1848 ‘The gold mine discovered in December last’, reported the paper’s anonymous correspondent, ‘is only three feet below the surface in a strata [sic] of soft sand rock.’ The same vein, between twelve and eighteen feet deep, runs at least twelve miles to the south and five to the north, he continued, so that ‘I would predict for California a Peruvian harvest of the precious metals, as soon as a sufficiency of miners, &c., can be obtained’.
Nearly right. On 24 January 1848 (not the preceding December), James Marshall was building a lumber mill for a Swiss settler called John Sutter, in the foothills of the Sierra, east of what is now Sacramento, when he came across some gold flakes in the tailrace. The two men tried to keep the discovery quiet, but the rumour spread, and by March a newspaper editor was broadcasting it in San Francisco.
Almost immediately, people in California downed tools and headed for the mountains to try their luck. But the Herald announcement spread the word to the rest of the country – and the world. Prospectors came by sea – around the Horn or across the isthmus of Panama – while as many again, with less to spend, crossed the country in wagon trains starting from Missouri. For these transcontinental voyagers (more like tourists than pioneers, let alone explorers), it was the journey of a lifetime, producing an explosion of vernacular writing in diaries and journals as they struggled to account for the strange physical and social landscapes on the way (see 18 June).
But the Gold Rush also attracted professional writers. If the Forty- Niners were writing for their families, journalists like Leonard Kip, J.D. Borthwick and Bayard Taylor had metropolitan readerships in their sights. For them California was just so much local colour, its details to be described and consumed de haut en bas.
Nothing was what it seemed. Kip in California Sketches (1850) told how he ‘peeked into’ many gambling houses ‘and was surprised to see how easily French paper, fine matting, and a small chandelier, can convert the rough ribs of an old barn into an elegant hall’. They were fascinated by California’s lack of scale. San Francisco had grown in under a decade from a small Mexican outpost and mission town to an American city of 50,000 inhabitants, supported by restaurants, hotels, banks and even an opera house. Yet whole tracts of it could burn down in a single night. The city’s earthquake and fire of 1906 is what people remember now, but that was just the largest of a series of natural disasters to be made good in record time.
Social codes were scrambled too. On landing in San Francisco, Bayard Taylor had tried to find a porter to carry his trunk, only to be told that ‘every man is his own porter here’. ‘Dress was no gauge of respectability’, he wrote in Eldorado (1850). ‘Lawyers, physicians, and ex-professors dug cellars, drove ox-teams, sawed wood, and carried luggage’, wrote Taylor in a sketch later collected in his book, while ‘men who had been Army privates, sailors, cooks or day laborers were at the head of profitable establishments’. Comic or just democratic? Depends on your point of view.