The Age of Gold (32 page)

Sarah avoided the rougher aspects of camp life whenever possible. She eschewed liquor and gambling. But she couldn’t keep entirely clear of the rowdiness. Like many camps, Weaverville was situated on two sides of a canyon. On the slope opposite the Royce residence was a saloon. At night the revelers regularly interrupted her and Josiah’s slumber, but one evening in particular stuck in her memory. “That was past midnight, one rainy, dark night, when we were startled from sleep by a loud shout, followed by various outcries, several running footsteps, and three or four pistol shots.” She and Josiah peered through the dimness to discern the cause of the shooting, but buildings and trees blocked the view. “The next morning we were told by one who had inquired, that a gambler who had lost several times, and saw himself about to lose again, had snatched all the money from the table by a sudden movement, and fled out into the darkness before any one had been aware of his intentions. Then, two or three had followed with shots; but he had escaped them.”

In some cases the boisterousness reflected nothing more than the need of men, mostly young, who spent long days at hard labor, to blow off steam. In other cases, however, it appeared—to Sarah, at any rate—to indicate an undercurrent of discontent and sadness that ran through the camp.

Some of Sarah’s neighbors, a crew from Missouri, had traversed the continent without once removing their clothes, not even their boots, and subsisting the whole time on salt meat and hardtack. “Of course disease claimed them as natural prey.” One died soon after arrival; the rest fell critically ill.

So did others more fastidious (including Hugh Heiskell, although Sarah seems not to have known him by name). Josiah contracted cholera upon his return from Sacramento. Sarah herself came down with the disease several days later. But through good luck, and perhaps because their strength had revived somewhat since reaching Weaverville, both survived.

T
OM ARCHER FOUND
life in California to be almost as arbitrary as Hugh Heiskell did, although in Archer’s case it was his friend Ned Hawkins who paid the ultimate price. Archer and Hawkins might have been excused for thinking all of Australia had come to California. Their ship had hardly anchored in the cove of San Francisco when a boat from a vessel out of Hobart dropped by to wish g’day. After conversing with Archer for some time, one of the Hobarters asked him his name. Upon being told, this fellow declared that he had been thinking that Archer looked familiar: Archer’s very brother was the captain of the Hobart ship. “I soon found myself on board the
Harriet Nathan
of Hobart Town,” Archer afterward told his children,
“shaking hands with her captain, your Uncle John, whose surprise at seeing me was, as may be imagined, very great.” Ned Hawkins ran into a brother- in-law, a man named Bertelsen who, though a nautical novice, had recently been promoted to first mate of another Australian craft when the entire regular crew abandoned ship for the mines.

Maybe it was all the familiar faces and accents, or perhaps it was that the land they came from was as rough and raw, in its own way, as California, but most of the Australians had few complaints about the lack of civic life and amenities in San Francisco. As Tom Archer wandered the city, he concluded that San Francisco’s shortcomings simply gave scope to what he called “the true and very enviable Yankee philosophy” that characterized the American approach to adversity. Archer was walking about one day, after some heavy rain.

Archer and Hawkins had reached California financially sound, and, having learned that the most convenient route to Sacramento and the northern mines was the Sacramento River, they purchased a ship’s longboat (these sold cheap, with so many ships abandoned). They piled their provisions aboard and headed northeast across San Francisco Bay, accompanied by a man named Mackenzie, another named Hicks, the two Chinese and the two aborigine boys Hawkins had brought over from Australia, and the two aborigines who came with Archer.

Between the provisions and the ten persons, the boat rode low in the
water. But the breeze was fair, filling the boat’s small sail, and they made the crossing of the northern arm of San Francisco Bay to the Strait of Beni- cia in fine shape. They landed at the town of Benicia, whose promoters proclaimed that it would supplant San Francisco as the hub of the region. So far it hadn’t, and the Australians spent no more time there than they required to purchase a few additional supplies. They sailed and rowed east across Suisun Bay toward the mouth of the Sacramento. But night fell and the tide ebbed while they were still several miles from the river, and they decided to drop anchor till dawn. All bundled themselves against the cold wind, shut their ears to the honking of the waterfowl that made the Sacramento delta their home, and tried to sleep.

They were shocked awake when they felt the boat listing sharply and the bay water rushing in. The anchor had got stuck in the mud of the bay floor as the tide changed, and the flood tipped them over. All were tumbled into the watery blackness—freezing, disoriented, and uncertain where the nearest land lay, or how far. Mackenzie managed to clamber atop the capsized boat, as did one of Hawkins’s aborigine boys and both of Archer’s. Hicks was nowhere to be seen, which wasn’t surprising in that he was a known nonswimmer. But Hawkins, a strong swimmer, was missing, too. Archer could also swim, and made it onto the boat’s bottom. (The two Chinese apparently had debarked at Benicia.)

Look and call as they might, the survivors found no trace of Hawkins, Hicks, or the missing boy. Archer hardly knew Hicks or the aborigine boy, but the loss of Hawkins, his companion from the outback, hit him with tragic force. And it was all the more tragic for the mystery it entailed. “I have never been able to understand his having disappeared without attempting to reach us, or making any reply to our calls. But so it was, and thus ended the life of one of the most manly, most generous, and most kindhearted friends I ever had.”

Soaking wet, splashed by wave and cut by winter wind, the survivors faced imminent death by exposure. Fortunately, the night was nearly spent; at first light Archer and Mackenzie determined that they must swim for land. “Telling the black-boys, who could all swim, to follow us, we struck out for the shore, agreeing to keep low down in the water, and swim very
slowly, so as to save our strength as long as possible. The friction of the water, and the shelter it gave us from the icy, bitter wind, and the exercise of swimming, restored our circulation to some extent, and we had progressed three or four hundred yards when it occurred to me that, though not very tired, I might as well put my feet down and try for the bottom. I did so, and to my amazement and joy, found that I could touch it with my toes and still keep my chin above water.” Mackenzie, shorter than Archer, had to swim farther, but soon he too could stand up. The pair then looked back for the boys, only to discover that they had disappeared. Archer and Mackenzie shouted and scanned the surface of the water, but saw nothing. (As Archer learned later, the boys, despairing of reaching shore, had swum back to the boat to await rescue. Two of them hung on there till a passing craft found them. The third, frozen and exhausted, was washed overboard by the waves and drowned.)

All that Archer owned was lost in the boat, even the clothes on his back, jettisoned before the swim to shore. Making his way to Benicia, he begged two suits of clothing from a merciful merchant, one for himself and one for Mackenzie. The two decided Sacramento wasn’t the place for them—a decision fate seemed already to have made—and they determined on Stockton instead. A man with a whaleboat was going that direction; in exchange for their labor rowing he let them come along.

Stockton had pretensions but little substance. The streets were quagmires, the buildings flimsy and miserable. Yet it offered work to willing hands, and Archer and Mackenzie took up the building trade. For a half ounce of gold per day they hammered and sawed, and saved. They also observed. One day they encountered a group of about fifty Chinese marching, or rather jogging, into the town from the west. Each one carried a pole over his shoulder; from the poles hung what appeared to be their entire possessions. Inquiring, Archer learned that they had been expelled from the diggings by whites who “jumped” their claims. “This, I thought at the time, was somewhat odd in a ‘free country,’ but I got more used to such things by and by.”

Archer and Mackenzie eventually gathered the wherewithal to purchase a minimal kit of mining tools. They ascended the Stanislaus River to
a region crowded with miners. For two weeks they panned here and there, with no success. All the good stretches of streambed had been taken; what was left hardly repaid the effort. Their resources were dwindling, and their future once more looked grim. But then the clouds parted.

ARCHER’S INSIGHT WAS characteristic of the empirical science practiced in the goldfields. The first miners correctly inferred that the gold found its way to the stream bottoms by the erosive action of water, and the first digging was done along current watercourses. Subsequent arrivals, including
those forced to look elsewhere after all the good beaches and bars were taken, reckoned that where rivers had formerly flowed, gold might remain. These dry streambeds, of ancient or recent vintage, attracted the second set of miners, men like Tom Archer. The digging they required was typically difficult and extensive, as the overburden of nonpaying dirt had to be removed before the pay dirt was struck.

Sometimes the pay dirt was very rich, as in Archer’s case. Sometimes it was less so. Jean-Nicolas Perlot eventually managed to amass enough capital to prospect for himself. But getting started required deciding where to dig. “I saw many places, but I was always faced by the same difficulty: How to distinguish the good from the bad? And in a good claim, how to know where the rich vein is? How, under six or ten feet of earth, to foresee where to find the most auriferous dirt, the
balux
?” With other miners, Per- lot carefully observed those who seemed to be doing well. In the case of the Mariposa, the best miners were the Sonorans, of whom three worked nearby. “They were miners in their own country; they should know the secrets of the craft; they had not established themselves by chance on the claim they were occupying. They had examined the rock at each turn of the river, had sounded it, had consulted among themselves; then by way of conclusion had started to dig a pit on the flat, at the foot of the hillside, and fairly far from the riverbed. They had come to a good conclusion, it seemed, for they were finding gold.” How did they know what they knew? Perlot tried to ask them. But his Spanish was no better than their French. “Whether they did not understand me or did not want to understand me, I could draw nothing from them.” He returned to his observations.

After a time he and a partner named Bérenger—the last of La Fortune—attempted to employ what Perlot had learned. Perlot proposed digging a test hole “at the bottom of a big flat where I thought I had observed that the river, in times past, must have deposited the same alluvium as where the three Mexicans were working; there was, in fact, the same lay of the land.” Bérenger agreed that this was a sound plan. They began digging the test hole. To their chagrin, fellow miners and passersby, including some former partners, laughed at their efforts and derided their choice of claim. “However, we continued to dig without paying attention to these remarks
and, at the depth of six feet, we observed that the gravel contained gold.” Two feet farther down they hit bedrock.