The Gold Hunters: Stories of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds, Far West, the Yukon, Australia and A Story of the Golden Age

Under the old Spanish law, foreign commerce was prohibited and foreign travelers were excluded from California. But Boston traders managed to evade it by collusion with local officials; and strangers did enter the land; sailors and merchants of divers nationalities came across seas and settled along the coast, while hunters and trappers crossed overland from the States. Generally they were welcomed and encouraged to establish themselves in California, though in defiance of the Mexican government. The foreigners, being for the most part men of enterprise and energy, were respected and became influential. Many of them married into native California families, were naturalized, and acquired large estates. Among the Americans was John A. Sutter, formerly a Swiss military officer, who, in 1839, was permitted to build a fortified post on the present site of Sacramento. He received a large grant of land around it, and became a Mexican official.

As a result of the Mexican war, California was ceded to the United States on the 2d of February, 1848. Nine days earlier an event occurred that was destined to fix upon this splendid province the fascinated gaze of all the world. On the 24th of January, at Colonel SutterÕs mill, near the present Coloma, a workman named James W. Marshall discovered gold.

Within a few months amazingly rich placers were found in river bars, creeks and gulches, of this and the surrounding region. During the first year or two of discovery it was not unusual for a miner to wash or dig up a hundred ounces of gold in a day. Some lucky strikes were made of five to ten times this amount, and nuggets were picked up of from $1,000 to $20,000 value. Within a few hundred yards of a populous town, a man stubbed his toe against a protruding rock; glaring in wrath at the stumbling-block, he was thunderstruck at the sight of more gold than quartz. A market gardener, abusing his sterile soil for producing cabbages that were all stalk, was quickly placated by finding gold adhering to their roots; the cabbage-patch was successfully worked for years, and pieces of gold of many pounds weight were taken from it. Stories went abroad of places where the precious metal was blasted out in chunks, of ledges so rich that it could be picked out of the fissures with a bowie-knife, of men digging up gold as they would potatoes, and of a competence being amassed by a few hoursÕ work with a tin spoon.

For two or three months the tales that came from the diggings were received with incredulity; but when larger and larger shipments of the yellow metal kept coming to the coast there was a wild stampede for the gold-fields. ÒSettlements were completely deserted; homes, farms and stores abandoned. Ships deserted by their sailors crowded the bay at San Francisco (there were five hundred of them in July, 1850); soldiers deserted wholesale, churches were emptied, town councils ceased to sit; merchants, clerks, lawyers and judges and criminals, everybody, flocked to the foothills. Soon, from Hawaii, Oregon and Sonora, from the Eastern States, the South Seas, Australia, South America and China came an extraordinary flow of the hopeful and adventurous. In the winter of Õ48 the rush began from the States to Panama, and in the spring across the plains. It is estimated that 80,000 men reached the coast in 1849, about half of them coming overland; three-fourths were Americans.Ó By 1851 the number of actual miners had risen to about 140,000. From across the Atlantic there came Britons, Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, others speaking strange tongues, until the mines of California were likened to so many towers of Babel, and pantomime often took the part of speech.

Never before had there been brought together, in a far quarter of the earth, a body of men of so varied trades and professions all massed in a twinkling to one common pursuit. Social distinctions vanished at a touch. Soft-handed lawyers and clergymen wielded pick and shovel side-by-side with born navvies, cooked their own meals and washed their own clothes. No honest labor lowered the dignity of a gentleman, since that gentleman needs must wait upon himself and provide for himself with the work of his own hands. Out of this common necessity grew, as it were over-night, a natural democracy in which all men met each other on an equal footing. No deference was paid save to conspicuous ability of such sort as was useful in the work at hand.

The popular notion of a miner is that of a rude and reckless fellow who Òworks one day with a tin pan and gets drunk the next.Ó There were, indeed, many of this ilk in the gold-diggings; but in the main, the miners of Õ49 were a picked and superior class of men. It was not as if a bonanza had been struck within easy reach of the riffraff of the nations. California, by the shortest route, was two thousand miles from any well populated part of America, five thousand from a European port. The journey thither was expensive, and most of the men who undertook it were such as had accumulated, by their own industry, a good ÒstakeÓ at home. They were adventurers, to be sure; but what is an adventurer? One who hazards a chance, especially a chance of danger. That is the spirit which starts almost any enterprise that demands courage, determination and self-reliance. Beyond this, the argonauts were notably capable and intelligent men, as their works soon proved. An unbiased observer said of them: ÒPerhaps in no other community so limited could one find so many well-informed and clever menÑmen of all nations who have added the advantages of traveling to natural abilities and a liberal education.Ó Most of them were charged with spontaneous and persistent energy. Immediately, as by an electric shock, the California of dreaming friars and lazy vaqueros was tossed aside and an amazing industry whirred into action.