Dolaucothi had given me the gold bug, I wouldn’t call it gold fever, not yet, but it was definitely an itch that needed scratching. It was 1982, and although my undergraduate geology degree at Goldsmiths College was absorbing, there was a problem. It told me nothing specifically about gold mining.
As a teenager, I had read everything about travel and adventure I could lay my hands on. Papillon by Henri Charrière, the brutal true story of a convict escaping from a penal colony in French Guiana, I had found particularly enthralling. These books helped me to dream, and I liked to dream.
So at the age of eighteen, to dream my gold-rush dream, I descended on the second-hand bookshops that lined Charing Cross Road in central London. They had to be second-hand bookshops, as the only books about gold I could find were all very old.
Veteran bookshop owners took an amused interest in my enquiries.
‘Gold rush, eh? Off to make your fortune, are you, laddie?’ one asked.
‘Maybe, if you can sell me a book cheap enough.’
Chuckling, he led me to the darkest corner of his shop. The books on the bottom shelf looked like they hadn’t been touched in years. This was a whole section on gold, many of which were about gold rushes – a whole lost genre of literature. I sat on the carpeted step next to the shelf and started to read books I could not afford to buy.
In these books were tales of the wild gold rushes in California and the astonishing riches of the gold fields in Australia. There were real-life heroes and heroines with plenty of bounders, cads and villains. Fortunes were won and lost. To an unsophisticated lad from Wales, these stories were a revelation.
The earliest known use of gold is from 4000 BC by the Sumerians in ancient Iraq. They were expert goldsmiths whose gold was probably derived from alluvials in the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
In ancient Egypt, gold mines in the eastern desert were worked to provide gold to the pharaohs. Highly skilled craftsmen used this gold in creating such exquisite objects as the death mask of Tutankhamen.
The Lydians were the first to introduce gold and silver (electrum) coinage. The trading city of Sardis (now in modern Turkey) was the capital of Lydia, and the River Pactolus, which flowed through the city, had alluvial gold and silver deposits. In Greek mythology, this gold had appeared when King Midas removed the curse of his golden touch by bathing in the river.
In the sixth century BC, the Lydians discovered that if they heated electrum with salt, they could separate the gold and silver, which often occurred together. This allowed the minting of the first pure gold coins, fittingly issued by King Croesus. These coins became widely accepted and were the first international currency.
The increased status and wealth that flowed to the Lydians as a result of this remarkable invention were not used wisely. Croesus destroyed his kingdom in a series of ill-advised wars. But now the gold genie was well and truly out of the bottle and the race was on to find more.
As time passed, various gold-mining districts were discovered and mined throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Presumably some unrecorded early gold rushes took place when these mines were first discovered and the rich near-surface gold exploited.
The first recorded large-scale gold rush started in 1693 at Minas Gerais in Brazil. So profound were the series of discoveries over the next thirty years that some 400,000 Portuguese and 500,000 (mainly African) slaves migrated to this state. It is estimated that at the peak of this gold rush some 350,000 ounces of gold (worth $420 million at today’s prices) were mined every year.
The next major gold rush helped define the American nation.
I soon shall be in Frisco and there I’ll look around.
And when I see the gold lumps there, I’ll pick them off the ground.
I’ll scrape the mountains clean, my boys, I’ll drain the rivers dry.
A pocketful of rocks bring home, So brothers don’t you cry.
Oh, Susannah, Oh, don’t you cry for me
I’m going to California with my washpan on my knee.
In the 1840s, Northern California was a remote rural backwater, but then gold was accidentally found near Sacramento in 1848. As word leaked out, people rushed to the site of the discovery and surrounding settlements emptied.
Some of the initial strikes were astounding. In parts, men simply picked up gold nuggets that lay on the surface (specking) or prised them out from river crevices with a knife, and tens of thousands of ounces of alluvial gold was swiftly won.
This was before the time of the telegraph, so it was when newspaper reports started to carry the news of the strike to the eastern United States that enthusiasm built up. When actual shipments of gold dust and nuggets started to arrive in New York, the atmosphere there reached fever pitch. The great California gold rush of 1849 was on.
One question was on everyone’s lips: ‘When are you off to the diggings?’
It was an era of limited social mobility and people saw the opportunity to free themselves from dreary jobs and lives, to be their own boss and get rich quick. A mass hysteria enveloped the eastern states and the fear of missing out overcame any caution or sound counsel. The gold was real, but the rush was based upon a dream.
During the next six years, over 300,000 people arrived in California in one of the largest mass migrations in American history: wealthy families and newly arrived immigrants; doctors and labourers; family men and poets. No one, it seemed, was immune when gold fever gripped the nation and the world. They called themselves the Forty-Niners, after the year the gold rush began, or the Argonauts, after the band of adventurers in Greek mythology who accompanied Jason on his search for the Golden Fleece.
There were casualties, too: families and children were deserted, confronting great hardship on their own, and the departed themselves faced years of loneliness and uncertainty. One man left instructions that his son should be taught to say ‘Papa is coming home’ and ‘Bye bye’, to be repeated on demand.
There were two main routes from the east of the country to California – overland or by ship – and both carried many hazards.
The overlanders went by wagon, blazing trails that would become a part of American folklore. The California Trail was the main route, a 3,000-kilometre track leading from the eastern states directly to the California goldfields. But it was risky, especially because the lack of sanitation at the freshwater campsites led to rampant cholera.
It is not known how many died on the California Trail. Estimates are up to 10,000 through cholera, 1,000 in American Indian attacks and several thousand more to scurvy and accidents.
Those who took the more expensive and faster option of travelling by ship faced different perils. The initial route saw Argonauts sail south from New York and then around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of South America, but this Southern Ocean journey took six months and the passage often encountered terrible storms.
A much shorter journey was via ship to Panama in Central America, where Argonauts disembarked and journeyed overland across the narrow isthmus to the Pacific coast. This part of the trip by canoe and on foot along rivers and muddy jungle tracks had its own problems, with malaria and yellow fever ending many a dream.
When they reached the Pacific Ocean, a boat ran the Argonauts up the west coast to San Francisco – if they were lucky, that is. Chartered boats often failed to turn up, leaving gold seekers to wait, sometimes for months.
Ships arrived in San Francisco packed with expectant miners from all over the world. Yet as soon as they docked, many of the crew absconded to join the gold rush. This often meant cargoes remained unloaded and the harbour became full of abandoned ghost ships: a gold-rush fleet that could not sail.
At San Francisco the Argonauts were met by hustlers, pimps and bums, all there to fleece the new arrivals before they even reached the diggings. But on to the rush the Argonauts continued by foot, oxen or tender up the Sacramento River. They journeyed to a series of unfolding discoveries 150 to 300 kilometres east and north of San Francisco. Nothing could stop them.
Upon arrival at the diggings in the early days, things were easier. The new hopefuls might observe the established miners to see how they were working, then move on to find their own unclaimed area, using a gold pan to prospect the river gravels along the way.
After washing a sample of gravel, the pan was given a final swirl. An inch of gold left in a line at the bottom of the pan (an inch tail) meant good ground, well worth working. Now the new miner could stake his claim.
Each camp had its own rules. Generally claims were staked (or pegged) over as much land as a single miner could work, 100 square feet (9 square metres) being a common size. This was done by driving wooden pegs into the ground at the corners of the claim, with the name of the miner(s) and claim written on the side of the pegs.
A whole industry sprang up in trading claims. Some men never dug at all, they just got rich buying and selling claims. The best ground was vulnerable to claim jumping, where an individual would be removed from his claim by force, and murders over this highly charged issue were common. ‘Claim jumper’ is still a pejorative term used in the mining industry today.
After staking his claim, the new miner was ready to mine. There were a few intrepid souls who, through sheer determination or obstinacy, managed to transport mining equipment bought in New York all the way to the diggings. For their troubles, they were usually mocked by the seasoned miners as their devices would be of no practical use. They had been conned by New York merchants who knew nothing about gold mining.
The miner would start by working the shallowest and highest grade (most gold per tonne) material first – the easy stuff. This was done using simple hand tools: a pick and shovel for the digging and a gold pan for the washing.
The panning was back-breaking work, requiring the miner to constantly bend over water. So most miners used a rocker, a device more easily worked by two or three men; already the new miners were teaming up.
The rocker, or cradle, was a simple wooden apparatus about the size of a stool. It had an iron grate on top with a riffle box below, a hand lever provided the rocking motion. The device greatly sped up the washing of the material. One miner shovelled gravel into the top and agitated (rocked) the cradle while the other, using a hand ladle, dumped water onto the gravel. The finer material, including the fine gold, washed through the grate to a riffle box below where the heavy gold would get caught by gravity.
Every few hours, the pair cleaned out the riffles (wooden slats) to get the concentrate – gold and black sand – which was then panned off to recover just the gold. Rockers were used extensively, but they were not good at recovering the floury (very fine) gold, much of which was lost.
As time progressed and the easier gravels were worked out, the gold grades fell. The miners now formed larger teams of four to eight men to construct and operate a more efficient device called a tom, or long tom. This apparatus was similar to a rocker. It had a launder (wash box) into which the gravel was shovelled, and below this a long sluice box to catch the gold. The tom required a constant flow of water to puddle (break up) the clays and to work the sluice, so the diggers often had to build elaborate earth or wooden water raceways.
A considerable camaraderie and loyalty was created within these teams, a common bond built upon the hardest of labour that captures the spirit of the Forty-Niners.
Over time, the mining techniques became ever more sophisticated. Entire rivers were diverted in order to access the auriferous (gold-bearing) gravels beneath, and long toms running for tens of metres were deployed to increase recovery of the fine gold. The longer the tom, the better the recovery.
The hardships of living in the goldfields were a constant challenge. The lucky ones had canvas tents; many others made their own shelters from brushwood or whatever came to hand. The food was poor. Flour, dried corn and salt pork were the staples, as these could be stored. But there was little fresh food to fend off scurvy.
Prices were sky high. In 1849 an ounce of gold was worth $20.67 cents, and a man on a good claim would be doing well to produce an ounce a day, with a quarter of an ounce being more common. In gold rush camps, beef cost $10 a pound, or half an ounce of gold. At today’s gold price, that would be the equivalent of $600 for a pound of beef.
The few women at the diggings either helped their husbands wash gravel or had more traditional roles running boarding houses or eateries.
Mail was of the greatest importance to the diggers and to their families back home. In 1849, William Brown, an Argonaut from a well-to-do Toledo family, went from unsuccessful miner to successful mailman. He carried 500 letters a month from the San Francisco post office to the miners in their camps, charging his subscribers a dollar a letter ($60 in today’s money).
Brown grew his ‘express business’, taking orders for goods and buying gold to resell at a profit. His is an example of the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that flourished in the Californian gold rush.
Not all of the miners continued to stay in touch with home. As time, loneliness and separation corroded family bonds, some created new identities and remarried. Their bewildered first wives, and often children, were left abandoned.
Life was rough and hard for the miners. This was manual labour at its most manual. For relaxation, each mining camp had its own saloon and Sunday was the day set aside for drinking rather than worship.
At the rougher camps, this saloon would be nothing more than a tent and a couple of benches where miners would gamble and drink themselves to oblivion. When the diggers had a good strike they would often head to Sacramento or San Francisco, to enjoy the grand saloons with entertainment and ‘working girls’.
The only form of law and order in the camps was imposed by vigilante groups set up by the miners themselves. This led to injustice and violence as different bands vied for dominance. The early tolerance at the diggings fell away as the gold became harder to win. Non-English-speaking groups were particularly vulnerable, and by 1850 they were being violently evicted from their claims by the predominantly English-speaking miners.
But there was gold. Around 12 million ounces were won during the first five years of the California gold rush, worth around $14 billion at today’s prices. The resulting economic boom led to increased trade and communications within the United States and around the world.
By 1853, the gravels that supported the smaller-scale alluvial mining were essentially worked out. Only larger and more organised bands of men or companies could afford the capital required for mechanisation. Many of the now impoverished diggers ended up working for salary in these larger companies – exactly the sorts of positions they had come to California to try to escape.
One of these organised methods was hydraulic mining, which was introduced to California in 1853. This involved high-pressure water-blasting of the auriferous hillsides, directing the resulting gold-rich slurry over long toms. The widespread destruction caused by this led to some of the earliest environmental laws, with hydraulicing banned in California in 1884.
The alluvial (river) gold was originally derived from primary gold-bearing ore that had, over millennia, been eroded into the surrounding rivers. Much of this primary ore – mainly quartz – still remained in the hills and mountains, and as the alluvial gold was mined out, these ‘hard rock’ sources were opened up and worked. This required the blasting of shafts (vertical) and adits (horizontal) into the rock, and the subsequent crushing of the ore using stamp mills (mechanical crushers). Over the ensuing decades, gold mining in California continued to evolve as new technologies took over, which is still the story of the industry today.
The social effects of this shared adventure helped to forge the independent spirit of California, and as many Argonauts returned to their home states they also played a role in crafting how Americans came to view themselves as a nation.
The economic stimulus from the gold rush fuelled a boom in America that developed the country and its burgeoning railroads. Yet, just as in modern times, mining booms led to busts.
The loss of the SS Central America, sunk in a hurricane off the coast of Florida on 11 September 1857, was a human tragedy in which 425 people died. However, this ship also carried, by some estimates, around 600,000 ounces of gold (worth $720 million today) from California, a portion of which was destined for already stressed New York banks. The sinking helped trigger the first global financial crisis, the Panic of 1857, and the world’s financial system did not recover until after the Civil War ended in 1865.
But as the years after the California gold rush passed, the veterans’ memories of the hardships and privations of their youth faded. They were replaced with nostalgia and affection for a bygone age, lived with companions ‘staunch and brave, and true as steel’.
And I often grieve and pine,
For the days of gold,
The days of old,
The days of forty-nine.
Towards the end of 1850, against the advice of friends and colleagues, a digger named Edward Hargraves had decided to leave the California gold rush and return to his native Australia to find gold.
Hargraves was a massive man, and a shrewd one too. He did not enjoy the hard work at the diggings and had a more elegant plan: to do just enough to claim the sizeable government reward for the discovery of the first payable goldfield in Australia.
Finding gold in Australia was a radical idea at the time and Hargreaves was derided for taking such a path. But he was not the type to be swayed by the opinions of others and he returned to Australia, landing at Sydney, capital of the British colony of New South Wales. Hargraves managed to borrow some money to kit himself out with a horse and rations. He set out on his gold-prospecting trip on 5 February 1851 and he badly needed something to come out of his venture.
Travelling alone and on horseback, Hargraves crossed the Blue Mountains to Guyong, about 200 kilometres inland, where he stayed at the Wellington Inn. That evening he noticed with great interest specimens of quartz on display above the fireside. Quartz was a mineral that Hargraves knew well, as it was often associated with gold.
He linked up with the innkeeper’s son, a youngster named John Lister, who had found the quartz and knew the district. Their subsequent prospecting trip netted five small specks of gold – hardly payable – but the wily Hargraves left Lister behind and hastily returned to Sydney to claim the substantial government reward for the first discovery of a payable goldfield. Those few specks, though, were not enough to persuade Charles Augustus FitzRoy, governor of the colony, that the goldfield was payable.
Meanwhile, back at Guyong, the industrious John Lister and his friend William Tom were working a rocker, a trick from California introduced to them by Hargraves. They worked hard in various spots and finally, on 7 April 1851, the two lads washed four ounces of gold from Summerhill Creek. This was worth nearly £10, or the equivalent of a labourer’s wage for six months. Lister and Tom had found Australia’s first payable goldfield.
They immediately sent word to Hargraves in Sydney, whom they considered their partner. Hargraves informed the government of the find before riding back to meet up with the pair. He took the four ounces of gold from Lister and Tom and then set about his true vocation: promotion. Hargraves was a master propagandist, taking a small truth and building it up into a big story. He renamed Summerhill Creek ‘Ophir’, after the biblical mines of King Solomon, and the name caught the public imagination.
Hargraves was also a convincing orator, and he fired up public meetings with tales of glory that awaited men of courage. His credibility as a Forty-Niner prospector from California lent him gravitas. The newspapers loved it, and Hargraves was spectacularly successful.
Honourable, though, he was not.
He took the accolades, the glory, and the £12,000 in government reward money (worth over $3 million today), and disowned Lister and Tom. Hargraves did everything he could to write them out of history, yet the families of the two men would not shut up and so started a feud that continued for decades and included three parliamentary enquiries.
Hargraves’ behaviour is a good example of the corruptive nature of gold. He retired a famous and wealthy man, but the stench from the way he treated his partners follows him to this day.
Within a week of Hargraves’ first public talk at Bathurst to promote the new gold discovery, 600 men had rushed to Ophir. The government geologist, Sam Stutchberry, reported back to the governor:
Gold has been obtained in considerable quantity, many persons with merely a tin dish having obtained one or two ounces per day. I have no doubt of gold being found over a vast extent of country. I fear unless something is done very quickly that much confusion will arise … Excuse this being written in pencil, as there is no ink yet in this city of Ophir.
Sydney went mad and the harum-scarum rush to the diggings turned the social order of the colony on its head. Businesses closed, farm workers absconded, and it was even a struggle to bury the dead. A long line of motley adventurers braved the Blue Mountains and made their way to the Macquarie River. The population of Ophir swelled to 2,000 people and they toiled, ripping up the riverbanks to access the auriferous gravels.
It was rough and tumble and early justice was dished out by hastily convened miners’ meetings, or kangaroo courts as they became known, which could easily end in a hanging.
Governor FitzRoy was taken by surprise. The whole affair was alarming for landowners, whose power and wealth were threatened by the disappearance of their labour supply. FitzRoy tried to discourage more people from leaving their established jobs by forcing each and every digger to take out a licence, at the usurious charge of 30 shillings a month. It was to prove a poor decision.
Initially things worked well. The rich and easy pickings of the early rushes allowed the diggers to pay the high licence fee, and the revenue paid for the police and mining wardens to settle disputes.
Just to the south in the neighbouring colony of Victoria, events were moving fast. During the latter half of 1851, a succession of gold rushes started that would eclipse New South Wales and even California.
In the first six months of the Victorian gold rush, a staggering 3 million ounces of gold (worth $3.3 billion today) were produced. The newly proclaimed colony was transformed. The Ballarat field alone went on to produce 20 million ounces.
But trouble was brewing. The miners found it irksome that farmers could lease vast areas of land for grazing at £10 a year while the gold miner had to pay a licence fee of 30 shillings a month, or £18 a year, for just a few square yards of dirt. This was regardless of whether they made any money or not; it was a tax on just being there.
Equally galling were the goldfields police who enforced the licence system. They were little more than thugs in uniform. To make matters worse, the police were entitled to a share in the fines of any successful prosecution, which led to wholesale corruption of the process of law. The sale of alcohol became a protection racket, with the police as enforcers. The most contentious issue was always the mining licences, which the diggers were required to carry at all times. The police would conduct spot searches they called ‘digger hunting’. Should a miner not immediately produce a licence, when asked, then a bribe was demanded. Diggers caught without licences were at times beaten or chained to logs in the burning sun or freezing cold.
An extraordinarily sadistic police superintendent named David Armstrong would burn down the diggers’ tents and beat those who questioned him with the brass knob of his riding crop. When finally dismissed, Armstrong left boasting he had made £15,000 in two years of bribes and fines. That is over $4 million in today’s money and illustrates the astonishing levels of police corruption.
There was little recourse. Almost the entire system was rotten and the diggers’ hatred of the authorities festered. These were free-spirited men, many of them veterans of California, and they were not easily intimidated.
By 1854, the alluvial gold was becoming harder to win, and thus the licence fee was even more onerous. Something had to give. The trigger came on the night of 6 October in Ballarat. A digger named James Scobie was killed with a blow to the head following an altercation with the landlord of the Eureka Hotel, an ex-convict named James Bentley. A trial ensued, with Bentley and his drinking companion, a policeman, accused of murder. Both were acquitted by a bench led by stipendiary magistrate John D’Ewes, a friend of Bentley and a part-owner of the Eureka Hotel.
Sensing corruption, the diggers were outraged. On 17 October 1854 they held a protest meeting. This meeting soon got out of hand, and the Eureka Hotel was burnt to the ground. The police arrested three diggers, ostensibly for arson; in reality they were taking them as hostages.
The governor of Victoria, Sir Charles Hotham, was a military martinet lacking in intelligence or guile. His flawed judgement was compounded by his equally inept resident commissioner for Ballarat, Robert Rede. Instead of listening to the diggers’ grievances, Hotham and Rede suspected sedition and troops were sent in to quell the unrest.
Both sides became entrenched, with neither willing to give ground. By November the demands of the diggers had increased from just the release of the three held men. They now wanted the abolition of the licence, together with land and political reform, including the vote for all white males, not just those with property rights. The social injustice of the licences and the lack of representation made this a political movement; it was the corruption of the officials that turned it into a battle.
Tensions in Ballarat rose and, in the final week of November, the town was at boiling point. Then more soldiers arrived.
On 29 November 1854, a meeting of diggers attracted 15,000 men. It was to become one of the most famous public meetings in Australian history and two significant events occurred. After a vote, the diggers burnt all of their licences and vowed to resist arrest. Then they raised a new flag upon a tall flagstaff: the blue-and-white flag of the Southern Cross.
The next day was windy, foul and hot. The authorities, not for backing down, embarked on a violent licence hunt that ended in a riot. Shots were fired and more arrests made.
The diggers rallied, in no mood for compromise. An Irishman, Peter Lalor, was elected their leader. Mostly wearing the digger’s outfit of moleskin trousers, checked blue-and-white shirt and felt hat, they all swore an oath: ‘We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties.’
Expecting an attack, the diggers prepared a stockade at Eureka Lead, a gold mine situated on top of a hill. Some of the miners then returned to their tents for the night, leaving others at the stockade.
At dawn the following morning, 276 soldiers and police attacked. The much larger military force took the diggers by surprise and a fierce battle ensued. It was all over in about ten minutes. The miners did not stand a chance against disciplined, well-armed troops. Fourteen diggers lay dead, and a further eight later died from their wounds. Peter Lalor lost an arm in the battle. Six police and military also died. The soldiers behaved appallingly in the aftermath and further outrages continued in the ensuing days.
The diggers lost the battle, but went on to win the war. The authorities and Governor FitzRoy lost all support from a public outraged by the bloodshed. No jury would convict the miners who had been arrested, and a Commission of Enquiry went on to uphold almost all of the reforms demanded by the diggers. This included the vote for all white males, implemented in Victoria in 1857, the birthplace of Australian democracy.
The next book I picked up was about a shipwreck. The Royal Charter was a sturdy and modern iron-hulled steam clipper. In September 1859 she set sail from the port of Melbourne bound for Liverpool; many of the passengers were miners carrying their own hard-won gold.
These miners were the lucky ones. Having survived great hardship, perhaps even the Eureka Stockade itself, they had struck it rich at the diggings and were headed home to marry sweethearts or rejoin families.
At the end of the long voyage, the sight of the British coast was greeted with pleasure, but as the ship rounded Anglesey in Wales, a bad storm was rising. The wind eventually rose to hurricane force 12 on the Beaufort scale, with enormous seas. Both anchors were deployed to hold position. At 1.30 a.m. on 26 October the cable holding the port anchor broke, followed by the starboard anchor cable an hour later. The Royal Charter was driven onto shore.
As the ship broke up on the rocks, some of the miners dropped the gold they carried and tried to save the women and children and themselves. Others refused to let go of their precious cargo. Those men sank and perished, bandoliers of gold nuggets and coins still around their shoulders.
There were over 440 deaths, including all of the women and children on board. Only 39 men survived.
To be so tantalisingly close to home, their fortunes made, and after all they had been through! If I had been there, would I have relinquished my gold to help the women and children? Or would I have drowned under the weight of a bandolier full of nuggets?
‘Come on son, we’re closing up. It’s not a library, you know,’ said the kindly bookshop owner.
I walked out of the shop into the cold and wet of a darkening Charing Cross Road, a boy with dreams but no time machine. It was a pity you couldn’t get that kind of action anymore, I thought.