Some found riches; many found themselves

Members of the Gold Rush History Alliance set up a historically accurate 1850s-style encampment along the south fork of the American River near the site of James Marshall's historic gold discovery. Bee Photo: Dick Schmidt

Aside from the facts, now virtually part of American folklore, what did the Gold Rush mean -- for its protagonists and for California?

As a matter of social history, the legacy of the Gold Rush was obvious: Thousands upon thousands who otherwise would never have thought of migrating to America's remote Pacific territory poured into California, which in 1848, when gold was first discovered, had a non-Indian population of barely 18,000.

California developed as much as a maritime colony as a frontier -- that is to say, within 20 years it developed a type and style of civilization, especially in San Francisco, Sacramento and adjacent areas, resembling nothing else in the Far West: urban, cosmopolitan, reminiscent in a provincial sort of way of the Atlantic states and parts of southern Europe.

Feeling the excitement and the temerity of what they were doing, knowing that this would be the great adventure of their lives, men wrote about it.

They wrote an extraordinary amount. No other phase of the American frontier witnessed such a pouring forth of prose, a literature that in seven score years has yet to be cataloged completely, much less read and assessed.

For a few brief years, in far-off California, the bottom fell out of the 19th century. Americans -- and not just Americans of the frontier -- returned en masse to primitive and brutal conditions, to a Homeric world of journeys, shipwreck, labor, treasure, killing and chieftainship. No James Fenimore Cooper or Francis Parkman appeared to give the material its needed preservation, but inadequate as was their response when judged from the point of view of literature, the forty-niners themselves were not unaware that they were being reduced to the elemental.

	"Thanks to California, I have broken my chains; I am 52 this year and I don't care who knows it!" -- a former East Coast dandy

Moments of stark experience, recorded without self-consciousness and yet shot through with mythic power, filled their narratives: There were murder, death, the falling out of friends, food by a fire, gestures of voice and action appropriate to the mining camps of California -- and not out of place in an epic memorializing a lost world and ancient heroes.

There was a gaudy freedom to California. "The very air," wrote Bayard Taylor of San Francisco in 1849, "is pregnant with the magnetism of bold, spirited, unwearied action, and he who but ventures into the outer circle of the whirlpool, is spinning ere he has time for thought, in its dizzy vortex."

At that city's Parker House or the El Dorado, women dealt the cards, a brass band or banjo music played, and gold nuggets were piled high on the tables. One could take a brandy-smash at the bar, then stroll the crowded streets rakish in hussar boots, corduroy pants, sash, red flannel shirt and sombrero. Costume was posturing and romantic.

Daguerreotypists did a good business in portraits of young men in miner's dress. J. Douglas Borthwick, an English artist sensitive to social distinctions, noted that it was the gentlemen who insisted on posing in the most picturesque attire.

If there were quarrels, there was also a new intensity to companionship as men took each other's measure under difficult conditions. "There is more intelligence and generous good feeling than in any country I ever saw," believed J.D.B. Stillman. "Men are valued for what they are."

A modern prospector adopts 19th-century gear -- even down to the rifle -- as he walks a trail along the American River. Bee Photo: Dick Schmidt

William Perkins met a former dandy, who on the East Coast had resorted to padded clothing, hair dye, makeup and a dental device for filling out the cheeks. In California he discarded all of this, delighted to find himself a gray-haired, hale and hearty man of middle age. "Thanks to California," he told Perkins, "I have broken my chains; I am 52 this year and I don't care who knows it!"

Under stress, men came to moral insight as well as to violence. Indians stole Charles Pancoast's supplies, upon which he depended for his life. "A few days after this," Pancoast wrote in his journal, "as I was walking up the shady path beside the river, I discerned three Indians sitting in the bushes on the opposite side. I raised my rifle to shoot at them, when the thought came to me that I should be taking the life of a human being without necessity or adding to my own security, and I should perhaps regret the murder. I dropped my aim, and I have ever since rejoiced that I did not pull the trigger of my rifle that day."

It was true that Americans indulged in an orgy of self-seeking. It was also true that there were times of pity. "Right below me, upon a root of our wide-spreading oak, is seated an old man of three-score and ten years," Daniel B. Woods entered into his journal at Weaver's Creek on Aug. 21, 1849. "He left a wife and seven children at home, whose memory he cherishes with a kind of devotion unheard of before. He says when he is homesick he can not cry, but it makes him sick at his stomach. He is an industrious old man, but has not made enough to buy his provisions, and we have given him a helping hand."

There were other experiences, ones that kept the Gold Rush on a human scale, kept it bearable. Letters came from home. "So if you should not be among the fortunate," Ellen Apple wrote her fiance, Enos Christman, "be not discouraged but return to those who devoutly love you in good old West Chester and let well enough alone."

'Supplies,' Ad in the New York Herald, Dec. 28, 1848 297K

There were Sundays when one sat before his cabin mending clothes, writing letters, smoking a pipe, or turning the pages of a Bible. Were later diversions ever as satisfying to Luther Melancthon Schaeffer as the evenings spent after work in Grass Valley with other miners singing to banjo, violin and harmonica? Or the nights at Swett's Bar when the boys would gather together for a reading aloud from Shakespeare or Dickens? Did any other food ever taste so good to Howard Gardiner as the salmon he caught in the American River near Horse Shoe Bar and broiled over a fire at his campsite? Or the tinned turkey, sweet potatoes, bread, butter, doughnuts, coffee and Bass Ale with which he celebrated in his Sierra cabin the Christmas of 1851?

"The appetite one acquires in California is something remarkable," believed Bayard Taylor. "For two months after my arrival, my sensations were like those of a famished wolf."

Miners found time to note beauties of landscape, to marvel at valleys and foothills in the spring, "this now most fairy-like country, everything so smiling and beautiful, flowers of the smaller varieties by the thousands."

When they began to see signs that the Gold Rush was the prologue to lasting settlement, 49ers solaced themselves that they had been pioneers. The Englishman Borthwick claimed that the Gold Rush gave Americans their first opportunity to develop a territory as a colony in the English manner, as opposed to a frontier. The Gold Rush, he pointed out, brought to California not just wild people, but the cultivated populations of the Atlantic states. California blended frontier and civilization, laying foundations for a regional culture that from its inception combined qualities of the East, the South and the Far West.

As colonists, Borthwick believed, Americans in California had held to a civilized center and not degenerated, although in the early years of the Gold Rush social chaos posed a real threat. Rugged frontier types seemed to improve in civility after a period of California residence.

A commitment to authenticity extends even to home-spun outfits worn by members of the Gold Rush History Alliance. Bee Photo: Dick Schmidt

Even without the comfort of seeing himself as a pioneer, a miner could admit that, although he had not made his fortune, he had at times enjoyed himself, had found something to affirm amid so much that was wasted and inconsequential. "I have enjoyed myself," wrote Franklin Buck after three years in California, "and lived most of the time just as I wanted to."

The legacies of the Gold Rush were good, bad and ambiguous. California, sought for treasure, became a home, or, as the California-born (Grass Valley) Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce later put it, a frontier became a province. Values of care and preservation, however, did not overwhelm the habits of exploitation. The mountains of the Mother Lode were left gashed and scarred like a deserted battlefield. Californians sought easy strikes elsewhere. Most noticeably in the areas of hydraulic mining, logging, the destruction of wildlife, and the depletion of the soil, Americans continued to rifle California all through the 19th century.

Infinitely more tragic, the Gold Rush even further decimated the Indian population, whom the miners frequently cleared from their path like so many vermin. Indians not murdered were frequently enslaved, especially children and adolescents. Only one horrible word, genocide, can be employed accurately to describe the effects of the Gold Rush on Indians in the mining regions. Likewise were the Old Californians (Latinos in current parlance) pushed further to the wall, although they did manage, especially in Southern California, to hold on for another generation.

Yet for all this record of human and environmental abuse, California remained charged with human hope, linked imaginatively with the most compelling of American myths, the pursuit of happiness. California would never lose symbolic connection with an intensified pursuit of human happiness. As a hope in defiance of facts, as a longing that could ennoble and encourage but which could also turn and devour itself, the symbolic value of California endured -- a legacy of the Gold Rush.

Kevin Starr is California state librarian.