John David Borthwick

“ Soft-handed lawyers and clergymen wielded pick and shovel side-by-side with born navvies, cooked their own meals and washed their own clothes. No honest labor lowered the dignity of a gentleman, since that gentleman needs must wait upon himself and provide for himself with the work of his own hands. Out of this common necessity grew, as it were over-night, a natural democracy in which all men met each other on an equal footing. ”

“ The same gamblers were sitting at the same tables, dealing monte and faro to crowds of betters; the piano and violin, which had been interrupted by the fire, were now enlivening the people in their distress; and the bar-keeper was as composedly as ever mixing cocktails for the thirsty throats of the million.
No time was lost by the rest of the population. The hot and smoky ground was alive with men clearing away rubbish; others were in the woods cutting down trees and getting out posts and brushwood, or procuring canvas and other supplies from the neighboring camps. ”

“ In the forenoon, when gambling was slack, the gamblers would get up from their tables, and, leaving exposed upon them, at the mercy of the heterogeneous crowd circulating through the room, piles of gold and silver, they would walk away, seemingly as little anxious for the safety of their money as if it were under lock and key in an iron chest. ”

“ The streets presented a very gay appearance. The natives, all in their gala-dresses, were going the rounds of the numerous gaudily-ornamented altars which had been erected throughout the town; and mingled with the crowd were numbers of Americans in every variety of California emigrant costume. The scene was further enlivened by the music, or rather the noise, of fifes, drums, and fiddles, with singing and chanting inside the churches, together with squibs and crackers, the firing of cannon, and the continual ringing of bells. ”

“ The contrast to San Francisco was so great that on coming out here one could almost think that the noisy city he had left but half an hour before had existence only in his imagination; for San Francisco presented a picture of universal human nature boiling over, while here was nothing but human stagnation—a more violent extreme than would have been the wilderness as yet untrodden by man. ”

“ Life for the most part was hard enough certainly, but every village was a little city of itself, where one could live in comparative luxury. Even Downieville had its theater and concerts, its billiard-rooms and saloons of all sorts, a daily paper, warm baths, and restaurants where men in red flannel shirts, with bare arms, spread a napkin over their muddy knees, and studied the bill of fare for half an hour before they could make up their minds what to order for dinner. ”

“ The popular notion of a miner is that of a rude and reckless fellow who “works one day with a tin pan and gets drunk the next.” There were, indeed, many of this ilk in the gold-diggings; but in the main, the miners of ’49 were a picked and superior class of men. It was not as if a bonanza had been struck within easy reach of the riffraff of the nations. California, by the shortest route, was two thousand miles from any well populated part of America, five thousand from a European port. ”

“ California has afforded the Americans their first opportunity of showing their capacity as colonists. The other States which have of late years been added to the Union, are not a fair criterion, for they have been created merely by the expansion of the outer circumference of civilization, by the restlessness of the backwoodsman unaided by any other class; but the attractions offered by California were such as to draw to it a complete ready-made population of active and capable men, of every trade and profession. ”

“ Gold mining, of course, was a gamble; while some “struck it rich” many others worked hard for nothing. So gambling was in the very air. And so long as common labor commanded at least five dollars a day, so long as ships by the hundred lay idle at their docks because sailors would rather take their chances in the mines than a steady wage of two or three hundred dollars a month, there was bound to be reckless extravagance and wild dissipation. Most of the miners were young men, too active, ebullient, vivacious, for quiet amusements in their hours of leisure. ”

“ On holidays, and on every possible occasion which offers an excuse for so doing, the whole fire brigade parade the streets in full dress, each company dragging their engine after them, decked out in flags and flowers, which are presented to them by their lady-admirers, in return for the balls given by the firemen for their entertainment. They also have fielddays, when they all turn out, and in some open part of the city have a trial of strength, seeing which can throw a stream of water to the greatest height, or which can flood the other, by pumping water into each other’s engines. ”

“ They were a rough-looking crowd; long, gaunt, wiry men, dressed in the usual old-flannel-shirt costume of the mines, with shaggy beards, their faces, hands, and arms as brown as mahogany, and with an expression about their eyes which boded no good to any Indian who should come within range of their rifles. ”

“ Being but a slightly reduced counterpart of what San Francisco was a year or two before, it offered a good point of view from which to contemplate the miraculous growth of that city, still not only increasing in extent but improving in beauty and in excellence in all its parts, and progressing so rapidly that, almost from day to day, one could mark its steady advancement in everything which denotes the presence of a wealthy and prosperous community. ”

“ Hither small parties of men are continually repairing to “take a drink.” Perhaps they each choose a different kind of punch, or sling, or cocktail, requiring various combinations, in different proportions, of whisky, brandy, or gin, with sugar, bitters, peppermint, absinthe, curaçao, lemon-peel, mint, and what not; but the bar-keeper mixes them all as if by magic, when each man, taking his glass, and tipping those of all the rest as he mutters some sentiment, swallows the compound and wipes his moustache. ”

“ They appeared to want that daring and independent spirit of individual self-reliance which impels an American or Englishman to disregard all counsel and companionship, and to enter alone into the wildest enterprise, so long as he himself thinks it feasible; or, disengaging himself for the time being from all communication with his fellow-men, to plunge into the wilderness, and there to labor steadily, uncheered by any passing pleasure, and with nothing to sustain him in his determination but his own confidence in his ability ultimately to attain his object. ”

“ In the course of a month, or a year, in San Francisco, there was more hard work done, more speculative schemes were conceived and executed, more money was made and lost, there was more buying and selling, more sudden changes of fortune, more eating and drinking, more smoking, swearing, gambling, and tobacco-chewing, more crime and profligacy,{59} and, at the same time, more solid advancement made by the people, as a body, in wealth, prosperity, and the refinements of civilization, than could be shown in an equal space of time by any community of the same size on the face of the earth. ”

“ They are very fond of dogs, and have always at their heels a number of the most wretchedly thin, mangy, starved-looking curs, of dirty brindle color, something the shape of a greyhound, but only about half his size. A strong mutual attachment exists between the dogs and their masters; but the affection of the latter does not move them to bestow much food on their canine friends, who live in a state of chronic starvation; every bone seems ready to break through the confinement of the skin, and their whole life is merely a slow death from inanition. ”

“ Society had to protect itself by the most practical and unsophisticated system of retributive justice, quick in its action, and whose operation, being totally divested of all mystery and unnecessary ceremony, was perfectly comprehensible to the meanest understanding—a system inconsistent with public safety in old countries—unnecessary, in fact, where the machinery of the law is perfect in all its parts—but at the same time one which men most naturally adopt in the absence of all other protection ”

“ Was it not time for a change—time, if need be, for a revolution which should inaugurate a new state of things—which should give an assurance that human life should be protected from the hand of the gentlemanly and moneyed assassin, as well as from the miserable, the poor, and the friendless? ”

“ For miles the river was borne along in a succession of flumes, in which were set innumerable water-wheels, for working all sorts of pumps, and other contrivances for economizing labor. The bed of the river was alive with miners; and here and there, in the steep banks, were rows of twenty or thirty tunnels, out of which came constant streams of men, wheeling the dirt down to the riverside, to be washed in their long toms. ”

“ In the space of a month the whole city might be swept off by fire, and a totally new one might be flourishing in its place. So great was the constant fluctuation in the prices of goods, and so rash and speculative was the usual style of business, that no great idea of stability could be attached to anything, and the ever-varying aspect of the streets, as the houses were being constantly pulled down, and rebuilt, was emblematic of the equally varying fortunes of the inhabitants. ”

“ There were plenty of men who, after two years’ hard work, were not a bit better off than when they commenced, having lost in working one claim what they had made in another, and having frittered away their time in prospecting and wandering about the country from one place to another, always imagining that there were better diggings to be found than those they were in at the time. ”

“ We might have been steering by compass, and it was like going to sea; for we emerged from the city as from a landlocked harbor, and followed our own course over the wide wide world. The transition from the confinement of the city to the vastness of space was instantaneous; and our late neighbors, rapidly diminishing around us, and getting hull down on the horizon, might have been bound for the uttermost parts of the earth, for all we could see that was to stop them. ”

“ As the miners entered the arena with their wheelbarrow and long tom, they were immensely cheered by the crowds who had already taken their seats, the band in the meantime playing “Hail Columbia” most lustily.
The Declaration of Independence was read by a gentleman in a white neckcloth, and the oration was then delivered by the “orator of the day,” who was a pale-faced, chubby-cheeked young gentleman, with very white and extensive shirt-collars. He indulged in a great deal of buncombe about the Pilgrim Fathers, and Plymouth Rock, the “Blarney-stone of America,” as the Americans call it. ”

“ At the other end of the tunnel the water emerged from a much smaller cave, which was so low as not to admit of a man crawling in.
The caves, at each end of the other tunnel, were also very small, though the architecture was of the same flowery style. The faces of it, however, were extremely beautiful. To the height of fifty or sixty feet they presented a succession of irregular overhanging projections, bulging out like immense mushrooms, of which the prevailing hue was a delicate pink, with occasional patches of bright green. ”

“ Laboring men fastened their coarse dirty shirts with a cluster of diamonds the size of a shilling, wore colossal gold rings on their fingers, and displayed a massive gold chain and seals from their watch-pocket; while hardly a man of any consequence returned to the Atlantic States without receiving from some one of his friends a huge gold-headed cane, with all his virtues and good qualities engraved upon it. ”

“ There was a great overplus of young men of education, who had never dreamed of manual labor, and who found that their services in their wonted capacities were not required in such a rough-and-ready, every-man-for-himself sort of place. Hard work, however, was generally better paid than head work, and men employed themselves in any way, quite regardless of preconceived ideas of their own dignity. It was one intense scramble for dollars—the man who got most was the best man—how he got them had nothing to do with it. ”

“ There had still been occasional heavy rains, from which our tent was but poor protection, and we awoke sometimes in the morning, finding small pools of water in the folds of our blankets, and everything so soaking wet, inside the tent as well as outside, that it was hopeless to attempt to light a fire. On such occasions, raw ham, hard bread, and cold water was all the breakfast we could raise; eking it out however, with an extra pipe, and relieving our feelings by laying in fiercely with pick and shovel. ”

“ Wagons, drawn by six or eight mules or oxen, were navigating along the street, or discharging their strangely-assorted cargoes at the various stores; and men in picturesque rags, with large muddy boots, long beards, and brown faces, were the only inhabitants to be seen.
There were boarding-houses on the table-d’hôte principle, in each of which forty or fifty hungry miners sat down three times a day to an oilcloth-covered table, and in the course of about three minutes surfeited themselves on salt pork, greasy steaks, and pickles. ”

“ It was the commencement of spring, and at that season the plains are seen to advantage. But after a few weeks of dry weather the hot sun burns up every blade of vegetation, the ground presents a cracked surface of hard-baked earth, and the roads are ankle-deep in the finest and most penetrating kind of dust,{113} which rises in clouds like clouds of smoke, saturating one’s clothes, and impregnating one’s whole system. ”