Port O' Gold Part 12

[Ill.u.s.tration: Men with shovels, leveling the sand-hills, piled the wagons high with shimmering grains which were dumped into pile-surrounded bogs. San Francisco reached farther and farther out into the bay.]

CHAPTER XVI

GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!

San Francisco never could remember when the first rumor of gold reached it. Gold was to mean its transformation from a struggling town into a turbulent, riotous city, a mecca of the world's adventurers.

Benito Windham, early in the spring of '48 brought home an echo of it from San Jose. One of Sutter's teamsters had exchanged a little pouch of golden grains for a flask of aguardiente. Afterward he had told of finding it in the tail-race of Marshall's mill on the south fork of the American River. Little credence had been given his announcements. In the south, near San Fernando Mission, gold had long ago been found, but not in sufficient quant.i.ties to allure the fortune hunter.

"See, is it not pretty?" asked Benito, pouring out a handful of the shining stuff which he had purchased from the teamster.

"Pretty, yes, but what's it worth?" asked Adrian, dubiously.

"Some say it's true value is $16 for an ounce," responded Inez, her eyes shining. "Samuel Brannan had a letter from a member of his band who says they wash it from the river sand in pans."

"Sam's skeptical, though," retorted Stanley. "And, as for me, I've a mine right here in San Francisco." He spoke enthusiastically. "Moving sandhills into the bay. Making a new city front out of flooded bogs!

That's realism. Romance. And what's better, fortune! Isn't it, my girl?"

Inez' eyes were proud. "Fortune, yes, and not a selfish one. For it is making others richer, San Francis...o...b..tter."

"Which is well enough for you," returned Benito with a hint of sullenness. "But I am tired of clerking for Ward & Smith at two dollars a day. There's no romance in that." With a quick, restless motion he ran the golden dust through his fingers again. "I hope they are true, these stories. And if they are--" he looked at the others challengingly, "then I'm off to the mines, muy p.r.o.nto."

"Come," said Stanley, "let us have a game of chess together." But Benito, with a muttered apology, left them and went out. San Francisco had streets now, since the O'Farrell survey's adoption by the council.

The old Calle de Fundacion had become Dupont street and below it was Kearny street, named after the General and former Governor. To the west were parallel roads, scarcely worthy of the name of thoroughfares, christened in honor of Commodore Stockton, Surgeon Powell of the sloop-of-war Warren, Dr. Elbert Jones, Governor Mason, Chaplain Leavenworth, the present Alcalde, and George Hyde, the former one.

Thomas Larkin, former counsel at Monterey, was also to be distinguished.

East and west the streets had more haphazard names. Broadway and California were the widest, aside from the projected Market street, which would have a lordly breadth of 120 feet. Some were named after Presidents--Jackson, Washington and Clay.

The council had authorized two long wharves, one at the foot of Clay street, 547 feet long. This was a great undertaking and had caused much discussion pro and con. But now it was almost completed and a matter of much civic pride. Large ships, anch.o.r.ed at its terminus, were discharging cargo, and thither Benito bent his course, head bent, hat pulled well down on his forehead, until a rousing slap on the back spun him around almost angrily. He looked into the wise and smiling eyes of Edward C. Kemble.

"Well, lad," the editor of the _Californian Star_ accosted, "I hear you've been to San Jose. What's new up there, if I may ask you?"

"Very little ... nothing," said Benito, adding, "save the talk of gold at Marshall's mill."

"Pooh!" exclaimed the editor. "Marshall's mill, and Mormon island! One would think the famous fairy tale of El Dorado had come true."

"You place no credence in it, then?" asked Benito, disappointed.

"Not I," said Kemble. "See here," he struck one fist into the palm of another. "All such balderdash is bad for San Francisco. We're trying to get ahead, grow, be a city. Look at the work going on. That means progress, sustained stimulus. And along come these stories of gold finds. It's the wrong time. The wrong time, I tell you. It'll interfere.

If we get folks excited they'll pull out for the hills, the wilderness.

Everything'll stop here.... Then, bye and bye, they'll come back--busted! Mark my words, BUSTED! Is that business? No."

He went off shaking his head sagely. Benito puzzled, half resentful, gazed after him. He abandoned the walk to the dock and returned with low-spirited resignation to his tasks at Ward & Smith's store.

For several months gold rumors continued to come. Citizens, fearing ridicule, perhaps, slipped un.o.btrusively out of town, to test their truth. Kemble was back from a trip to the so-called gold fields.

Editorially, he made sport of his findings. He had seen feather-brained fortune-seekers gambling hopelessly with fate, suffering untold hardships for half the pay they could have gained from "honest labor."

Now and then a miner, dirty and disheveled, came in ragged clothes to gamble or drink away the contents of a pouch of "dust." It was at first received suspiciously. Barkeepers took "a pinch for a drink," meaning what they could grasp with their fingers, and one huge-fisted man estimated that this method netted him three dollars per gla.s.s.

San Francisco awoke to a famine in butcher-knives, pans and candles.

Knives at first were used to gouge out auriferous rock, and soon these common household appurtenances brought as high as twenty-five dollars each. Candles ere long were the equivalent of dollars, and pans were cheap at five dollars each.

Still San Francisco waited, though a constant dribble of departures made at last perceptible inroads on its population. Then, one May afternoon, the fat was in the fire.

Samuel Brannan, who had been at his store in New Helvetia, rode through the streets, holding a pint flask of gold-dust in one hand, swinging his hat with the other, and whooping like a madman:

"Gold! Gold! Gold! From the American River!"

As if he had applied a torch to the hayrick of popular interest, San Francisco flamed with fortune-seeking ardor. Next morning many stores remained unopened. There were neither clerks nor proprietors. Soldiers fled from the garrison, and Lieutenant William T. Sherman was seen galloping northward with a provost guard to recapture a score of deserters. Children found no teacher at the new schoolhouse and for months its doors were barred. Cargoes, half-discharged, lay on the wharves, unwarehoused. Crews left en ma.s.se for the mines, and ships floated unmanned at anchor. Many of them never went to sea again.

On every road a hegira of the gold-mad swept northward, many afoot, with heavy burdens, the more fortunate with horses and pack animals. Men, old, young, richly dressed and ragged--men of all conditions, races, nations.

The end of May, in 1848, found San Francisco a manless Eden. Stanley, struggling with a few elderly Indians and squaws to carry on his work, bemoaned the madcap folly bitterly.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Samuel Brannan rode through the streets, holding a pint flask of gold-dust in one hand ... and whooping like a madman: "Gold!

Gold! Gold! From the American River!"]

But Benito, with shining eyes, rode on to what seemed Destiny and Fortune. Ward & Smith's little shop lay far behind him. Even his sister and her busy husband. Before him beckoned Gold! The lure, adventure, danger of it, like a smiling woman. And his spirit stretched forth longing arms.

CHAPTER XVII

THE QUEST OF FORTUNE

By the end of June more than half of San Francisco's population had departed for the mines. They went by varied routes, mostly on horseback.

Rowboats, which a month ago had sold for $50, were now bringing ten times that sum, for many took the river route to the gold fields. Others toiled their way through the hills and the Livermore Valley. The ferry across Carquinez Straits at Benicia, was thronged to the danger of sinking.

Those who stayed at home awaited eagerly the irregular mails which straggled in from unsettled, unorganized, often inaccessible regions where men cut and slashed the bowels of the earth for precious metal, or waded knee-deep in icy torrents, washing their sands in shallow containers for golden residue. No letter had come from Benito to Inez or Adrian. But Robert Windham wrote from Monterey as follows:

"My Children: Monterey is mad with the gold-l.u.s.t, and our citizens are departing with a haste that threatens depopulation. Until recently we had small belief in the tales of sudden fortune started by the finds at Marshall's mill. Alcalde Colton dispatched a messenger to the American River on the 6th of June, and, though he has not returned, others have brought the news he was sent to gain. On the 12th a man came into town with a nugget weighing an ounce and all Monterey Buzzed with excitement.

Everyone wanted to test it with acids and microscopes. An old woman brought her ring and when placed side by side, the metal seemed identical; it was also compared with the gold k.n.o.b of a cane. Some declare it a humbug, but it is generally believed to be genuine gold.

"Governor Mason, who has been messing with Alcalde Colton and a naval officer named Lieutenant Lanman, is now compelled to bake his own bread.

The trio roast their coffee and cook what meals they eat. Even the negro who blacked their boots went gold hunting and returned after a few weeks with $2000.

"Yesterday I met a rough-looking fellow who appeared to be starving. He had a sack on his shoulder in which was gold-dust and nuggets worth $15,000. You should have seen him a few hours later--all perfumed and barbered, with shiny boots; costly, ill-fitting clothes and a marvelous display of jewelry.

"Alcalde Colton is going to the mines next month. He laughed when he told me of Henry Bee, the alguacil or jailor of San Jose. This man had charge of ten prisoners, some of whom were Indians, charged with murder.

He tried to turn them over to the alcalde, but the latter was at the mines. So Bee took his prisoners with him. It is said their digging has already made him rich and that he'll let them loose. There is no one to chide him. And no one to care."

Later in the day Sam Brannan and Editor Kemble looked in on the Stanleys. "It's sheer insanity!" exploded Kemble. "The soldiers have gone--left their wives and their children to starve. Even the church is locked. Governor Mason has threatened martial law in the mining regions, which are filled with cutthroats and robbers. It's said he contemplates giving furloughs of two or three months to the gold-fevered troops which remain. Was there ever such idiocy?"

"You're wrong, Ed," Brannan told him. "This gold boom is the biggest thing that's ever happened. It'll bring the world to our door. Why, Mason has reported that gold enough's been taken from the mines already to pay for the Mexican war."