Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (3 page)

By the mid-1850s, San Francisco was a city of seventy-five thousand, supporting five hundred saloons and twice as many gambling dens. Each day thirty houses went up, two people died by knife or gun, and one fire broke out. Her more prominent citizenry sported the latest fashions from Paris and filled two-thousand-seat theaters nightly.

Richard Henry Dana had sailed into a pristine San Francisco Bay aboard a hide ship in 1835 and later described it in his classic,
Two Years Before the Mast
. “If California ever becomes a prosperous country,” wrote Dana, “this bay will be the centre of its prosperity.” Yet at that time, besides the ruins of the presidio and an almost deserted mission, in the whole area, smoke rose from the chimney of a single fur trader’s shanty on the far eastern shore.

Twenty-four years later, in 1859, Dana returned. He arrived at midnight aboard a steamer and took a room at a hotel, which as close as he could ascertain, stood near the spot where he and the crew had beached the boats from the hide ship. The site had changed. “I awoke in the morning,” wrote Dana, “and looked from my windows over the city of San Francisco, with its storehouses, towers, and steeples; its court-houses, theatres, and hospitals; its daily journals; its well-filled learned professions; its fortresses and light-houses; its wharves and harbor, with their thousand-ton clipper ships, more in number than London or Liverpool sheltered that day, itself one of the capitals of the American Republic, and the sole emporium of a new world, the awakened Pacific.”

Occupying an outpost of prosperity still in the far reaches of the continent, San Franciscans communicated with the rest of the world by steamship. Along their broad promenades the steamers carried mail and merchandise and new settlers, and brought news and ideas and fashion from the outside world. California became a state on September 9, 1850, but no one in California knew until six weeks later, when the
Oregon
steamed into San Francisco Bay draped in banners and national flags and firing its big guns.

From 1849 to 1869, 410,000 passengers traveled west over Panama, and another 232,000 journeyed back east. Of those who crossed the Great Plains on foot, most returned by sea. The Panama route was the quickest and the safest, and the ships carried passengers of means, persons helping to shape the American West, and for the first twenty years they carried nearly every ounce of California’s precious export, the only thing besides land that California had and everyone else wanted: gold. Officially cataloged, duly recorded and delivered, $711 million in gold passed over the Panama route, and $46 million went via another route later established across Nicaragua. On steamer day, crowds of merchants, shippers, passengers, and well-wishers packed the wharf and scurried among hand carts and wagons, coaches and cabs, past agents of the press gathering information for the shipping register. It was a time of settling accounts, remitting to eastern creditors, and taking stock of mercantile affairs, “a time of feverish activity,” noted one merchant. Goods and gold had to be properly consigned with official receipts, first- and second-class staterooms had to be readied, barrels of beef and flour had to be loaded, and the baggage for five hundred passengers leaving San Francisco for several months had to be stowed. Below, coal tenders ran coal from the bunkers to the furnace amidships, stoking the fires for departure. Every two weeks, a steamer departed San Francisco, with cargo and passengers bound for the East, and carrying a commercial shipment of gold weighing close to three tons.

T
HE MORNING OF
August 20, 1857, the sidewheel steamer SS
Sonora
lay tight to the wharf on Vallejo Street, her gangways aflow with human bodies dodging big trunks, little trunks, valises, carpetbags, bedding, and
bundles. Men in long jackets and stovepipe hats conversed in clusters. Light breezes off the bay caused the hooped dresses of the women to dance about their waists. From the heart of the city, a wedding procession wound toward the wharf, a horse-drawn carriage surrounded by the wedding party. When the procession arrived, the bride and groom alighted from the carriage and mounted the gangway, the bride still in her wedding gown. She was Adeline Mills Easton, the petite, vivacious sister of Darius Ogden Mills, who later founded the Bank of California and was one of the richest men in the state. Addie’s husband, Ansel Easton, had immigrated to California in early 1850 and built a fortune selling furnishings to the new steamship lines. He now raised thorough-bred horses on his fifteen-hundred-acre estate south of San Francisco. As they hurried up the gangway swinging baskets of wedding gifts and carrying hampers of wine and sweet cakes, the wedding party swept Ansel and Addie across the promenade deck with wishes for a bon voyage and a happy life together.

Approaching the quay was another young couple easily recognized in San Francisco, the famous minstrel and actor Billy Birch and his bride of one day, Virginia. Recently, the newspaper
Alta California
had applauded Birch as “the bright, particular star of the San Francisco Minstrels.” He sang “The Grape Vine Twist” and “I’m Fatter Than I Wish to Be” and starred in farces like
The Rival Tragedians
. A year earlier, the theater critic for the
San Francisco Alta
had written that “the very sight of Billy Birch is enough to make a cynic laugh.” Birch had just concluded a successful engagement at Maguire’s Opera House and was on his way to join Bryant’s Minstrels in New York City. His new bride, as one journalist described her, was “young, petite in form, and in personal appearance very attractive; added to this, she is possessed of a lively vivacity which renders her very interesting in conversation.” As she walked the gangway to the
Sonora
’s deck, Virginia carried a small cage housing a yellow canary.

Another Birch in the crowd, no relation to Billy, was James Birch, a thick-chested man who had been a stagecoach driver in Providence, Rhode Island, and had trekked to California overland in 1849. Within five years, he had become president of the California Stage Company, then resigned to establish a stage line between Texas and California,
which would complete the first transcontinental stagecoach route. The previous year, Birch’s wife had given birth to a son, and to honor the birth, a friend in San Francisco had given Birch a sterling silver cup. With his family residing in Massachusetts, Birch carried the cup with him now to present to his infant son.

Among the clusters of men along the quay stood one man with thin hair carefully parted and slicked down, a large nose, and wide mutton-chops in a cotton candy cloud out two inches from his jowls: Judge Alonzo Castle Monson. A native of New York, Monson had graduated from Yale in 1840 and from Columbia Law School in 1844. Five years later he had migrated to California, one of the original forty-niners, and within three years took the bench in the geographic heart of the gold rush, Sacramento County. The
San Francisco Alta
claimed, “No more capable or efficient judge ever sat upon the bench in California.” However, Judge Monson soared to legendary status in the gold country not for his intellect, but for losing his house in a poker game. As one newspaper discreetly put it, the judge “sported” to the limit.

The first-class passengers boarded at their leisure. Their three-hundred-dollar fare entitled them to a private cabin aft, where the ship rode smoother, a porthole looked out across the ocean, and the inner door opened onto the main deck dining saloon. Each private cabin contained three cushioned berths, one above the other, a locker, a mirror, toilet, washbowl, and water bottles and glasses. Carpet covered the floors, and layered damask and cambric curtains screened the berths.

Around the ticket office, nearly four hundred steerage passengers now clamored for the best berths forward in the hold. The hold was cramped and hot, the air damp, and the berths stacked three high, often no more than two feet side to side separating the tiers. A higher berth near a porthole to let in sunlight and fresh air made the trip in steerage tolerable.

One steerage passenger among the throng was Oliver Perry Manlove, a spirited young man who with three other men, a wagon, and four yoke of cattle, had set out from Wisconsin and crossed the prairie on foot in 1854. Manlove recorded every mile of the journey, a five-month search for grass and water to keep the animals alive, and for wood and game to keep the men warm and fed. In a train with three other wagons, they often
walked twenty-five miles a day. Sometimes they passed wagon trains as long as six miles, three hundred wagons, their white canvas stained yellow with beeswax, a thousand head of cattle trailing behind. “This was life in earnest,” wrote Manlove. “All rushing on to the Eldorado.”

Manlove counted the miles, the Indians, the crosses marking the graves of those who had died along the trail: This one hit by lightning, that one drowned, the other one stricken by disease, another shot. During the five months, he counted 205 crosses.

In September, two days short of his twenty-third birthday, Manlove had arrived at Nelson Creek, which emptied into the middle fork of the Feather River, which joined the main Feather north of Marysville at one of the richest strikes of the gold rush, Bidwell’s Bar. In a ravine only a few ridges south of Nelson Creek, three Germans had used penknives to pick $36,000 worth of gold out of cracks in the rock. News of the find had drawn thousands of other miners, several of whom washed $2,000 in gold in a single pan. A small party of men from Georgia pulled in $50,000 in one day.

Upon his arrival at Nelson Creek, Manlove wrote, “I had traded my rifle at a trading post for some clothing. This left me with only my satchel to carry, which contained my clothes with a Testament and a revolver—a six-shooter—strange company to be together. In my pocket book there was a half dollar, all the money I had in the world.”

Like Manlove, most of the miners exhausted their money and supplies just getting to California, and they were dumbfounded at the cost of living and the difficulty of the work when they did. As promised, the gold was there, but the luck to find it and the labor to remove it had been greatly underestimated. To stay alive in the diggings, a miner had to find between a half ounce and an ounce of gold, between eight dollars and sixteen dollars, each day to keep abreast of the cost of living in the camps and lay a little aside for the trip home. But most miners averaged no more than a few cents to a few dollars, and that was after squatting on their haunches at the edge of a stream for ten hours and washing fifty pans of sediment.

For three years, Manlove watched men blow off fingers and hands with blasting powder, drink, scar each other in fistfights, read the Bible, scrape fingernails to the quick handling river rock, and wander from
one claim to another, looking for profitable diggings, hoping and praying that the next shovelful would bring salvation. The miners wrote thousands of letters home, many telling of weariness, discouragement, and homesickness. The tales of rich finds were spectacular but few and always just over the next ridge.

When he left the diggings in July 1857, Manlove had been away from his Wisconsin farm nearly three and a half years. In that time he had sent a little money home, and he had a few hundred dollars left, just enough to pay for a berth in steerage on the fortnight steamer rather than walk back across the prairie.

L
ATE THAT MORNING
at the quay, the decks of the
Sonora
erupted in a frenzy when the captain sounded the final departure bell and those not sailing tried to depart against the tide of those still struggling to board. When the uproar subsided, the captain ordered the crew to cast off, and a pilot boat led the
Sonora
into the bay past Alcatraz Island and the lighthouse. Then free of her pilot, the
Sonora
passed through the Golden Gate and steamed out upon the broad Pacific, heading south, carrying five hundred passengers, thirty-eight thousand letters, and a consigned shipment of gold totaling $1,595,497.13.

For fourteen days, the
Sonora
would steam south and east toward Panama, where her passengers would transfer to the new open-air rail-cars and shimmy for forty-eight miles to the Caribbean port city of Aspinwall. There the passengers would embark on the Atlantic steamer SS
Central America
bound for New York, a final trip of nine days across the Caribbean and up the East Coast, with an overnight call in Havana.

SHIP OF GOLD

HAVANA

T
UESDAY
, S
EPTEMBER
8, 1857

T
HE GAS LAMPS
of Havana cast erratic ribbons of light out across the harbor, zigzagging among the dark silhouettes of more than a hundred ships at anchor. In the darkness, the SS
Central America
lay wrapped in the moist tropical air, her engines silent, her decks dimly lit and trod only by the night watch. In these predawn hours, her five hundred passengers slept with the ship motionless for the first time since departing Panama four days earlier.

High above the ships, at the mouth of the harbor, a massive brown escarpment called El Morro swept upward out of the sea. On top, the flag of Spain awaited the first light of day as it had ever since Columbus celebrated mass on the island three and a half centuries earlier. Then the first glimmer outlined El Morro, and slowly dawn touched the green
hills of Cuba, following them down to the sea, as the flag of Spain brightened to crimson and gold, and the
Central America
emerged from the darkness as the biggest ship in the harbor.

She was sleek and black, her decks scrubbed smooth with holystones, her deckhouses glistening with the yellowed patina of old varnish. Along her lower wale, a red stripe ran nearly three hundred feet stem to stern, and three masts the height and thickness of majestic trees rose from her decks. Spiderwebs of shrouds and stays held her masts taut, and in moments she could sprout full sail, but she rippled with real muscle amidships: two enormous steam engines with pistons that traveled ten feet on each downstroke and turned paddle wheels three stories high. Between the paddle wheels, the funnel rose thick and black above all save the masts.