California Gold
John Jakes
For Frank Curtis
the best there is
Prelude: California Dreams
1886
II. Welcome to the City
1887-1888
III. Life Among the Escrow Indians
1888-1889
V. Gentlemen of Riverside
1895-1899
IX. Smashing the Machine 1909-1910
Now I wish you to learn one of the strangest matters that has ever been found in writing or in the memory of mankind…Know ye that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called
California,
very close to the Earthly Paradise…
—Garcí Ordóñez de Montalvo
Las Sergas de Esplandián
Seville, 1510
In reading the biographies of Californians, I found some recurring themes: restlessness rather than rootedness, innovation instead of tradition, freedom replacing responsibility…I also found an obsession with bigness.
—Carol Dunlap
California People
I don’t think of California as a place, you see. It is a certain kind of opportunity.
—James D. Houston
Californians
Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free
—Henry David Thoreau
Thirty years after the Gold Rush, men and women of adventurous spirit began to discover the true gold of California. They found it hidden in her soil and her streams, in black oil and golden citrus, in seemingly impractical new inventions such as moving pictures and airplanes.
One such gold seeker set out in 1886, his destination a place steeped in legend, myth, and dreams. She was still a raw frontier, a land of stunning geographic contrasts, of parched savannas and snowy peaks, cold purple valleys and hot yellow deserts. She spilled across 158,700 square miles, and an entire 10 degrees of latitude north to south.
She had already known many cultures. Manila galleons had provisioned in her coastal bays, homebound for Europe with the riches of the Orient. Sir Francis Drake had careened his ship on her shore while searching for the fabled northwest passage to the Indies.
Early Spanish explorers waded her rivers and trekked her deserts in search of mythical cities paved with gold. Like a string of sacred rosary beads, twenty-one Franciscan missions were placed from San Diego to Sonoma. These first European settlers, the soldiers and clerics, practiced what they perceived as a benevolent despotism. In the name of God and civilization they enslaved the first Californians, native Indians whose most warlike activities were digging roots and weaving baskets.
As the years passed, others came to California in pursuit of good fortune or easy living. Mexican descendants of the Spanish soldiers settled on her hills to raise cattle on great
ranchos.
New England merchantmen sailed in to trade for tallow and hides—“California bank-notes,” the Yankees called them. Imperial Russia planted a colony on the northern coast in search of furs and perhaps new territory, only to see it fail after a few decades.
By then a new, menacing breed had appeared: bold mountain men who risked their lives to push through the snow-choked passes of the Sierras. They greedily eyed the sweet rich land sequestered, behind the mountain barrier, and soon word of their discoveries filtered east. Many more “Anglos” were shortly on the way.
“Manifest destiny” was a banner the Americans carried from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In 1846 they seized California, and four years later she was ushered into the Union as the thirty-first state. By 1851 Americans were using the courts to steal the land-grant
ranchos
from their original owners.
All of this took place against the turmoil of a truly global event. On January 24, 1848, at Captain Sutter’s sawmill on the south fork of the American River, a cry went up and echoed around the world:
“Gold!”
Hundreds heeded it, then thousands. They walked or rode across the prairies and mountains, or tossed in reeking ships that carried them to California after they trudged through the pestilential heat of the Isthmus of Panama. Other ships voyaged around the Horn, many sinking in its raging storms. By foot and by horse, by wheel and by sail, these modern seekers of the golden fleece, these Argonauts, came. They hailed from farms and cities all over America, from Britain, Germany, France, Switzerland, Russia, China, Hawaii, Brazil, and scores of other places. During the peak of the Gold Rush as many as a hundred thousand of them were swarming into California each year.
A few found gold; most didn’t. Those who did failed to keep it. The Gold Rush created not a single millionaire, not one family fortune.
Within ten years, however, other men with different perspectives began to seek and find the real gold of the Golden State. First among them were four shopkeepers, all of ordinary background but extraordinary avarice and energy, who planned, financed, and built the western portion of the first transcontinental railroad.
Other Californians began to strike it rich in silver mines just over the Nevada border. Still others found wealth in vast tracts of land where wheat could be grown bountifully and profitably.
Even by 1886, when she held almost a million people, California had not yet yielded all of her treasures. Despite the disillusionment of many who had already failed there, her shining myth remained undimmed. Her name was still a lodestone for the courageous and hopeful, and she still sang her siren song to young dreamers around the world.
This is the story of one of them…and of some of those he met on his journey in search of California gold.
CALIFORNIA DREAMS
1886
THE THREE HANGED MEN turned in the wind as the timbers of the gibbet creaked and the blizzard covered the shabby coats of the dead with shrouds of white. The boy was frightened of the three, with their closed eyes, fishy white skin, purple throats. He knew them all: O’Murphy, Caslin, and Uncle Dave, Pa’s brother. They frightened him nearly as much as this sudden storm.
It came down off Sharp Mountain like a howling wolf, building the drifts an inch higher during the short time he stood by the gibbet. It stung his face, the snow more like pellets of ice, and drove against him so that he resembled a shrunken old man with white hair.
The blue medicine bottle dropped from his numb right hand. Frantic, he pawed in the drift till he found it and then put it in the left pocket of his poor coat, the only one without a hole. The bottle came from the store operated by the mine company—the Pluck-Me Store, Pa called it, because that’s what it did to all the miners, plucked them clean.
He started to run through the growing drifts. Hard going; soon his breath was tearing in and out in loud gasps. The storm gripped his bones and made them ache, and he felt he’d never be warm again, never see sunshine again. Stumbling past the last of the hideous frame duplexes where some of the miners lived, he feared he’d never see Pa again, because drifts twice as tall as he was blocked the path home.
He wanted to cry but didn’t, because he’d learned that lesson already. Even at seven years old, you didn’t cry. If there wasn’t enough food—and there never was—you didn’t cry. If the winters were endless, freezing, without sun except for a feeble yellow-white glow in the haze now and then, breaking your heart because you longed for warmth and light, you didn’t cry. If the mine’s hired detectives hanged your uncle for conspiring to strike, you didn’t cry. If you were out here, lost, afraid for your life and immortal soul, you still didn’t cry.
He ran, slamming through a drift, battering it with both fists, the wind yelling and sobbing and cluttering in his ear. His hair was white. Bolting left, he lost his balance and tumbled onto his side. He came up spitting snow and, wild with fright, cupped his hands around his mouth. “Pa? Pa, help me!” Under his nails dark deposits showed; the dirt came from his work, picking and sorting the anthracite with forty other boys. He had Pennsylvania black gold under his nails, but he couldn’t spend it.
He feared there’d be no answer. Stumbling, he nearly fell again when he heard a distant voice. “Mack? Mack—son!”
“Pa, where are you? I can’t see you. I’m lost.”
“Mack, I’ve been searching for an hour.” The voice receded as he ran toward it.
“But where are you?”