A Crack in the Edge of the World (16 page)

Some still regard the war as a manifestation of President James Polk's bitter ambition to control this huge swath of western territory (not least to deny it to the British, who were also eyeing it hungrily). But, whatever his presumed motives, the consequences are with us still: firm American title to the land that comprises today's New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and much of Colorado and Wyoming—and, most important for this story, the 100 million acres of incomparably beautiful and fertile land that had long been separated from the others and named “California” by its former masters. All this was handed over by Mexico on that February day. In return the Mexican government was given a U.S. Treasury check for more than $18 million and a series of promises that, like so many made in international treaties, came to be honored more in the breach than in the observance.
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California's previous rulers—first the Spanish, who had planted the flag of Castile in San Diego in 1769,
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and then the Mexicans, who, once they themselves had wrestled free of Spanish rule in 1821, assumed control of what was then called the Department of Alta California—made pathetically little attempt to realize the potential of the territory. One after another visitors from other parts of Europe and from the American East Coast expressed bewildered astonishment at its woefully undeveloped condition, at the sadly unkempt ordinariness of a place that had the possibility to be, in more competent hands, truly extraordinary.

Richard Henry Dana, for example, the Harvard aesthete who briefly became a common seaman and worked his way aboard a sailing brig to California by way of Cape Horn in 1834, wrote scathingly of the inhabitants in the book that was to make his reputation,
Two Years Before the Mast
. The Californians,
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he wrote, “are an idle and thriftless people, and can make nothing for themselves. The country abounds in grapes, yet they buy bad wine made in Boston.” He added, with the scorn of a true-blue Brahmin who well knew his cobbling needs, that, rather than making shoes out of the hides so easily available on every farm and in every forest glade, these indolent and artless people imported them
from merchants back in Boston
—shoes that had been “as like as not made of their own hides, which have thus been carried twice around Cape Horn.”

Not everyone shared this view. Walter Colton, the kindly Vermont clergyman who would edit the state's first English-language newspaper and whose book
Three Years in California
would become a classic soon after its publication in 1850, spoke fondly of the courteous and leisure-loving citizens of those early times, and was highly critical of the practical effects of the state's Americanization by those he saw as greedy and amoral Yankees. But his was a minority view. Most other early visitors—men like George Vancouver and George Simpson from Britain, Count Nikolai Rezanov of the Russian-American Fur Company, the French explorer Jean-François La Pérouse and his fellow countryman Jean-Louis Vigne (who, as his name suggests, grew wine grapes and urged the practice on Californians)—said much the same
as Dana. Here was a place blessed by fair weather, pure streams, and fine-looking country; and yet the few thousand Californios who settled had made nothing of it. Content to be ruled by the primitive feudalism of the missions, or administered by the gasconading lickspittles of the Monterey bureaucracy, they were docile and placid and lacked all initiative, lived in gimcrack houses, drank bad wine, supped on rotten food, and had a look and feel about them that spoke of utter primitivism. Though to Walter Colton California was a noble paradise on the verge of ruin, to most others it seemed that, by settling in Mexican California, pre-American humankind had decided to step back in time. George Simpson, a grand panjandrum of the Hudson's Bay Company, thought they had done little more than adopt the ways of “the savages whom they have displaced.”

Such criticism was largely based on racial disdain, of course. Most white Americans of the time held most Mexicans in contempt, and felt that since it was their Manifest Destiny, to use the phrase of the day, to settle themselves eventually upon all of the continent with which Providence had supplied them, the presence of this rabble of dark-skinned Spanish-speaking hobbledehoys was an inconvenience that should swiftly be brought to an end.

Which is what began to happen from almost the very moment California was formally inducted into the United States. And, as this change took place, there came a transformation in the character and outlook of Californians themselves—although the roots of that transformation, the first stirrings of the spirit with which the state would be so amply endowed at the time of the earthquake, were probably discernible as far back as 1841, almost a decade before full statehood.

For this was when the first rush of settlers from the American Midwest began to arrive. Their long overland treks first brought in scores, and then hundreds and thousands, of Americans of great energy and a restless spirit who were in search of the then-not-so-elusive phenomenon that has since come to be called the California Dream. New Englanders were already living in California's western seaports—having come around by way of the long sea route—and trappers from outside had been camping in the forests and deserts of the east for years; but
by 1841, when the famous Bidwell Expedition set out in its immense wagon train from Independence, Missouri, word had gone out to all Americans that to the far west lay a land of perpetual springtime, and all who could come should come, and quickly.

John Bidwell, who died six years before the earthquake but who left a legacy of attitude and style that would direct the manner in which the city and the state dealt with the disaster, was the quintessential California Man—the fact that he was born into a farming family in western New York proving no bar to his becoming so. He lived in California for almost sixty useful and productive years, and in those six decades he saw his adopted state blossom into the greatest of all the American states.

With a caravan of six-horse Conestoga wagons and their lighter ox-drawn siblings, known later on as “prairie schooners,” the Bidwell party pushed their way west across the prairies and via wide passes through the Rockies, right up to the wheel-breaking granite fortress of the Sierra Nevadas. Here they had to leave their wagons and journey on horseback or on foot, and with trains of mules that had to be persuasively lashed to make their way up and across these great peaks. Bidwell knew that he was almost certainly the first American-born man
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ever to make this westbound journey.

(Jedediah Smith, among the most fabled of the American mountain men, a trapper and trader from Bainbridge, New York, was the first white man to cross the Sierra, in 1827. But he was going home, and was crossing in an easterly direction that would take him back into familiar territory. Smith had been the first American ever to cross into California from the east the year before; he had come by way of a much less mountainous—but more terribly hot and dry—southern route, through the hundreds of miles of the Mojave Desert. His reputation stems from this barely believable epic: With Indians slaughtering his men, with water running out in the scorching heat of cactus country, with long periods in the mountains when he had to endure
“my horses freezing, my men discouraged, and our utmost exertion necessary to keep from freezing to death,” he eventually made it, crossing into California and out again, all by land, and without a map of any kind to guide him. Had he left more writings behind, or had he lived longer, he would probably have enjoyed a reputation that seems less like a tale embroidered by fable and more like the kind of substantial life story of a Daniel Boone or a Davy Crockett. But it was not to be. He was eventually killed in his beloved Southwest, where a party of Comanches stabbed him to death at a watering hole near the Cimarron River in what is now New Mexico. He was on his way to trade in Santa Fe and was just a few days shy of his thirty-third birthday.)

Bidwell was more fortunate: He and his thirty-strong party found the proper westbound passes, endured the terrible mountain weather, and eventually descended into a valley, winning his first sighting of the Mexican department that would soon be America's newest acquisition. He was instantly aware of its riches. “It was apparently,” he wrote, “still just as new as when Columbus discovered America, and roaming over it were countless thousands of wild horses, of elk, and of antelope.”

He made some unsuccessful forays, got himself into trouble with the local Mexican authorities, and then decided to seek sanctuary in a curious European settlement of which he had long heard rumors. Some years before the Mexicans had granted a tract of 48,000 acres in the valley of the Sacramento River to a group who had come all the way from Austria. They had set up a tiny and self-sufficient colony and called it New Helvetia, and when Bidwell arrived it was still in the process of being built. The colony's leader was an Austrian-Swiss pioneer named Johan Suter, a man long fascinated by the American West who had sailed the long way around to California from New York by way of Honolulu and the Russian-Alaskan capital of Sitka. Once there he had changed his name to the one that is well known to all Americans today, but more for the wooden race of the mill he owned than for the details of the life he led: John Sutter.

Bidwell supposed he would get to New Helvetia in two days, but it took him eight. Winter, he wrote in a lengthy essay in the
Century
magazine, had come in earnest,

and winter in California then, as now, meant rain. I had three companions. It was wet when we started, and much of the time we traveled through a pouring rain. Streams were out of their banks; gulches were swimming; plains were inundated; indeed, most of the country was overflowed. There were no roads, merely paths, trodden only by Indians and wild game. We were compelled to follow the paths, even when they were under water, for the moment our animals stepped to one side down they went into the mire. Most of the way was through the region now lying between Lathrop and Sacramento. We got out of provisions and were about three days without food. Game was plentiful, but hard to shoot in the rain. Besides, it was impossible to keep our old flint-lock guns dry, and especially the powder dry in the pans. On the eighth day we came to Sutter's settlement; the fort had not then been begun. Sutter received us with open arms.

The bustling settlement, which at times had as many as a thousand residents, went on to become a model of prosperity. Bidwell and Sutter would become the firmest of friends as they set about turning Northern California into a place of gardens and croplands like no other region then known on the American continent. There were vineyards and orchards and wheatfields around Sutter's sawmill; there were a smithy, a distillery, and hundreds of acres of grazing pastures for herds of longhorn cattle.

John Bidwell adopted Sutter's ideas for a while, and raised cattle and wheat on a 22,000-acre estate that he managed to buy close to the present-day city of Chico.
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But soon the promise of horticulture seemed more thrilling than the pursuit of agriculture—gardening was more alluring than cultivating, as it has remained for the truck farmers of the Central Valley ever since. And so, on the wildflower-filled meadows
of his Chico land, Bidwell started a magnolia nursery; he planted large groves of peach trees, orchards of pears and apples, and small armies of different varieties of cherries. He experimented—at first with low-risk crops like oats and grapes; and then, as his confidence grew, with figs, quinces, walnuts, raisins, Egyptian corn, almonds, melons, sorghum, and olives. He imported threshing machines and built a cannery.

His energy and ambition were prodigious, virtues matched only by his piety (he became a devout Presbyterian) and his zealous abhorrence of strong drink. And it was in this one regard that John Bidwell did, eventually, come to depart from what would soon be the California norm. For once gold was found at his friend John Sutter's millrace in 1848, the trickle of immigrant pioneers grew to an overwhelming flood, and such niceties as Christian charity and respect for the ladies and abstinence from strong drink vanished, almost overnight, from California society. The well-mannered order that men like Sutter and Bidwell had brought to replace the idle apathy of Californians was itself suddenly replaced by a tidal wave of abandon and turpitude.

When James Marshall spotted those flakes of gold late in the afternoon of January 24, 1848,
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the population of California was not much more than 18,000—a fivefold increase from ten years before, to be sure, but an increase that was by no means suggestive of the goldstruck migrant invasion that was about to begin. Came the Gold Rush, however, everything precipitously and dramatically changed. It was by the purest coincidence that just nine days after the find, the territory on which the gold was discovered changed hands, and what had been Mexican became, indubitably and eternally, American.

Yet when thousands upon thousands abandoned their roles as
wretches and wage slaves in faraway factories and headed off to California, they found a country that, though technically American, still had no constitution, no settled system of law, no firm notion of statehood or any timetable for it, no reliable system of justice—not even a fixed eastern boundary.
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This was America raw and unprepared, and it was about to undergo as profound a change of nature as it is possible to imagine.

When newfound nuggets of placer gold were brought out for display, everyone was amazed. Walter Colton wrote of the mood of unbridled elation that gripped almost all who saw the metal and understood its promise:

The excitement produced was intense; and many were soon busy in their hasty preparations for a departure to the mines. The family who had kept house for me caught the moving infection. Husband and wife were both packing up; the blacksmith dropped his hammer, the carpenter his plane, the mason his trowel, the farmer his sickle, the baker his loaf and the tapster his bottle. All were off for the mines, some on horses, some on carts, and some on crutches, and one went in a litter. An American woman, who had recently established a boarding-house here, pulled up stakes and was off before her lodgers had even time to pay their bills. Debtors ran, of course. I have only a community of women left, and a gang of prisoners, with here and there a soldier, who will give his captain the slip at the first chance. I don't blame the fellow a whit; seven dollars a month, while others are making two or three hundred a day! That is too much for human nature to stand.