Authors: Fred Rosen
Maybe, at last, he'd strike it rich.
By the end of the 1850s, the California Gold Rush boomtowns were in sharp decline in direct proportion to the placer gold that was running out in the American and Feather Rivers.
Huge mining combines had come in to get at the ore beneath the earth. Gradually, the prospectors were being pushed out in favor of actual miners, who traveled deep into the earth to get the gold ore that would later be distilled. Out-of-work prospectors soon found themselves turning their collective heads to the east. Some of them climbed over the Sierra Nevada into Nevada, where they began mining gold on the eastern slope.
By that time, the Mexicans and the Chinese, with their more sophisticated mining techniques, were long gone, frozen out by xenophobic laws. The white California miners on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada in 1859 were literally throwing away pounds of silver every day because they were looking for gold. It took a while for two guys to get smart and realize that there was something special in the blue mud they were throwing away. They decided to take a sample to be assayed in Virginia City.
Just as they were leaving, Frank Comstock confronted them. A loafer who would give Washington's legendary Beau Hickman a run for his money in the loafing
department, Comstock also had a dishonest streak. The two guys who had the blue mud in hand were told by Comstock that it was his land they had been working on. Instead of fighting it out with fists or guns, the two guys compromised and cut Comstock in as a full partner.
Thus, when the blue mud was assayed as being full of silver, the discovery became known worldwide as the Comstock Lode. It was a vein of silver that ran half a mile wide and seventy miles long. During the next twelve years it would be mined two thousand feet into the earth, where the temperature rose to 130 degrees Fahrenheit.
The California prospectors set off, en masse, to Virginia City. Mining the Comstock Lode for all it was worth, nearby Virginia City became the largest city between Denver and San Francisco, thus helping to settle the surrounding country. Unfortunately, the Comstock Lode required sophisticated machinery to mine. The California prospectors discovered that the kind of “mining” they had done was small potatoes compared to what was necessary here: huge reserves of capital and industrial skills were necessary to get to the silver ore deep in the earth. That was way beyond the capability of the average prospector, immigrant or otherwise.
Still the belief was there, and men streamed into Virginia City looking to strike it rich. In 1861, with the Comstock Lode still going strong, albeit controlled by mining combines of American big business, the country's attention turned to a more immediate problem. The country was at war, with itself.
The United States found itself embroiled in a civil war. While one meaning of the word “civil” is being friendly with another, the Civil War was anything but civil. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died on the Confederate and Union sides. The man who turned the tide, who cut the Confederacy in half and thus ended the war, was a survivor of the Gold Rush, William Tecumseh “Cump” Sherman.
In 1850, Cump had married his foster sister Eleanor, Thomas Ewing's daughter. Resigning his army commission in 1853, Cump became a partner in a San Francisco banking establishment, Lucas, Turner, & Co. He oversaw the construction of the new bank building, which opened on July 11, 1854, at 800 Montgomery Street. It still stands, and is today known as Sherman's Bank.
Cump grew restless. Since he couldn't go west, into the Pacific Ocean, he showed the contrariness that would serve him well in Georgia years later, by turning east, and traveled in the opposite direction of the pioneers. He settled for a year in Leavenworth, Kansas, where he practiced law between 1858 and 1859. Then the military bug hit him again. He took the job of superintendent of the Louisiana State Military Academy at Alexandria, Louisiana.
A Northerner by birth and temperament, he resigned from the military academy in January 1861. When the Civil War started the same year, Cump joined the Union Army as a colonel. He commanded a brigade in the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861. By August he had been made a brigadier general of volunteers and reassigned to
Kentucky. No sooner had he taken command of the army's Department of the Cumberland in October than he was reassigned to the Department of the Missouri.
A heroic division commander at the bloody Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, he was promoted to major general in May. In subsequent battles at Corinth, Vicksburg, and Arkansas Post, he continued to distinguish himself in battle as an intelligent, able soldier. In July 1863 he was made a brigadier general in the regular army.
Sherman's experiences during the Gold Rush period had seasoned him into a hard, competent man who understood that victory was surviving. No wonder, then, that Colonel Mason's adjutant went onto become, to the present day, the most reviled man in the southern United States.
Had Sherman's subsequent actions not shortened the war, it would certainly have gone on longer and affected the silver rush to come. That he could be so brilliant against one enemy, however, and so ignorant of the other says a lot about the man's willingness, at least, to put it all on the line for what he felt was right.
Sherman had seen in the California gold fields how important a man's spirit was. Without it, he'd fail at the backbreaking work of gold prospecting every time. He had to
believe
to get it done. In the same way, he knew that if the South were to be beaten, the sooner he vanquished the rebellious spirit of its civilians, the sooner the war would be over.
In September 1864 he applied the same careful thought to how to defeat the enemy as he had years
before on Sutter's request to own the land on which gold had been discovered. Sitting in his Atlanta headquarters, Cump tried to decide where to move his army next. The March to the Sea was conceived as the final psychological blow to the Confederacy, one that would make it fall to its knees.
Looking at census records, he tried to determine which route across Georgia would supply his men with food and forage for their animals. A skeptical President Lincoln was presented with Cump's report that he could march across Georgia, to the ocean, and thereby cut the Confederacy in half. The point wasn't so much to engage the enemy but to show the civilians that the Union could do it with impunity.
The president waited until his November 1864 reelection before giving Cump the go-ahead. By that time, most of Georgia had been cleared of Confederate forces. For his march to the sea from Atlanta to Savannah, Cump divided his men into two wings. He gave them strict orders to forage as much as they needed, though not to use force against the civilian population unless it was used against them. In that case, they were to proceed to level the town where such an incident occurred and move on.
Meeting little military resistance, Cump and his men took Savannah. In their wake, they left burned-out hulks that had once been homes and towns to the guerrillas who fired upon the Union troops. As for crops, any in the army's path had been totally gone over by Cump's men.
On December 21, Cump telegraphed President
Lincoln that Savannah was now under Union Army control, offering the city and twenty-five thousand bales of cotton as Christmas presents. In his wake, Cump left more destruction than any military campaign, before or since, on the continent. But Cump knew that the kind of ruthlessness he showed in war would shorten it.
He was right. As a result of his March to the Sea, Cump had split the Confederacy into two parts, depriving each “side” of supplies without which they would be forced to surrender or perish.
After the war, Sherman stayed in the regular army, with a commission of lieutenant general. He would soon have a hand, once again, in a major gold discovery.
On April 9, 1865, the war ended when General Lee presented his sword to General Grant at Virginia's Appomattox Courthouse. Five days later, President Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth during a performance of
Our American Cousin
at Washington's Ford's Theater.
It was on that day, when the nation lost its greatest president, that John Sutter once again showed his penchant for poor timing. He chose to petition the U.S. Congress for the “loss” of his land to the Gold Rush on the day Lincoln died. To say the least, the Congress was preoccupied with other matters.
Booth's plan that night had not been just to assassinate Lincoln. Coconspirator David Herold was supposed to kill Vice President Johnson but “chickened” out. But coconspirator Lewis Paine did attack and attempt to kill
the third in line to presidential succession, Secretary of State William Seward. Were it not for the riding accident Seward had recently been in, leaving him wearing a leather brace around his back, Paine would have succeeded. But the brace served to stop the blade of Paine's knife from sinking into his throat. Instead, Paine slashed him across the face, a wound from which the secretary would recover.
Had Booth succeeded in killing all three, the federal government would have fallen into ruin because the next in line to head the executive branch was the president pro tempore of the Senate, a political nonentity named Lafayette Sabine. But Booth hadn't succeeded.
When things began to get back to normal in late May, the last thing Congress or anyone else wanted to deal with were the grievances of a sixty-three-year-old man who once had visions of a grand empire in his youth. Showing the stubbornness that had characterized his ability to build his fort in the wilderness, and finance the building of the sawmill where gold was discovered, Sutter decided to stay in the East and pursue his claim to his last breath.
By 1868, the country had recovered its collective breath and was ready to move forward. Once again, the seed of the new American Dream, planted by Marshall and Sutter, was about to blossom. There was an expectation now that prosperity was just around the corner.
While most of the nation's attention was focused on Washington, where President Johnson was being impeached by a reactionary Congress, and his trial in the Senate was about to begin, the country's economic interests were being negotiated in Laramie, Wyoming.
That's where Cump Sherman, now a full general, went to represent the interests of the U.S. government.
Cump knew that if the hostile Indians were not pacified, they would be wiped out by force. He knew war, and he didn't want to see it again. Instead, he wanted the western tribes to give up their ancestral lands and live on reservations, where the government would provision them. If he could succeed in doing that, then the land they controlled would come under the aegis of the federal government, which would do everything possible to promote its growth in accord with the government's avowed policy of “Manifest Destiny.”
Under the Treaty of 1868, the Great Sioux Reservation in Dakota Territory was established, on which the SiouxâBrule, Ogallala, Miniconjou, Yanktonai, Hunkpapa, Blackfeet, Cuthead, Two Kettle, Sans Arcs, Sante, and Arapahoâwould settle. In so doing, the federal government reaffirmed the Sioux hunting rights on land the Sioux controlled, including the Black Hills of what is now South Dakota.
But by 1871, rumors were already circulating on the frontier that the Black Hills were full of riches. President Grant had to rethink his administration's policy of containment and contentment of the Sioux balanced by the country's push for more prosperity, more money.
Meanwhile, in Lititz, Pennsylvania, Captain John Sutter of the Swiss Guard took up residence in a Moravian community to which one of his children belonged. Once again, Sutter set to work on petitioning Congress, only
this time he decided to see about getting some congressmen to cosponsor a bill on the House floor to pay him for the loss of his lands during the Gold Rush. Having served in California's first legislature, he was well aware of the practice of petitioning elected representatives and planned to take full advantage of it in coming years, as long as his health held out.
By the end of the 1860s, James Marshall was back to speculating, hoping to raise funds to develop a mine. He went on a lecture tour, only to find himself penniless, stranded in Kansas City, Missouri.
Leland Stanford, one of the “Big Four” who built California's Central Pacific Railroad, stepped in to pay Marshall's train fare back to his hometown in New Jersey, where he was able to visit his mother and sister, whom he hadn't seen in years. A few months later, he returned to Kelsey and moved into the Union Hotel.
In 1872 the California state legislature passed a bill awarding Marshall a pension of $200 a month. He used it to pay off some debts and equip a blacksmith shop in Kelsey. The state subsequently reduced the pension to $100 per month, and capped it at six years. Marshall's frequent public inebriation seems to account, this time, for the legislature's actions.
Back in Washington, President Grant's secretary of the interior, Columbus Delano, decided to take a second, more formal look at the fragmented reports coming out of the Black Hills about its potential mineral wealth.
On March 28, 1872, he wrote:
I am inclined to think that the occupation of this region of the country is not necessary to the happiness and prosperity of the Indians, and as it is supposed to be rich in minerals and lumber it is deemed important to have it freed as early as possible from Indian occupancy.
I shall, therefore, not oppose any policy which looks first to a careful examination of the subject.⦠If such an examination leads to the conclusion that country is not necessary or useful to Indians, I should then deem it advisable ⦠to extinguish the claim of the Indians and open the territory to the occupation of the whites.
Of course, Delano was abrogating the terms of the treaty without giving the Sioux a chance to renegotiate. He couldn't do that anyway. It could take years to get them to the table again and besides, they wouldn't believe anything the government said from that point onward.