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INTRODUCTION

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ALIFORNIA under Spanish and Mexican rule was a lotus-land of lazy, good-natured, hospitable friars, of tame and submissive Indian neophytes, of vast savannas swarming with half-wild herds, of orchards and gardens, vineyards and olive groves. There was no mining, no lumbering, no machinery, no commerce other than a contraband exchange of hides and tallow for clothing, merchandise and manufactures. There was no art, no science, no literature, no news, save at rare intervals, from the outer world. One day was like another from generation to generation. Everyone was content with his mode of life or ignorant of any other. War never harassed the Franciscans’ drowsy realm, nor ever threatened, beyond a few opéra bouffe affairs that began and ended in loud talk and bloodless gesticulation.

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 Sutter’s 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 hours’ 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. “Settlements 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 ’48 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.” 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 overnight, 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 “works one day with a tin pan and gets drunk the next.” There were, indeed, many of this ilk in the gold-diggings; but in the main, the miners of ’49 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 “stake” 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: “Perhaps in no other community so limited could one find so many well-informed and clever men—men of all nations who bave added the advantages of traveling to natural abilities and a liberal education.” 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.

When San Francisco was laid in ashes, not a day was wasted in lamentation. Before the debris had fairly cooled the work of rebuilding was started with a rush. Soon the sand-hills were leveled, and rocks were blasted out to make room for a greater city. Brick buildings rose where there had been nothing but shanties or canvas tents. Foundries were built and shops were fitted with machinery brought half around the world. To provide rapid transit to the mines, large river steamers, of the same model as those used on the Hudson, were bought in New York, and, incredible as it may seem, these toplofty and fragile craft were navigated around South America, by way of the Straits of Magellan, and most of them came safe into the Golden Gate. (The author of this book declares his belief that a premium of 99 per cent, would not have insured them at Lloyd’s for a trip from Dover to Calais.) The mines themselves were as so many ant-hills swarming with hurrying workers. Where water was scarce, canals were dug, or flumes were run for miles along mountain sides and carried over gorges or valleys by viaducts; even a large river was borne half a mile by an aqueduct high above its native bed. So rapid was the development of the country that, as our author says, California became a full-grown State while one-half the world still doubted its existence.

Gold mining, of course, was a gamble; while some “struck it rich” many others worked hard for nothing. So gambling was in the very air. And so long as common labor commanded at least five dollars a day, so long as ships by the hundred lay idle at their docks because sailors would rather take their chances in the mines than a steady wage of two or three hundred dollars a month, there was bound to be reckless extravagance and wild dissipation. Most of the miners were young men, too active, ebullient, vivacious, for quiet amusements in their hours of leisure. There was no home life nor anything to suggest it. In 1850 only two per cent, of the population of the mining counties were women, and probably most of these were of loose character. There was no standard of respectability to be lived up to. So long as a man did not interfere with the rights of others, he was perfectly free, if he chose, to go to the devil in his own way. Against the toil and hardships of the mining-field, against the gloom of disappointment or the wild elation of success, human nature demanded a counterpoise of some sort—and the only places in all the wide land where the miner could find comfort, luxury, gaiety, were the saloons and gambling-houses.

There being no sheriffs or policemen worthy the name, every man went armed, prepared at an instant’s notice to redress his own real or fancied grievances. Shootings and stabbings were frequent, though in much less number actually than such conditions might be expected to provoke—most men think twice before stirring up trouble in a company where everybody carries a loaded gun and knows how to use it. Formal law was powerless, through corrupt or inefficient officers, to keep in check the many scoundrels and desperadoes that infested the cities and the diggings; so the miners themselves administered summary justice by means of extemporized courts, and for high crimes were prompt to inflict the highest punishment after the verdict of Judge Lynch. It is undeniable that, in a pioneer society, such rough-and-ready justice was a necessity and that its effects were salutary.

Yet when the first fever of excitement had passed away, when the richest placers were exhausted, when men settled down from prospecting and “rushes” to the steady work of mining on a business basis, it is wonderful how quickly the social order changed for the better. Miners returning to San Francisco after a year’s absence scarcely recognized the place. Substantial buildings of brick and stone were replacing the tinder-boxes that had been swept away by one “great fire” after another—dressed granite for some of them was even imported from China! Streets that had been rubbish-heaps and quagmires were orderly and clean. A large number of respectable women had arrived in California, and their influence was immediately noticeable in the refinement of dress and decorum of the men. Places of rational amusement had sprung up—clubs, reading-rooms, theaters—which replaced in great measure the gambling-houses. In very many instances a quiet domestic life had supplanted the old-time roistering in saloons. Few, if any, cities ever showed such rapid progress in manners and morals as well as in material things.

Many narratives have been published by men who participated in the stirring events of early California. From among them I have chosen, after long research, one written by a British artist, Mr. J. D. Borthwick, and issued in Edinburgh in 1857. The original book is now rare and sought for by collectors of western Americana. It is here reprinted in full, with certain errors corrected. I do not know of another story by an actual miner that is so well written and so true to that wonderful life in the Days of Gold.

Horace Kephart.

October, 1916.