Big Dreams (23 page)

James Marshall’s find was the significant one. A carpenter from New Jersey, Marshall came west on the Oregon Trail, and in 1847, after some reversals as a rancher, he joined forces with Colonel John Sutter, a German who’d been raised in Switzerland. Sutter had constructed an adobe fort on a vast land grant of eleven leagues, or 48,400 acres, on the east side of the Sacramento River, where it debouched into the American. With winter coming on, settlers were thronging to the fort to wait out the snows before trying to make it over any mountain passes.

Marshall agreed to be Sutter’s partner in building a sawmill on a separate land grant in Coloma, about forty-five miles away. On January 24, 1848, while workers were digging a tailrace, he caught “a glimpse of something shining in the bottom of the ditch.” Years later, he recounted for a correspondent from the
Century Magazine
what it had felt like to touch the nuggets:

The camp cook and laundress, Jenny Wimmer, devised a test to determine if the pieces were authentic. She dropped them into a pot of lye that she used to make soap. Real gold nuggets would tolerate the acid and still be intact in the morning—and in the morning, buried in potash, there they were.

Marshall hastened to tell Sutter the news. He brought about an ounce-and-a-half of gold with him. The partners hoped to keep things quiet, but it must have been tough on Sutter, who dealt in broad strokes. Ambitious to a flaw, he had a talent for the grand gesture, and that made him ideally suited to exploit the raw potential of virgin territory.

Sutter had arrived in New York in 1834, running from a painful marriage and some bad debts in Switzerland. He bounced from St. Louis to Santa Fe to Oregon and made voyages to the Sandwich Islands and Alaska before reaching San Francisco in 1839. In order to get a land grant, he became a citizen of Mexico, and Don Juan Bautista Alvarado, the Mexican governor, awarded him the property on the Sacramento. Alvarado had been having trouble with the Indians up north and also wanted an outpost there to keep his uncle, General Vallejo, from gaining any more power.

The local Indians, presumably from the Maidu tribe, were indeed a problem, all of them armed, war-painted, and looking hostile. Sutter believed that he might have been murdered by them if it hadn’t been for his cannons and his big bulldog.

“When they came slyly near the house in the Night, he got hold of them and barked most severly,” Sutter wrote in his memoirs, still appreciative.

The colonel soon had the Maidu in harness. He put them to work tending cattle, harvesting wheat, and serving as domestics around the fort. Some of them were inducted into his private militia and costumed in a white cotton shirt, blue trousers, and a red bandanna. Although they were sometimes paid a pittance in the unique money that their patron had coined, they were little more than serfs.

In 1847, as U.S. Indian agent for the region, Sutter submitted a tally of his colony, Nueva Helvetia, to the federal government.

The total population of Nueva Helvetia was 22,657, nine-tenths of it so-called wild Indians. The Hawaiians were souvenirs of Sutter’s swing through the Sandwich Islands, and the single Negro was a barrelmaker imported to hammer the casks in which the patron’s homemade wine and whiskey were stored.

As the only sociable kingdom in the north, Nueva Helvetia hosted any and all prominent visitors—Russian fur traders from Fort Ross on the coast, emissaries from the U.S. Navy, and guests of the French consular service. Edwin Bryant also stopped at the fort and praised Sutter for courteously providing his party,
gratis
, with beef, salt, onions, and tomatoes. He ate well at Sutter’s table, as he had at General Vallejo’s. He was served soup in china bowls, two meat dishes, and a dessert course of bread, butter, cheese, and melons.

“The day is not distant,” Bryant intoned, “when American enterprise and American ingenuity will furnish those adjuncts of civilization of which California is now so destitute, and render a residence in this country one of the most luxurious on the globe.”

The viability of Nueva Helvetia ended with Marshall’s find. Word of it leaked out, and the fires were fanned. Sam Brannan, a hard-drinking Mormon backslider who was always looking for a score, dashed through the streets of San Francisco, where he published a newspaper, showing off a bottle of gold dust and shouting, “Gold!
Gold! Gold in the American River!” Brannan owned a general store near Nueva Helvetia and became the state’s first millionaire.

In no time at all, the foothills were ringed with rough mining camps. There were about six thousand people living in the vicinity of the mines in 1848. Four years later, at the peak of the Gold Rush, there were about one hundred thousand.

The forty-niners spelled doom for John Sutter. Nobody would work for him anymore, not while the gold fever was raging. Squatters commandeered Nueva Helvetia and soon ran it into the ground. By 1852, Sutter was bankrupt. Ten years later, the state legislature presented him with a monthly pension of $250 as a sop for his losses, but he continued petitioning the federal government for the return of his land, even moving to a Moravian community in Lititz, Pennsylvania, to be closer to Washington, D.C. No California was Lititz!

James Marshall, who stayed put, fared no better. His minimal holdings slipped away, and he was transformed over the decades into a ragged, bitter old man, the town crank of Coloma, who supported himself with odd jobs and piecework, the pounding of nails and the raking of leaves.

I
N COLOMA
, at Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, people were still looking for gold, or for its shadow. At nine the next morning, a lanky man in a bowling-team Windbreaker could be seen rushing from monument to monument and sprinting ahead of his wife, who shouldered a videocam and fell into step with me. Together we examined the replica of a Chinese store, where tinned herbal medicines crowded a shelf, and she was careful to point out to me the stuffed turkey that dangled from the ceiling by a cord.

“It must have been almost Thanksgiving,” she said, confusing the celestials with the Puritans.

We paused at a miner’s log cabin, and she pressed her nose to a dusty window.

“Look!” she shouted. “There’s a little man inside!”

The little man was a dummy miner. He resembled Gabby Hayes stretched out for an autopsy, asleep for the duration beneath a cotton sheet. The woman’s husband came along and interrupted us, fidgety because he hadn’t yet found what he called “the actual site” of Marshall’s discovery.

“Look at the little man, honey,” his wife instructed him, filming his response. “How’d you like to live in there?”

“Better than a tent,’ he said.

The little man didn’t have it so bad, really. He had no mortgage payments and owed nothing to a bank. He had never even heard of curb appeal. Gold mining was much easier for him in Coloma than it would have been in Alaska or South Africa. The snow fell infrequently in the foothills, and there were fruit and nut trees. There were trout in the river and deer for venison steaks. The little man had a can of tobacco on a bench and doubtless some whiskey under his cot. He had his paradise.

Another song leaped into my mind, one that the artists and the bohos used to sing when they could still live cheaply around Monterey, in a time before the coming of the realtors:

The woman’s husband had found
the actual site
. “Yo, Judy!” he yelled. “The gold’s over here!” They filmed a sequence of him standing by another monument, after which he held up some pebbles from the stream and pretended that they were nuggets. He did some digging with an invisible shovel and mopped his brow with a handkerchief, overacting like a star of the silent cinema. Then they got into their car and left, ready for the Gold Country’s next attraction.

I
DROVE HIGHWAY
49 through the Gold Country for a week or so and made a few notes.

Some towns and mining camps of the Mother Lode:
Gold Hill, Fair Play, Shingle Springs, Enterprise, Volcano, Fiddletown, Sutter Creek, San Andreas, Drytown, Felix, Tiger Lily, Calaveras, Pleasant Valley, Jackass Hill, Mokelumne Hill, Frogtown, Indian Diggins, Negro Hill, Coyoteville, Jesus Maria, Angels Camp, Bummerville, and El Dorado.

What you see in Mother Lode towns:
retired people; new subdivisions and trailer parks; old frame houses with clapboards and gable roofs; porches where old dogs snore; quilts and rocking chairs; picket fences; taverns with card rooms; museums; gold samples sold in bottles, as jewelry, and in tiny, plush-lined caskets; ruins; mini-malls; renovated hotels with flocked wallpaper and an upright piano; chiropractors and acupuncturists; vineyards; biker girls in oil-stained jeans; and many images of miners on signs and on billboards kneeling, panning, or having a general hoot.

A thing to be avoided in the Mother Lode:
the Mark Twain Center, a mini-mall in Angels Camp.

What the miners at Bret Harte’s fictional Roaring Camp contributed to Cherokee Sal’s infant son, orphaned at birth
: a silver tobacco box; a doubloon; a navy revolver, silver-mounted; a gold specimen; a diamond breastpin; a diamond ring about which the donor, a gambler, remarked that he had seen the breastpin “and went two diamonds better”; a slingshot; a Bible (nobody would own up to giving it); a gold spur; a silver teaspoon; a pair of surgeon’s shears; a lancet; a five-pound note drawn on the Bank of England; and about two hundred dollars in loose gold and silver coins.

Mark Twain, in
Roughing It: “It was in this Sacramento Valley … that a great deal of the most lucrative early gold mining was done, and you may still see, in places, its grassy slopes and levels torn and guttered and disfigured by the avaricious spoilers of fifteen and
twenty years ago. You may see such disfigurements far and wide over California—and in some such places, where only meadows and forests are visible—not a living creature, not a house, no stick or stone or remnant of a ruin, and not a sound, not even a whisper to disturb the Sabbath stillness—you will find it hard to believe that there stood at one time a fiercely flourishing little city, of two thousand or three thousand souls, with its newspaper, fire company, brass band, volunteer militia, hotels, noisy Fourth of July processions and speeches, gambling halls crammed with tobacco smoke, profanity, and rough-bearded men of all nations and colors, with tables heaped with gold dust sufficient for the revenue of a German principality—streets crowded and rife with business—town lots worth four hundred dollars a front foot—labor, laughter, music, dancing, swearing, fighting, shooting, stabbing—a bloody inquest and a man for breakfast every morning—
everything
that delights and adorns existence—all the appointments and appurtenances of a thriving and prosperous and promising young city—and
now
nothing is left of it all but a lifeless, homeless solitude. The men are gone, the houses have vanished, even the
name
of the place is forgotten. In no other land, in modern times, have towns so absolutely died and disappeared, as in the old mining regions of California.”

C
OPPEROPOLIS
, a foothill town in Calaveras County, was trying to revive itself from the dead. It had a population of one hundred and fifty, but that could change at any minute if the mining operation at Royal Mountain King Mine were to strike some serious paydirt.