Tag Archives: Gold Rush

November 13, 2013 · 3:46 am

Lonely Hearts in California

The Gold Rush (Source: Business Insider)

The Gold Rush (Source: Business Insider)

You know the old adage, “necessity is the mother of invention?” Necessity is also the mother of change in attitudes. When young men headed to the California gold fields, with few exceptions, they left the women behind. Most expected to get rich quick and return home with their plunder.

In the late 1840s, men in California outnumbered women by better than nineteen to one. Even at that, many of the women who made the hazardous journey to California sought their fortunes, not by mining California’s rivers for gold, but by selling their companionship to the highest bidder.

Back east, most states followed English common law and bestowed very few rights to women – forget the right to vote – most women enjoyed few property rights, their lot in life dictated by the whims of their husbands.

At the 1849 Monterey, California constitutional convention, California’s early leaders sought to improve their own marital chances by enacting liberal divorce and property laws. They adopted divorce laws that lowered the bar for an unhappy spouse to win court dissolution of an unhappy marriage.

The delegates also adopted the Spanish community property law model rather than the English common law model. This protected women’s property rights in two respects: (1) a woman controlled the property she acquired before marriage or by gift or inheritance during marriage; and (2) a husband and wife were treated as partners, each of whom would share equally in wealth accumulated during their marriage. Thus, a husband could not use his wife’s separate property as his own in some risky venture nor could a creditor go after the wife’s separate property to collect her husband’s debt. If a marriage ended in divorce, half of the property accumulated during the marriage was hers. [Caroline B. Newcombe, The Origin and Civil Law Foundation of the Community Property System, Why California Adopted It and Why Community Property Principles Benefit Women, 11 U. Md. L.J.  Race, Religion, Gender, and Class, Volume 11, Issue 1 (2011); http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/rrgc/vol11/Iss1/2%5D

The delegates clearly wished to motivate women to join them in California. The risk of losing a bride to divorce or losing property acquired during marriage paled in comparison to the enhanced opportunity of bringing members of the opposite sex to California’s shores. As one bachelor delegate said, “It is the very best provision to get us wives….” [Jo Ann Levy, They Saw the Elephant, p. 190 (Archon Books 1990)]

Henry Halleck, future Union general and thorn in General Grant’s side after the Battle of Shiloh, echoed the sentiment:

I am not wedded either to the common law or the civil law, nor, as yet to a woman; but having some hopes that some time or other I may be wedded, and wishing to avoid the fate of [an unmarried friend], I shall advocate this section in the constitution, and I would call upon all the bachelors in the convention to vote for it.

H. W. Brands, Age of Gold, pp. 283-284 (Anchor Books 2002).

The bachelors got their wish. By 1860, the ratio of men to women in the state dropped from 19:1 to 2:1.

Gold Rush Flyer (Source: Uncyclomedia Commons)

Gold Rush Flyer (Source: Uncyclomedia Commons)

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October 23, 2013 · 2:56 am

Pandemics

Source: New-York Historical Society

Source: New-York Historical Society

Most of us shrug off pandemics as the stuff of movies (Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman) or events that occurred long ago and are unlikely to occur in our lifetimes despite what seem like annual panic reports emanating from the media.  One of the most recent events, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, killed 20 million people in a worldwide population of 1.8 billion, including the character Lavinia in Downton Abbey and 575,000 Americans in a population of 106 million.Let’s look at one pandemic, the Second Cholera Epidemic of 1830-1851, focusing on the California Gold Rush years.

First, what is cholera? The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) defines the disease as “an acute, diarrheal illness caused by infection of the intestine with the bacterium Vibrio cholera and is transmitted by contaminated food or water. The infection is often mild or without symptoms, but sometimes it can be severe.” The incubation period is one to five days and the proper treatment is intravenous rehydration.

Source: Wikipedia

Drawing of death wiping out a large crowd with cholera Le Petit Journal. Source: Wikipedia

Before medical professionals understood the science – largely the need for clean water supplies – the infection was rarely “mild.” One could appear perfectly healthy at dawn and be dead by sundown. Cholera, yellow fever, and malaria were the principal reasons fortune hunters from the eastern United States chose to sail around Cape Horn (i.e., the entire continent of South America) or to travel across the continent (before the advent of railroads) rather than take a “short cut” 47 miles across the isthmus of Panama (before the completion of the Panama Company Railroad in 1855).Travelers made the trip in mosquito-infested territory partly by canoe and partly by mules. If all went well, which it seldom did, due to the overwhelming number of travelers, one could make the trip across the isthmus in four to eight days and then pray that a steamship bound for San Francisco was on time and not overbooked. Delays meant increasing chances of infection by mosquitoes or unsanitary food or water. As H.W. Brands (The Age of Gold) and David Lavender (The Great Persuader) graphically illustrate, many fortune hunters who chose the short cut ended their quest in a Panamanian grave. Perhaps being stuck on that tarmac for two hours was not so terrible after all.

But making it to California did not guarantee the good health of the Forty-Niners. Lavender describes an outbreak in Sacramento as follows:

“Cholera, a periodic scourge in the East and Midwest, reached California by ship during the fall of 1850. Sacramento’s first case was a man who dropped writhing on the new levee on October 20. Soon sixty cases were cropping up each day. In a single week 188 of the victims died. By November 9 the toll was said to have reached 600, including seventeen doctors – an estimate, since no one was keeping accurate records. In any event, it was bad enough that four fifths of the city’s terrified populace fled from the town.” (Note: Sacramento’s population in 1850 was approximately 6,800)

– The Great Persuader, p. 38

How would we deal with such a pandemic today? We would like to think cholera has been eradicated, but the CDC reports that worldwide there are an estimated three to five million cases of cholera and roughly one hundred thousand deaths from the disease every year. We can only hope that advances in science and more plentiful resources will make cholera a disease of the past.

Sources

  • H.W. Brands, The Age of Gold. New York, New York. Anchor Books, 2002.
  • David Lavender, The Great Persuader. Garden City, New York. Doubleday & Co., 1970.
  • CDC, Cholera – Vibrio cholera infection. http://www.cdc.gov/cholera/illness.html

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September 17, 2013 · 2:12 am

Fathers of the California Gold Rush

One man owned the land and stream where the gold was found. The second found the gold. The third created a frenzy that emptied San Francisco and filled the Sierra Nevada foothills with men burning with gold fever.

johnsutter01

John Sutter (About.com)

It all began when John Sutter employed James Marshall to build a sawmill for his Mexican land grant of over forty thousand acres. Mexico and the United States were still at war in January, 1848, less than a month from signing a treaty ending the conflict, when Marshall spotted flecks of metal downriver from the incomplete mill. Several days later, Sutter confirmed Marshall’s suspicion that the flakes of metal he had found in the American River were gold.

370px-James_Marshall2

James Marshall (Examiner.com)

The news spread like wildfire when Mormon entrepreneur Sam Brannan bought gold dust, put it in a bottle, and walked through the streets of San Francisco shouting “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” [H.W. Brands, The Age of Gold, p. 43] Brannan had no intention of searching for gold himself. He wanted to enrich himself by selling supplies to the miners. His Sacramento store later would sell as much as five thousand dollars of merchandise per day [H.W. Brands, The Age of Gold, p. 276], a fantastic sum at a time eastern farm workers were earning thirty to forty dollars per month.

Ultimately, the gold rush was not kind to these three men. Marshall lived humbly most of his days.

brannan1

Sam Brannan (Source: Sierra Foothill Magazine)

Sutter lived to see his inland empire overrun by fortune hunters and squatters. He died in relative poverty in Washington, DC.

Brannan used much of his fortune speculating in real estate, only to lose much of his wealth when his wife divorced him. (Early in its American territorial history when men outnumbered women nineteen to one, California had liberalized its divorce laws in an effort to attract women to its borders. Divorce included the divorcee’s right to fifty percent of the marital property.) While Brannan did remarry, he was never able to regain his old knack for success in business. He died in poverty in 1889 leaving his nephew to finance his burial. [Brands, The Age of Gold, p. 484].

Marshall’s discovery, and the publicity which followed it, brought a torrent of argonauts from around the world.

So, in a sense, these three men, who accelerated California’s transition from a territory to a state, can also be viewed as the fathers of the state of California.

For a well-documented and entertaining account of the California Gold Rush, I highly recommend Professor H.W. Brands’ The Age of Gold, Anchor Books (2003). Also consider J.S. Holliday’s The World Rushed In, Simon and Schuster (1981); Susan Lee Johnson’s Roaring Camp – The Social World of the California Gold Rush, Norton & Co. (2000); and Jo Ann Levy’s They Saw the Elephant – Women in the California Gold Rush, Shoe String Press (1990).

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