalde of Gorgona personally sought out the American senator’s daughter and invited her to a celebratory feast. Jessie shuddered, and nearly became ill, at the sight of the pièce de résistance: “a baked monkey, which looked like a little child that had been burned to death.” The alternate entrée—iguana—was only slightly more appetizing.
At Gorgona the emigrants left the river and set forth on foot—mules’ feet, horses’, or their own. Whether the track they followed was a road, a trail, or something less substantial was a matter of interpretation. “The distance from Gorgona to Panama was about twenty-one miles,” Jessie explained. “It was
distance
, not a
road
; there was only a mule track—rather a
trough than track in most places, and mule staircases with occasional steps of at least four feet, and only wide enough for a single animal—the same trail that had been followed since the early days of Spanish conquest; and this trail followed the face of the country as it presented itself—straight up the sides of the steepest heights to the summit, then straight down them again to the base.”
The regular rains hardly helped matters, drenching the travelers and turning the soil into a greasy semiliquid. “Scrambling up ravines of slippery clay,” wrote Bayard Taylor, “we went for miles through swamps and thickets, urging forward our jaded beasts by shouting and beating. Going down a precipitous bank, washed soft by the rains, my horse slipped and made a descent of ten feet, landing on one bank and I on another. He rose quietly, disengaged his head from the mud and stood, flank-deep, waiting till I stepped across his back and went forward, my legs lifted to his neck.”
Mules carried much of the emigrants’ baggage; porters carried the rest. “It was astonishing to see what loads these men could carry over such a road,” J. D. Borthwick noted. It was especially astonishing in light of what Borthwick and most of his fellow travelers had come to expect of the natives. “It really seemed inconsistent with their indolent character, that they should perform, so actively, such prodigious feats of labor. Two hundred and fifty pounds weight was an average load for a man to walk off with, doing the twenty-five miles to Panama in a day and a half, and some men carried as much as three hundred pounds.”
The human porters usually made it to Panama alive; and when they didn’t, their bodies received comparatively respectful treatment. Not so for the mules. “We found the ‘road’ in a horrible condition,” wrote Stephen Davis, “the mud being 4 or 5 feet deep in some places, and at frequent intervals were dead mules in various states of decomposition, which were now being torn and devoured by vultures.”
The travelers’ reward for a hard day slogging through the mud was a night at the Washington Hotel, an establishment much advertised along the route from Chagres. It boasted forty beds, although the assertion proved even more inflated than many in that immodest time and place. The beds “consisted of frames of wood five feet long,” explained Frank
Marryat, “over which were simply stretched pieces of much-soiled canvas—they were in three tiers, and altogether occupied about the same space as would two fourposters.” Moreover, in Marryat’s case, they were already filled, leaving him to spend a miserable night outdoors, soaked, dirty, perched on a dead tree to avoid the wet ground, but tormented there by ants until he discovered a refuge among the packsaddles of a team of mules turned loose by their drivers till morning.
During the first several months of the Gold Rush, nearly all the traffic across the isthmus went from north to south—that is, from the Caribbean to the Pacific. But as early as the end of 1849, outbound gold-seekers met men returning from the mines. The encounter could be sobering. “Some were returning rich in gold dust and scales,” wrote Frank Marryat, who ran into a group of returnees at the Washington Hotel, “but the greater part were far poorer than when they first started to realise their golden dreams. And these latter were as drunken and as reckless a set of villains as one could see anywhere. Stamped with vice and intemperance, without baggage or money, they were fit for robbery and murder to any extent; many of them I doubt not were used to it.” The picture they painted of California was grim. “They foretold with a savage joy the miseries and disappointment that awaited all who landed there.” Yet the outgoers tried to put the best face on things. “There are various reasons for some returning without gold,” wrote one who refused to be discouraged. “Some are sick and spend their money to get well, and some lose all their money by gambling.” The good news outweighed the bad: “All agree that there is gold enough for many years to come.”
Once again, Jessie Frémont fared better than most travelers. She slept in a real bed, with a roof and screens to keep out the rain and ants—and snakes and rats and mosquitoes and leeches. Yet the atmosphere of the place weighed on her as on the others. “The nights were odious with their dank mists and noises,” she wrote. Determined to bear up, at least in public, she kept her fears to herself—which caused the guardian assigned to her by the steamship line to assume she was stronger than she was. “As there were no complaints or tears or visible breakdown, he gave me credit for high courage, while the fact was that the whole thing was so like a
nightmare that one took it as a bad dream—in helpless silence.” But the nightmare diminished with the dawn. “There was compensation in the sunrise, when from a mountain top you look down into an undulating sea of magnificent unknown blooms, sending up clouds of perfume into the freshness of the morning; and thus from the last of the peaks we saw, as Balboa had seen before us, the Pacific at our feet.”
Crossing the continental divide, Jessie felt she was crossing a chronological and emotional divide as well. Balboa in Darien recalled Prescott’s history of the Spanish conquest, which she had read at home with her father and family. That happy time now seemed so long ago as to beggar the memory. “It lay before the date which should hereafter mark all things— before and after leaving home.”
D
ESCENDING THE MOUNTAINS
, the isthmian travelers emerged onto an open plain that ended at the ocean and the old city of Panama. The city showed its past—and its present. “Never were modern improvements so effectually applied to a dilapidated relic of former grandeur as here,” remarked Frank Marryat wryly.
The main street is composed almost entirely of hotels, eating- houses, and “hells” [saloons]. The old ruined houses have been patched up with whitewash and paint, and nothing remains unaltered but the cathedral. This building is in what I believe is called the “early Spanish style,” which in the Colonies is more remarkable for the tenacity with which mud bricks hold together, than for any architectural advantages. The principal features in connection with these ancient churches are the brass bells they contain, many of which are of handsome design; and these bells are forced on the notice of the visitor to Panama, inasmuch as being now all cracked, they emit a sound like that of a concert of tin- pots and saucepans.
At the corner of every street is a little turreted tower, from the top of which a small boy commences at sunrise to batter one of
these discordant instruments, whilst from the belfries of the cathedral there issues a peal, to which, comparatively speaking, the din of a boiler manufactory is a treat. If those bells fail to bring the people to church, at all events they allow them no peace out of it.
The Panamanians were a diverse lot. “The natives are white, black, and every intermediate shade of color, being a mixture of Spanish, Negro, and Indian blood,” observed J. D. Borthwick. (A less worldly emigrant put the matter less neutrally, saying the city “is inhabited by all of the hell hounds of god’s creation, for they are some blacks, spanish jews with French.”) Like most of the overwhelmingly male argonauts, Borthwick paid particular attention to the fairer sex. “Many of the women are very handsome, and on Sundays and holidays they dress very showily, mostly in white dresses, with bright-colored ribbons, red or yellow slippers without stockings, flowers in their hair, and round their necks, gold chains, frequently composed of coins of various sizes linked together.”
Borthwick went on to describe a custom among the Panamanian women that struck him—with most other travelers through the isthmus— as very curious, if not downright dangerous.
They have a fashion of making their hair useful as well as ornamental, and it is not unusual to see the ends of three or four half- smoked cigars sticking out from the folds of their hair at the back of the head; for though they smoke a great deal, they never seem to finish a cigar at one smoking. It is amusing to watch the old women going to church. They come up smoking vigorously, with a cigar in full blast, but, when they get near the door, they reverse it, putting the lighted end into their mouth, and in this way they take half-adozen stiff pulls at it, which seems to have the effect of putting it out. They then stow away the stump in some of the recesses of their “back hair,” to be smoked out on a future occasion.
Borthwick estimated the native population of the city at about eight thousand; beyond this was the floating mass of perhaps three thousand
transients. The latter included, along with the honest travelers, a considerable collection of sharps, pickpockets, and other birds of prey seeking a living from the birds of passage. Gambling was epidemic; even Jessie Frémont, simply through observation, became something of an expert at judging fighting cocks. The appetites of all were whetted by the gold that passed through Panama on its way back to the Atlantic world. “This morning 22 mule loads of gold dust started for Cruces, with over $1,000,000,” wrote Stephen Davis in his diary, still wondering if he had seen what he thought he had seen.
T
HE LARGE NUMBER
of transients in Panama reflected not simply the appeal of California gold but the peculiar manner in which the gold deranged traffic all along the Pacific coast of the Americas. During the spring and summer of 1849, California resembled what physicists of a later generation would call a black hole; in this case ships (rather than light) went into the harbor of San Francisco but didn’t come out. Crews abandoned their vessels even before the anchors touched the bottom of the bay; despite the direst threats and most alluring promises, ships’ captains found their vessels unmanned and themselves marooned on the golden shore. The effect was felt as far away as Nantucket, where an alarmed shipowner wrote to the captain of his whaling craft, “Keep clear of there by all means, or you will not have a crew to bring you out.”
As a result, during that spring and summer, argonauts piled into Panama by the hundreds, then thousands, expecting to see the Pacific steamers promised them at New York—steamers that simply didn’t come. Jessie Frémont, despite all the money at her disposal and all her family connections, found herself stranded with the rest of the mob. For weeks she waited, dreading that Lily would catch the fever and die—or worse, that she herself would die, leaving Lily alone in this godforsaken place. The point of the journey was to make a home in California with Lily and John; would they ever be reunited?
Her worries grew with the unexpected delivery of a letter from John. Since their parting at Westport on the banks of the Missouri, Jessie naturally
had feared for his safety. She fancied herself modestly psychic; at one point she was seized by a feeling that he was in grave danger. “I became possessed with the conviction that he was starving,” she wrote. “Nor could any effort reason this away.” Now she learned the truth, which did little to assuage her fears.
John wrote of a disaster that had befallen his latest expedition. The expedition’s stated purpose was to discover a route across the Rocky Mountains that would be passable for railroad trains in winter as well as summer. Frémont had been over the Sierras in winter, and was convinced that where he could go, trains could follow. But neither he nor anyone else he knew of had crossed the Rockies, on a latitude convenient to California, in the dead of winter. Such was precisely what he set out to do.