A Counterfeiter's Paradise (26 page)

While global in scale, the gold rush epitomized the distinctly American desire to make something from nothing. Digging gold out of the ground required labor, of course. But extracting hundreds, even thousands, of dollars’ worth of metal from the earth in a single day seemed more like
alchemy than real work, and the migrants streaming into California wanted to become millionaires with a minimum of effort. The
Boston Courier
denounced their get-rich-quick mentality as an enemy to “industry, productive labor, thrifty habits.” Paradoxically, this was the same argument that hard-money advocates from Thomas Hutchinson to Andrew Jackson had used against paper money: that by creating opportunities for acquiring wealth without labor, a paper economy ruined people’s work ethic. If Hutchinson or Jackson had been alive in 1848, they might have had to revise their thinking. The gold rush proved there was nothing intrinsically moral about precious metals. Gold could encourage frenzied speculation just as well as paper. And, like the paper-fueled booms and busts that preceded it, the gold rush would end up enriching a small handful and bankrupting many more.

When gold fever reached Philadelphia in 1848, Upham surrendered without much of a fight. His daughter had been born in April, and departing for California meant leaving his wife at home alone with the child. But the temptation was too great—and perhaps, after two years of marriage, the banalities of domestic life felt a little stifling. Seized with enthusiasm, Upham spared no expense outfitting himself for the trip. He filled a chest with flannel and hickory shirts. He bought a pick, a spade, and a large tin pan. He even purchased a waterproof suit and tent, both made of rubber. Many of these items proved to be totally useless, but Upham couldn’t help himself. An hour before midnight on January 15, 1849, he said good-bye to his wife and daughter and boarded the
Osceola
. The next morning, an iceboat began dragging the ship down the frozen Delaware River toward the open sea.

UPHAM’S CALIFORNIA ADVENTURE
would be the defining experience of his life. The journals he kept during the trip formed the basis for a book he published in 1878,
Notes of a Voyage to California via Cape Horn,
Together with Scenes in El Dorado, in the Years 1849–’50
. An eyewitness chronicle of the gold rush era, it offers an indispensable portrait of the man who later in life became one of America’s most intriguing counterfeiters.

In the book’s preface, Upham calls his story “a narration of
facts
, not
fancies
,” and true to his word, he includes many facts. He tended to wake up early on board the
Osceola
, usually around six. He would walk on deck to observe the ship’s rigging and the winds. Before retiring for the night, he would note the temperature, the latitude, and the distance sailed in his journal. But Upham knew that the
Osceola
was more than the sum of these statistics. What makes his account an absorbing read is his eye for the ship’s human drama, the scenes that ensue when eighty people are separated from civilization by miles of water and forced to interact for months under challenging conditions.

Life on the
Osceola
involved stretches of numbing boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror. Most of the time there was nothing for the passengers to do. Their only exercise came from strolling about on deck, and they soon became lethargic; Upham gained so much weight on the trip that he could barely fit into his clothes. Then, after days of uninterrupted dullness, a storm would suddenly appear and wreak havoc. This schizophrenic pace must have been exhausting, and everyone dealt with it differently. Many got drunk, escaping the claustrophobic world of the
Osceola
in booze-fueled parties that Upham called “jollifications.” One jollification had just gotten under way when a gale hit: “[W]ith the roaring of the elements and the carousing of the revelers,” Upham wrote, “the night was rendered hideous.” Others gambled, betting several hundred dollars on games of cards or dominoes. When a player ran out of money, he would cut the buttons off his coat and use those, or promise to buy the winner a pet monkey when they reached the next port. The most popular pastime, however, was fighting. Brawls provided an excellent way to relieve pent-up frustrations, especially when the weather heated up.

Although he faithfully recorded these activities in his journal, Upham
preferred to spend his time reading and writing; his greatest vice was sipping a little whiskey to calm his nerves during a storm. His level disposi-tion earned him the respect of his fellow passengers, who made him a mediator in their ongoing dispute with the captain. Captain James Fairfowl had been causing problems from the moment the brig set sail. He was a curmudgeonly Scot with big ears, imperious eyebrows, and an unfortunate tendency to take unreasonable positions from which he refused to back down. When the steerage passengers demanded to be served more potatoes, Fairfowl threatened to throw the food overboard.

On the night of May 13, 1849, Captain Fairfowl almost ran the
Osceola
into a reef off the Chilean coast. He was looking for Talcahuano, a popular port for whalers and passenger ships bound for California. After his near-collision, Fairfowl stayed close to the shore, hoping to find the right harbor. But the darkness obscured his view, and when day broke, a heavy fog fell. He piloted the
Osceola
into a small bay and dropped anchor. Once the haze lifted, he resolved to go ashore to try to figure out where they were, and gave the passengers permission to join him.

They learned that they were only twenty-seven miles from Talcahuano. As long as the wind kept blowing the
Osceola
toward the mouth of the bay, however, the ship couldn’t leave. Upham didn’t want to wait for the weather to change. He persuaded Fairfowl to let him and thirteen other passengers travel to Talcahuano on their own and reunite with the
Osceola
later. After the dreariness of life at sea, tramping through the Chilean countryside must have been invigorating, and Upham devoted long, colorful journal entries to it. He and his companions started down a muddy road lined with apple orchards, vineyards, and strawberry patches, stopping at huts along the way to sample the wine that people generously offered the travelers. Upham drank the wine, but immediately disliked the Chileans. He found them “idle, indolent,” “a poor, flea-bitten, priest-ridden people” who were too lazy to develop their great natural resources. The men he admired the most in Chile weren’t the Chileans but the American
expatriates who had become local entrepreneurs—men like Brooks, a New Englander who had deserted from a whaling ship six years earlier and now ran a profitable hotel. Upham saw Americans everywhere: the Chilean coast seemed overrun with them.

It took the
Osceola
another sixty-nine days from Talcahuano to reach California. On August 2, 1849, the passengers glimpsed land through the fog, and three days later, they passed through the Golden Gate into a harbor teeming with ships unloading people and cargo from every part of the world. After seven difficult months, they had arrived in San Francisco. It was a “queer place,” Upham wrote. San Francisco had grown rapidly in the past year, but it still seemed more like a large campsite than a proper town. Most of its five thousand residents lived in tents planted in the shifting sands along the beach or in the nearby dunes. They hadn’t come to build a community—many didn’t even share a common language—but to get rich as quickly as they could. Their ephemeral dwellings were regularly incinerated by fires, only to be rebuilt within weeks. When heavy rains fell in the winter of 1849–1850, the streets they hadn’t bothered to pave flooded—Upham, who witnessed the deluge, saw men and mules drowning in “rivers of mud.” San Francisco wasn’t a destination but a transit point for people headed to the mines farther east. Its most perma-nent establishments were those that catered to the appetites of the mostly male newcomers, places where they could drink, gamble, and fornicate before trekking into the interior to look for gold.

Upham pitched his tent in a portion of the beach called Happy Valley. In his pocket was $6.75; he would need more money to make it to the mines, so he took a job at a lumberyard. Instead of recoiling from San Francisco’s rawness, Upham enjoyed it. He felt it had a democratizing effect. “A graduate of Yale considers it no disgrace to sell peanuts,” he noted approvingly. In California the aristocratic distinctions of the East meant nothing; men competed as equals, and succeeded through their own initiative and hard work. Determined to try his luck in the mines,
Upham booked passage in September aboard a ship that sailed up the San Joaquin River to Stockton, an inland town about ninety miles away. From there, he hired muleteers to take him to the Calaveras River and, armed with a pick, a crowbar, a spade, and a tin pan, began panning for gold. Upham would dig dirt from the riverbed and then place it in a pan with water, letting the heavier gold dust settle to the bottom and the rest wash off. On his first day, he extracted a quarter of an ounce of gold this way. He dedicated himself to the task, waking up at dawn and toiling for hours, moving boulders to locate richer lodes underneath.

The successful prospectors, he noticed, were those who took a patient, methodical approach. “Those who had expected to realize a fortune in a few days or weeks were sadly disappointed,” Upham remarked. His persistence paid off, as when he found a patch of earth that held almost $400 worth of gold. But the job proved too physically demanding. In Philadelphia he had worked behind a desk, and he wasn’t accustomed to strenuous manual labor. After nearly a month of mining, Upham’s joints became so badly swollen that he could barely walk. He had no choice but to sell his tools and quit.

When Upham returned to San Francisco in November 1849, he couldn’t believe how dramatically it had grown in his absence. “The saw and hammer of the carpenter could be heard in every square, and the voice of the crier and the auctioneer at the corner of nearly every street,” he marveled. The campsite was becoming a city: the flimsy canvas tents had given way to sturdier wooden structures, built to accommodate an exploding population. Every day more gold-seekers showed up on the piers, and by the end of the year, around twenty-five thousand people lived in San Francisco. This influx created a huge demand for goods, and Upham came up with a plan. “I had a vision,” he recalled, “and in that vision I saw—pickles.” He bought cucumbers and vinegar from a ship newly arrived from Boston and cornered the market on pickles. Within a week he had netted $300, and soon started another profitable trade in tobacco pipes.

While he clearly had a gift for it, Upham hadn’t sailed twenty thousand miles to sell pickles and pipes. If he couldn’t dig for gold, he needed to find a satisfying way to spend his time or he might as well go home. So he closed his business and applied for a position signing up subscribers for a local newspaper, the
Pacific News
. Published by a pair of former gold prospectors who met in Chile on their way to California, the
News
appeared three times a week and cost twelve and a half cents. It carried reports from all over California as well as news from faraway capitals like Havana and Rome. San Francisco’s isolated residents craved information from the outside world, and Upham had no trouble increasing the newspaper’s circulation. The
News
’s publishers rewarded him by hiring him as their bookkeeper and providing him with a bunk in their offices where he could sleep.

Living and working in the rudimentary wood-frame building on Kearny Street that housed the
News
thrust Upham right into the hectic heart of early San Francisco. The newspaper was located north of the Plaza, which had been the town’s center since its early days as a Mexican village. When something significant happened, like a fiery political speech or San Francisco’s first theatrical performance, it took place in the Plaza. So many pairs of boots had trampled it that no grass could grow, and on the brown ground merchants had set up stalls to peddle items from the different continents represented by the swarm of ships in the harbor.

Upham loved newspapers. They appealed to his fondness for hard facts and engaging anecdotes. The
Pacific News
printed wholesale prices, election returns, and firsthand stories from the mines. It did for the citizens of San Francisco what Upham had been doing privately in his journal since departing Philadelphia: documenting what might otherwise go unrecorded. Upham liked the
News
but wanted to be more than an accountant. So in the spring of 1850, when a New Orleans printer named George Kenyon Fitch invited him to help publish a newspaper in Sacramento City, he agreed. They rented the second floor of a house near the American River
and assembled the first issue of the
Sacramento Transcript
. Upham slept on the office counter, using a roll of paper for a pillow. He served not only as the newspaper’s business manager but also as its local reporter. While Sacramento was only a fraction of the size of San Francisco, it didn’t lack for excitement. In the summer after Upham arrived, a dispute over land titles escalated into a firefight between an angry mob of squatters and a group of armed citizens. The sheriff was shot dead, but the mayor survived.

Upham had come west for gold but found something else: a society in the process of being created. He felt exhilarated by the “almost magical” growth of Sacramento, watching its residents build the town’s first levee or organize its first concerts. These weren’t prospectors but pioneers, people who, like his ancestor John Upham, cleared the wilderness and planted the standard of civilization. Upham could have become one of them but he had a family waiting for him in Philadelphia, and in late August 1850, he decided to return home. He sold his stake in the
Transcript
and set off for San Francisco, where he began the voyage east. His friends at the newspaper were sorry to see him go. “We sincerely wish him a speedy return to his family,” they wrote in their announcement of Upham’s departure, “and success in the business in which he may hereafter engage.”