Steve Boggan - Gold Fever: One Mans Adventures on the Trail of the Gold Rush

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank all the miners who put down their tools to help me and pass on their knowledge when it would have been much easier, and more fun, to point at me and laugh. Some of them are named in this book Tom Henderson, Terry and JoAnne McClure, Duane Wilburn, Matt and Shannon from Mariposa, Heather Willis, Mike Morgan, Doug and Lonnie McDowall and, of course, Gene and Cathy Meyers. Others, such as Todd Osborne, one of the cleverest miners I met, are not. My deepest gratitude goes to you and to the wider gold prospecting community; you were kind to me.

My gold mentor Nathaniel Burson was particularly kind and generous with his time and to him I wish boundless luck. And how can I ever thank Bear River Gary Shaver for teaching me to dig like an American?

Without the dogged support of my wonderful agent Laura Longrigg this story would never have been told. Huge thanks go to Laura and to Mike Harpley at Oneworld for his exceptional editing and wise advice, and to Amanda Dackombe for spotting my mistakes and putting them right.

Heartfelt gratitude goes to The Authors Foundation whose 2012 assessors Simon Brett, Sameer Rahim, Fiona Sampson, Helen Simpson and Frances Wilson awarded me a grant to help me write this book.

For giving me carte blanche to prospect on one hundred miles of claims, I would like to show my appreciation to Dave Mack, Rich Krimm and the New 49ers. For making me feel so welcome in Happy Camp, thanks go to Rita and Gary King, and their friend Beth Buchanan. I found Hazel Davis Gendrons peerless knowledge of the Karuk invaluable; thank you Hazel, and thank you Ellen Johnson who, with husband Bill, made me most welcome. And I simply must show my gratitude to Jeff Herman at Empire Mine for introducing me to the guy .

No set of acknowledgements relating to the California Gold Rush would be complete without a mention of E Clampus Vitus, whose ubiquitous guides and plaques were a constant source of information. I am secretly hoping they make me an honorary member.

At the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, I would like to thank Crystal Miles for her help and advice regarding Sarah Royces Reminiscences and Maria Brandt for additional research. On the opposite side of the USA, I would like to acknowledge the generous advice and time afforded me by George Miles, William Robertson Coe Curator of the Yale Collection of Western Americana at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

For giving of their time and their invaluable advice as readers, my gratitude goes to Andy McLintock whose guidance on gold finance and economics was a life-saver to Jan Owen, Bill Scannell and Jonathan Callery. For their support, my love and thanks go my mother, Pat, sister, Marie, nieces Nicola and Laura, nephew, Ben, and great niece, little Elsie, who is wearing some of my gold around her neck thanks to the jeweller Joanna Pearce at MaisyPlum. An extra big thumbs-up goes to Ian Buchanan, whose strength has been an inspiration.

Peter Fearon, Emeritus Professor of Modern Economic and Social History at the University of Leicester, and Chris Blackhurst of The Independent were kind enough to check for errors in the chapter on the gold standard. If any remain, they are mine.

For their support and friendship, heartfelt thanks go to Mike Dolan, Steve and Andrea Redmond, Paul Hackett, Josie Martin, David Felton, Domenico Pugliese, Matt Elgood, Paul Peachey, Vanessa Thorpe, Sophie Woods, Mark Willis, Ian McLeish, Lindsay Frankel, Michele Callery, the Hallam family, Susan Speller, Zita Nicolaou Chen, David Lister, Douglas Maggs, Ruth Fielding, Pete Norman, Marie-Pierre Darneau, Louise Jury, Kathy Marks, Andrew Marks, Kirsty Bennett, Ben Unwin and John Hardwick.

And for having endless patience with me and all my daft ideas, my love and deepest thanks go to my wife and best friend, Suzanne, who is worth more than a gazillion times her weight in gold.

The Luck of James Wilson Marshall

The morning sun rose over the South Fork of the American River shortly before six, setting into relief the pointing figure of James Wilson Marshall, an ordinary man with extraordinary luck. Cast in bronze ten feet high on top of a thirty-one-foot granite plinth, Marshall looks almost embarrassed in his floppy hat and breeches, his left arm outstretched for all eternity, index finger aimed at some specific place of inscrutable interest far down below.

Okay, okay, it was there, he seems to be saying. Now can I put my arm down?

You cant actually see the spot to which Marshall is pointing from his hilltop perch; trees and geography obscure the view. But if youve made it this far, as far as Coloma in El Dorado County, California, then you probably already know it as the exact location where, on 24 January 1848, he found gold. In a fleeting moment far less dramatic than the monument that celebrates it, Marshall simply looked down into a ditch and saw some yellow and shiny objects.

I picked up one or two pieces and examined them attentively, he later recalled. And having some general knowledge of minerals, I could not call to mind more than two which in any way resembled this: sulphuret of iron, very bright and brittle; and gold, bright yet malleable. I then tried it between two rocks and found that it could be beaten into a different shape, but not broken.

Marshall took the nuggets to William Scott, one of his workmates, and, appropriately tongue-tied, said simply, I have found it.

What? inquired Scott.

Gold, said Marshall.

Oh, no! That cant be.

Marshall looked into the palm of his hand. I know it to be nothing else, he said.

The men were in the middle of nowhere but word seeped out and so began the most infamous gold rush in history, a frenzy of hopes born and dashed, of greed and fever, lust and death. In just eighteen months, the population of San Francisco the nearest sea port had grown from a few hundred to twenty-five thousand. Within two years of Marshalls discovery, California had become part of the United States, its admission a political watershed that would affect the balance of power between the pro-slavery South and the free North and eventually lead to civil war.

Over the next seven years, more than three hundred thousand chancers would pour in to slake their thirst for gold. Some of them would strike it rich; most wouldnt. And tens of thousands would die trying.

Looking up at the bronze figure of Marshall in the early morning heat the day was already sweltering but it would reach 107 degrees by mid-morning I began to wonder whether my timing was a bit off, perhaps by as much as two hundred years. After rushing to extract gold from the ground, I had begun to look into the practicalities of such an enterprise and learned mostly this: these days it is very hard to find gold. It is even harder to find in any significant quantity.

Before Marshalls discovery, California was a land mass (almost twice the size of the UK) that had been largely ignored and little-settled by the pre-eminent colonial powers of the day. It had an indigenous Native American population of around 150,000 when the Gold Rush began, a number that would be reduced by illness, starvation and murder to around thirty thousand by the time it ended.

The remaining population, numbering a few thousand, comprised Californian-born Mexicans, Americans who had survived perilous journeys from the east, Mormons escaping persecution, a sprinkling of escaped slaves and a handful of adventurous Europeans who had found favour with the Mexican authorities when the country declared independence from Spain (with California included in the territory) in 1821.

Among these Europeans was a German-Swiss adventurer called John Augustus Sutter, who had managed to persuade the Mexican governor of California to grant him almost fifty thousand acres of land in the verdant valley of the Sacramento River, a couple of hundred miles north-east of what we now call San Francisco; it had previously been called Yerba Buena. So desperate were the Mexicans to tame California that it was not unusual for them to give away large tracts of it.