A Crack in the Edge of the World

  From all America, and from all across the world, they raced to the foothills of the Sierra. Buoyed by entirely accurate reports that gold was to be found in vast abundance—in streambeds, in deposits of gravel, on the sandbars in estuaries and around lakes, in the potholes in rocks—a tidal wave of humanity, most of them young, single, and rudely energetic men, began to surge its relentless way westward. The men came from the East by the two ways then possible: by sea or by land.* If by sea, they could choose (on the basis of either anecdote or blind and hurried ambition) to get to the gold by one of two routes: either the five-month, 15,000-mile journey by way of Cape Horn, as Richard Dana had done, or through the marginally less stressful Strait of Magellan; or via the shorter route of two months, which went by way of a ship to the Isthmus of Panama, across that narrow and malaria-infested neck of land by foot and mule train, and thence by a steamer that would be waiting on the Pacific side of Panama, and on up to its West Coast destination. In 1849 more than 500 sailing ships and the occasional steamer left ports like Boston and Gloucester and New York and Baltimore for the goldfields: The vessels were hurriedly provisioned, scantily crewed, and poorly maintained, and the journey was in most cases the most hazardous part of the adventure—a large number did not survive it.

  For those braver or more foolhardy men who elected to travel overland,* four routes soon opened up—along a handful of previously vaguely defined trappers’ paths that within weeks had become scarified and rutted wagon ways that could soon be seen for miles, lacerations that would scar for years to come the hitherto unmarked landscapes of the West. These were the trails—from Memphis to California across Texas, from St. Louis to California across Utah, from Hannibal along the valley of the Platte River toward Oregon, and from Chicago up across the peaks of Montana and via the empty rain-shadowed wastelands to the tiny army encampment at Fort Walla Walla—from which the roadbeds for all of America’s future surface links would be formed. The routes of the telegraph cables, the tracks of the Pony Express, the Wells Fargo stagecoach lines, the transcontinental railroads, the two-lane and then four-lane highways—Route 66 most legendary among them—and then the roads of the interstate system of today—all of them first followed the routes that those Gold Rush migrants had taken, once John Marshall’s find had cried its havoc and the newcomers had slipped their traces and begun.

  They came in absurd numbers, and in many cases with either an abysmal lack of preparation, or entirely the wrong kind of preparation. All that a miner really needed, according to an early how-to guide for Forty-Niners, was “a good but light Pick, a round pointed shovel, a light Crow Bar, a Pan or light cradle, a short knife and a horn spoon.” But a writer named Archer Butler Hulbert, who seems to have been less infected than most by the mythic hyperbole of so many Gold Rush accounts, spoke of

  wagon trains lurching their way across the country loaded instead with everything that a man’s wife or a boy’s mother could think of … sheet-iron stoves, feather-beds, pillows, pillow-slips, blankets, quilts and comforters, pots and kettles, dishes, cups, saucers, knives and forks … some had trunks full of white shirts and plug hats … one man was hauling a great walnut bedstead.

  Most of what the migrants tried to take was about as much use, said Hulbert, “as two tails to a dog.”

  And, in any case, little of this ever arrived: Hundreds of the more hopelessly overloaded wagons broke down, or bogged down, in Death Valley, or on the Great Salt Lake, high on the mountain passes, or in the awful loneliness of the Humboldt Sink. There they were abandoned to rust and woodworm, monuments to the folly of these particular pioneers, so many of whom were impelled merely by avarice, rather than by the real rewards of settlement.

  Gold, and the greed for it, played havoc with the morals of the California-bound miners. At this point in America’s history towns in the East and in the Midwest were fully sophisticated, with citizens behaving toward one another with mature civility. But those who initially went to the West were overtaken by the barbarism of the frontier with astonishing speed—think Lord of the Flies or Heart of Darkness. There was murder, mayhem, robbery, alcoholism, depression, and suicide, and all of it on a positively Homeric scale that still has cultural anthropologists enraptured. The presence of thousands of unattached and desperate men, all gathering in California with a single ambition—to break the chains of their past and to grow rich—made each man a risk to every other. There was so little brotherhood, so much individual assertion of right and claim. It was, quite literally during those Gold Rush years, sauve qui peut, and the devil take the hindmost.

  And yet many of the men who streamed west were far from being simpleminded members of the lumpenproletariat; far from it, indeed. These, after all, were men who had in large measure the good sense and the gumption and the moxie, call it what you will, to get up and move: They were a crew who as often as not were intelligent (an unexpectedly high proportion had university degrees), besides being more obviously motivated and determined. They were men who wanted keenly to put whatever past they had firmly and forgettably behind them and to start anew. The fighting and the tedium with which it was interspersed prompted many of the brighter souls to creative endeavor. Walter Colton’s newspapers, for instance, were able to write about the establishment of musical ensembles, the offering of lecture series, the formation of debating clubs and amateur dramatic societies that staged ambitious new plays and operas.

  So if the journey, and the rivalry, and the crime, and the temptations of the bottle and the brothel (for not inconsiderable numbers of women did go west, and not all of them angels either) did not do for them, then those who survived, even if they did not all make their fortunes, provided the new territory with a substrate of cultural energy, intellectual achievement, and classless ambition that eventually helped turn California into by far the most interesting state in the Union. And in time, of course, into the wealthiest as well.

  Although the goldfields had played themselves out after only three years (and after metal worth $2 billion had been extracted), many still seemed bent, once they could draw breath long enough to see how magical were their surroundings, on settling there for good and making California home. “If a man comes to California and stays two years,” wrote one early settler, “he will never want to leave.” “I don’t intend to call California home,” said the wife of one Lewis Gunn, a Philadelphian who had come out to mine in 1849, failed, opened a drugstore and a small newspaper in Sonora, and persuaded his wife and children to make the endless journey out to him, around the Horn. She was horrified by what she saw—drunken women staggering through town on election day, lurid pictures of naked girls tacked up in the bars, shoot-outs staged almost every night. But she persevered, stayed put, brought her children up as she thought proper, and endlessly looked forward to a time when the state might adopt more sober ways. She remained there, the first of thousands of long-staying Californians, for the rest of her life, dying only in the earthquake year of 1906, when she was ninety-five years old.

  Mrs. Gunn lived her long life in San Diego, in the south of the state, but the vast majority of those people who migrated during the Gold Rush went to the north, with most living around San Francisco Bay, or along the postroad that led east to Sacramento and the Sierra, where the ultimate reason for their being there could be found. The six southern counties of the new state had just 20,000 people, of whom Mrs. Gunn was one. The tiny pueblo that was Los Angeles had a mere 1,600 inhabitants in 1865, most of them ranchers, and the total value of their property—and this at a time when the area declared that it wished to be known simply as “Queen of the Cow Counties”—was just $800,000. By contrast the city of San Francisco, which got its name and its first American mayor in 1847 (a year before the treaty and three before statehood), already had a population of 40,000, and that a scant three years after James Marshall discovered his first flecks of gold. Provided that these people stayed—as they did, no matter what happened to the gold that first drew them—there could be no dou
bt by the mid-1850s that the state, and its bounty, were there to stay, too.

  The Civil War, which affected California little during the fighting itself,* spurred still further immigration once the dire days of Reconstruction got under way. This immense and open territory, with its fair weather and its huge skies and fields in which, it seemed, anything that might grow in the South would in fact grow twice as well, was so much more agreeable than the wrecked landscape of Dixie. There was a huge demand for labor in the West at this time, too—and so began a flood of new people from Alabama and Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana, and soon kept up amply with demand: The state’s population rose from 380,000 in 1860 to 560,000 in 1870.

  The transcontinental railway was completed in 1869. The cheap and willing labor needed to build it was provided in large measure from China, which led to the creation of a scattering of big-city Chinatowns (the Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for this term is 1857, quoting a newspaper in California, where the phenomenon was born). Trans-Pacific immigration—with the concomitant pressure to ban it, which was on occasion a sorry feature of California’s history during the nineteenth century—thus became a prominent feature of the state’s story, and led in large measure to the extraordinary demographic diversity that had already begun to characterize its great cities at the turn of the century.

  By now the state was in good administrative order, with an abundant supply of cities, roads,* railways, schools, hospitals, prisons, universities, and all the other accoutrements of settled western life. It had shifted its capital more than once—from the Mexican capital of Monterey it had been moved in 1851 to Vallejo (close to Mount Diablo, from where the state’s land survey lines had first been drawn), then two years later to Benicia and finally in 1854 to Sacramento, where the first railway terminus was built to link California with Chicago and New York, where the state capitol buildings were completed in 1869, and where, somewhat inconveniently, the capital remains today.

  Governors came and went—most of them Democrats (though one of them, in 1860, was a Democrat who ran on a ticket favoring the admission of Kansas on a proslavery constitution—racist passions sometimes ran high in early California). The first Republican governor was Leland Stanford, in 1861, who saw the introduction of the telegraph to his state and the start of the building of the railway, the Central Pacific; Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker, soon to be known as California’s legendary “Big Four” business tycoons, were the founders and owners. The first California oranges reached New York in 1885. The state’s population passed a million a year later. Yosemite became a national park. There was an outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco. Anti-Chinese riots, anti-Oriental legislation, vigilantism—the ills of society all seemed to be manifest in the extreme in California, as were the blessings.

  And then came the 1902 election, and a rather dull ear-and-nose doctor named George Pardee, a Republican who had been the mayor of Oakland, was elected to the governorship. He is little remembered today—just a dam, a reservoir, and a recreation area stand as memorials to him—and the inaugural address he offered in January 1903 speaks only of the banal quotidian demands of his position, with no great reform required, no major overhaul called for, simply a need for a steady hand on the tiller of state. He stood up in the newly finished rotunda at the capitol and addressed the politicians before him:

  We take office under conditions which are most flattering. California is blessed to-day with a material prosperity for which her citizens may well thank the bountiful mercies of the God who rules the destinies of nations and of men. Almost every interest is thriving as it has not thrived before in many years; our homes are homes of peace and plenty; work and employment abound, and the rewards of industry and enterprise were never greater. Wealth is increasing; and the proportion of the increase which is represented by the $350,000,000 deposited in our savings banks indicates that prosperity is widely distributed among all our people and is not the exclusive enjoyment of a few. Upon such industrial conditions as these we may well congratulate ourselves; and, if we are wise, we shall carefully refrain from any course which might produce a change for the worse.

  He expressed some concern about the state’s trees and its waters (John Muir, the archdruidical founder of the Sierra Club, was ministering away among the redwoods at just this time); he asked for more money for the 2,400 students then being educated at Berkeley—taxes that would be “most cheerfully paid,” he predicted; he called upon the citizens to desist from their eager habit of obtaining injunctions from the courts for every imaginable complaint; and he recognized that

  California, probably on account of her geographical position and her fame as a land of wealth and easy conditions of life, which serve as an attraction to the restless and idle, has an overplus of inmates in her penitentiaries and reformatories.

  He sought, in consequence, more funds for prisons and for those institutions then known as Hospitals for the Feeble-Minded. He urged expansions of the ports of San Francisco and Oakland. And he reminded his listeners that international expositions were to be held during his tenure in the cities of Portland (as a memorial to the Lewis and Clark Expedition) and St. Louis (similarly reminding the country of the Louisiana Purchase—which President Jefferson had sent Lewis and Clark to explore and to map). It would be prudent, he said, for California to be represented at both, the better to advertise its wares and its charms to those few unfortunates who might be still unaware.

  In short, the state was in exceptionally good shape, and Governor Pardee had merely to tinker, to tune, and to tread water. The statistics of the time underpin the notion of comfort and prosperity. There were a million and a half citizens in a state that, just fifty years before, had comprised an indolent handful of Mexicans clinging to a thin strip of land along the fogbound coast. Come the new century and the state’s mines were still producing precious metals of considerable worth; exports of wheat, barley, wool, milk, butter, cheese were being loaded onto ships in the great ports of the Bay and down at Long Beach; freight trains on the three great lines that now linked California with the Mississippi Valley were hauling away cars loaded with oranges and lemons, prunes, sugar, wines, brandies, beans, raisins, and oil. And Stanford University had just been founded: $20 million of private money had been slapped down for the foundation and endowment—a gift “unparallelled in magnitude,” said the Daily Telegraph across in London, “in the history of mankind.”

  All was, in other words, set fair for California, and for its principal city of San Francisco, as Governor Pardee and his team commenced their gentle program of governance and supervision. The first two of his four years in office went as smoothly as might be expected, with a host of unanticipated challenges but not a single problem that even approached the level of a crisis.

  And then came the spring of 1906—when, almost halfway through the governor’s elected term, everything suddenly went spectacularly and memorably wrong.

  SIX

  How the West Was Made

  The West I liked best. The people are stronger,

  fresher, saner than the rest. They are ready to be

  taught. The surroundings of nature have instilled in

  them a love of the beautiful, which but needs

  development and direction. The East I found a

  feeble reflex of Europe; in fact, I may say that I was

  in America for a month before I saw an American.

  OSCAR WILDE, quoted in the

  St. Louis Daily Globe, February 26, 1882

  ON GOING WEST, EVERYTHING CHANGES ON THE FAR side of Amarillo. The word means “yellow,” presumably from the dun-colored dust of this parched part of Texas—and the town was set up first as a railway-construction camp. Now it is a thoroughly up-to-date place, with tall buildings that house banks and the headquarters of large cattle ranches and small private oil companies, and there are lines of strip malls ringing the town just as the Conestoga wagons used to ring the cam
pfires.

  The town ends suddenly, with neither sprawl nor suburb to extend its reach. And, as it does so, the road ahead empties and the horizon becomes quite flat, with just the faintest line of settled cloud in the distance hinting at a chain of mountains somewhere far away. The gas stations are fewer here, the radio signals fade away into static—except for the evangelical preachers, who rant on endlessly into the otherwise unpopulated ether. Ed Ruscha, an Oklahoman contemporary artist who became fascinated by the lonely majesty of this part of America, wrote in an essay that he had discovered here the importance of gas stations. They are like trees, he said, but really only because they are there, and there is not much else besides—nothing but the bleached jawbones of cattle, old wind pumps creaking with rust, broken-backed barns and barbed-wire fences that provide a barrier against the bundles of tumbleweed that bounce casually past in the ceaseless hot wind.

  The landscape is dominated by sagebrush and chaparral; it is a place of mesas and buttes, of canyons and arroyos, of lodgepole pine and saguaro cactus and rattlesnakes and golden eagles and museums of wagon trains—and all underpinned by a geology, moreover, that is nothing at all like the geology back in the East. For a start, it is all so very much on display: The ribs of the land show through, landscape laid out as textbook.

  I drove across the slowly ascending flatlands of far-west Texas, up and over the low hills of what is called the Front Range—the gradient of the highway ticked upward a few miles outside the junction town of Tucumcari. Then, near Albuquerque and Santa Fe, the road passed through into the southern Rocky Mountains, with the Sangre de Cristos to the right, the Sacramentos off to the left, and the Black Range and the San Andreas Mountains directly ahead. The flanks of the hills were covered with pine trees, and on the late-January day I was there, fresh snow glistened from their summits. After that I endured some hours of driving over the open deserts and sharp-edged ranks of peaks in the region that is formally known as the Basin and Range Province, 500 miles of wide-open land that has been favored for its emptiness and romantic beauty by writers and filmmakers for years past.