The Age of Gold (18 page)

Anything would have been anticlimactic for the
Challenge
. The weather improved, and with it Waterman’s treatment of his men. The ship again made swift sailing, but not nearly swift enough for the captain to win his ten-thousand-dollar prize. The
Challenge
anchored at San Francisco on the 108th day from New York. For such consolation as the coincidence offered, the eighteen days by which Waterman missed his mark was precisely the duration of the storm off Cape Horn.

The amphibious assault on California—across the Pacific, via the isthmus, and around the Horn—was a chapter of world history. A great many of the invaders, including an initial majority, were from countries other than the United States; and even the Americans who entered California at Monterey or through the Golden Gate had spent most of their journey in international waters, mingling their aspirations and experiences on equal terms with those of their fellow inhabitants of the blue planet.

By contrast, the invasion of California by land was a fundamentally American affair. Some Mexicans came north over the border, but by far the majority of those who reached the goldfields afoot were from the United States. These were the quintessential Forty-Niners, migrants in the mode of westering that had marked American history from the early seventeenth century. Their numbers outstripped those of the seaborne assailants, and their place in American memory would loom even larger than their numbers warranted.

A prime reason for the outsized memory was the nature of the overland journey. Although much shorter in distance than the isthmus route, and far shorter still than the Cape route, the overland route was by certain measures the longest, for it required travelers to cross not just distance but ignorance. Since the early nineteenth century, explorers (including John
Frémont) and traders had traveled from the Mississippi Valley to the West Coast; more recently emigrants to Oregon had pushed out across the plains and mountains. But vast reaches of the continent west of the 100th meridian remained terra incognita to all but the aboriginal inhabitants—who knew enough to stay out of the most desolate zones. This was more than many of the argonauts knew. Although most of the Forty-Niners kept to well-trod trails, some of the more impetuous, reckless, or greedy struck out on their own, with results that made even the survivors shudder.

Those who chose the overland route did so for various reasons. Some shunned ships from fear of drowning, in much the way some travelers in a later era would shun airplanes from fear of crashing. For a larger number, the primary consideration was cost. The widely circulated
Emigrants’ Guide to California
, printed in early 1849, explained that the least expensive sea voyages to California cost three hundred dollars per person, while the overland route would set the gold-seeker back but fifty or sixty. This overland estimate was a net figure; the cash outlay at the start of the journey was greater, perhaps three times as much, but the overlanders would arrive with wagons and teams of mules or oxen that would command top prices in California, where a substantial portion of the initial outlay might be recouped.

The cash required at the start prevented the really poor from making the trek, but within a broad band of middle means, the overlanders were a diverse group. They hailed from the North and from the South, from the East and from the West (as the West was then understood, extending from the Appalachians to the Mississippi Valley). They were farmers and townsfolk, merchants and ministers, lawyers and doctors and teachers, slaveholders and slaves, freedmen and abolitionists, white and black and brown and occasionally red.

All sought wealth; nearly all sought adventure too. The news from California was the most exciting most of them had ever heard; the rush to California promised to be the event of their lifetime. Like little boys hurrying to greet the circus, to catch a glimpse of the mighty elephant, the emigrants of 1849 couldn’t bear to miss out—and in fact the phrase “to see the elephant” became a cliché on the trail. To neglect this opportunity would
be to guarantee future regret; to seize it would be to partake of something truly historic and wonderful.

H
UGH HEISKELL HEARD
the news in Knoxville, Tennessee. Hugh’s father, Frederick Heiskell, was a mainstay of the East Tennessee community: former owner and editor of the
Knoxville Register
; present proprietor of Fruit Hill, a twelve-hundred-acre farm ten miles from town; senator in the Tennessee legislature. Hugh was one of ten children (and one of thirty- five first cousins living within a day’s drive of Knoxville). He showed promise as a gentleman farmer, and when Frederick went off to Nashville on government business during Hugh’s twenty-second year, Hugh took charge of Fruit Hill with his mother, Eliza. Interestingly, during the precise months in the autumn of 1847 when James Marshall was digging a millrace at Coloma, Hugh Heiskell was doing the same at Fruit Hill. When the autumn rains came, Heiskell’s luck was worse than Marshall’s, for a flood burst the mill dam at the Tennessee farm, forcing Heiskell to excavate a new channel. “Hugh is making a perfect slave of himself,” his mother reported to Hugh’s father.

That was the problem, as Hugh saw it. In a state and a region that knew what slaves were, he had no desire to slave away at farming. “Farmers don’t often dream; their sleep is too sound,” he explained to his sister Margaret. He added, “Following a plough, staggering and stumbling over clods all day, is anything but poetry.”

Hugh would have settled for prose: the prose of the lawyer. He studied law, evidently in the office of one of Frederick’s friends. By early 1849 he had completed his studies and was ready to hang out his shingle.

But then came the news from California. In Tennessee as elsewhere, certain civic guardians tried to dampen the enthusiasm for the goldfields and thereby forestall the depopulation of their own communities. A newspaper in Franklin, Tennessee, reprinted a letter from a traveler to California: “I have seen those who started from the borders of Missouri hale and stalwart men, hobble down into the plains of California crippled for life. I have seen brothers, who in the madness of hunger have fought for the last
bit of their father’s dead body.” The
Western Star
of Pulaski, Tennessee, lampooned the gold-seekers in verse, concluding:

But others celebrated the golden promise. One paper ran a letter from a Tennesseean just arrived in California: “Men are here nearly crazed with the riches forced suddenly into their pockets…. The accounts you have seen of the gold region are
not overcolored
….
The gold is positively inexhaustible
.” Various editors characterized the argonauts’ rush to California as part of the march of civilization and religion. In the words of the Memphis
Daily Eagle
: “They go as agents of social comfort, moral progress, expanding civilization and diffused thought, and (noblest of achievements) run high up into the heavens of strange lands, the cross-crowned spire, symbol of a true faith and prophecy of a sure eternity. Those who go to California may not know it, but they are society’s, or rather God’s, agents to these wonderful ends.”

Naturally—again as elsewhere—much of the enthusiasm reflected an expectation that the rush to California would be good for business. A Memphis merchant advertised:

The co-owner of the
Nashville Daily American
advertised something of a different sort—his share of the paper.

Hugh Heiskell caught the fever. Despite the promise of his law practice, he opted for adventure and quick riches. Scores of emigrant groups were being organized in the area; Heiskell selected one headed by James Bicknell of Madisonville. Bicknell had been a farmer, a politician, a postmaster, a shopkeeper, and a soldier in the Fifth Tennessee Volunteers in the Mexican War. He was also the husband of Hugh Heiskell’s cousin Elizabeth Heiskell. Elizabeth’s brother Tyler Heiskell, a recent college graduate, was another member of the Bicknell company, as was Oliver White, a beginning doctor who decided that Madisonville, with four physicians already for its four hundred inhabitants, wasn’t the place to commence a practice. Oliver White’s brother Richard and four others rounded out the crew.

Early in the planning, James Bicknell contacted Donald Campbell, a former Tennesseean who had drifted down the Tennessee River into Alabama. Campbell had tried farming but found it unrewarding; consequently he welcomed the chance to dig for gold. Campbell organized a company consisting of himself, his three brothers, a slave youth named Alex, two young free blacks, and a handful of others. The Tennesseeans proposed to steam down the Tennessee to the Mississippi River; they would pick up Campbell’s Alabama company on the way.

Hugh Heiskell and the others left Knoxville on April 16, 1849, aboard the shallow-draft steamer
Cassandra
. The boat carried them without incident to Decatur, Alabama, where the rapids of Muscle Shoals compelled the upper-river boats to turn around. Continuing passengers traveled overland
via horse-drawn railcars to Tuscumbia. There the Bicknell company met their Alabama partners and embarked on a lower-river packet for Paducah, Kentucky. At Paducah they caught one of the steamboats on the Cincinnati–St. Louis run, vessels that for speed and style outstripped anything on the Tennessee. At St. Louis they switched to a Missouri River boat that carried them west up the Big Muddy to St. Joseph, Missouri, one of the principal jumping-off points for Oregon and California.

W
ILLIAM SWAIN WAS
a less likely argonaut than Hugh Heiskell, in that while Heiskell had neither wife nor child, Swain had both. Swain had just begun a career as a schoolteacher in upstate New York, north of Buffalo, when he met Sabrina Barrett at a spelling bee. Within a year they were married. A year after that—while the news from California was working its way east—Sabrina bore William a daughter, Eliza.

Perhaps family life wasn’t everything Swain had hoped. Perhaps, having lived his entire twenty-six years almost within the spray of Niagara Falls, he felt his horizons contracting prematurely. Swain had read the romances of Walter Scott and the truer but no less romantic tales of John (and Jessie) Frémont. At one point he considered a military career. But then his father died, and with his mother, Patience, and bachelor brother, George, he inherited the family farm. His share in the farm was his sole capital, which under the circumstances of multiple shareholding was essentially illiquid. Nor, on a teacher’s salary, and supporting a wife and child, could he hope to save more than pocket money. Between the farm and his two families, his life appeared bleakly predictable.

Then came word of the gold strike. As everywhere else, staid voices tried to keep the young men home. “We are quite sure that it is the duty of newspapers to use all the means in their power to repress rather than stimulate the prevailing excitement,” intoned the Buffalo
Morning Express
. But, again as everywhere else, the naysaying often fell on ears attuned to a sweeter siren, in this case rendered by a California correspondent to the same paper, who wrote, “Many men who began last June to dig for gold with capital of $50 can now show $5,000 to $15,000.”

Such statements supplied the moral cover Swain needed to bolt the farm, abandon Sabrina and Eliza, and embark on the great adventure of his heretofore adventureless life. Sabrina pleaded with him to stay; Eliza seconded her mother, at least by Sabrina’s interpretation of the baby’s cries. Sabrina’s plea doubtless reflected her love for her husband; it may also have reflected the fact that with William gone, she would be stuck in the house of her in-laws. But William wouldn’t be deterred. Here was the chance of a lifetime—of
their
lifetime, he explained. He wouldn’t be gone long: a year, two at the most, only long enough to make a few thousand dollars, which would allow them to buy a place of their own, away from Patience and George.

Swain had no trouble finding companions for the journey west. Frederick Bailey’s story was similar to Swain’s; at thirty he had a wife, son, and few prospects. John Root was nineteen and unattached. Michael Hutchinson, forty-three, was a childless widower.

The foursome embarked in mid-April 1849 from Buffalo. By steamboat they traversed Lake Erie to Detroit, planning to proceed by train across Michigan. “But after learning that the fare to Niles [Michigan], 180 miles to the west, was $6,” Swain explained to brother George, “that we would have to travel from there by stage forty miles to New Buffalo and thence from there by steamboat to Chicago for $6 more; that it would take three days on that route; and that the cars and boats did not run on Sunday, we concluded to take the lake route on account of its cheapness.” The lake steamer
Michigan
would carry them up Lake Huron, through the Straits of Mackinac, and down Lake Michigan to Chicago, in four days for $6. “We concluded that $6 or $8 saved in one day was better than gold-digging, and we took our passage on the steamer.”