By 1852, California’s annual gold production reached a high of $81 million.  By 1853, the total take was $67 million, and although no one wanted to admit it, the hottest story in the Old West had already peaked.  In 1854, a 195-pound mass of gold, the largest known to have been discovered in California, was found at Carson Hill in Calaveras County.  In 1859, the famous 54-pound Willard nugget was found at Magalia in Butte County.  But for the most part, the rich surface placers were largely exhausted by 1855, and river mining accounted for much of the state’s output until the early 1860s.  From the first strike of 1848 through 1855, the total amount of gold taken from the mother lode was right around $350 million.  As for the first person involved in the discovery, he did not live happily ever after.  After his monumental discovery, Marshall claimed a major chunk of Coloma Valley, but the area was quickly overrun by at least 4,000 would-be gold miners.  Marshall found work as a prospector, but he was often hounded by gold rush groupies, men who believed if they stayed close to him he might find some more gold.  He continued to be an inactive partner at Sutter’s sawmill until legal difficulties closed it in 1850.  In 1857, Marshall returned to Coloma and bought 15 acres of land for $15.  He planted a vineyard, dug a cellar, and began bottling California wine.  He won a few prizes for his port at county fairs, but taxes and competition found him on the prospecting trail again in the late 1860s.  He hit the lecture circuit, but ended up broke in Kansas City.  The California legislature took pity on him and passed a $200 a month pension for the discovery of gold in 1872, and then cut it in half the following year.  Marshall died forgotten in 1885 and was buried on a hill in Coloma overlooking the gold discovery site.  Five years later, a statue was commissioned and placed on his gravesite.

The Gilded Age was embodied in the private railroad car-a baroque equipage of millionaires that today may be found in museums. But there is little trace of the carriages in which the masses were transported, only the memories of those who rode them. To Robert Louis Stevenson, the emigrant train on which he traveled West in 1879 resembled a series of long wooden boxes-a “Noah’s Ark on wheels.” Wooden benches were their only furniture, “far too short for anyone but a child,” and the atmosphere was stagnant with the smells of food and tobacco. Families and single men and women shared these rolling slums, cooking, washing perfunctorily, and at night sleeping on wooden boards stretched across benches. The rate for these “beds,” which included three straw- (and bug-) filled cushions, was $2.50. Except for rare acts of kindness, the poor emigrants met nothing but rudeness from train functionaries, who even refused to answer their anxious inquiries. “Civility is the main comfort you miss,” Stevenson remarked. “Equality, though very largely conceived in America, does not extend so low down as the emigrant.” I prefer the image of the emigrant as portrayed by William Holden in the movie Arizona. The movie centers around Phoebe Titus a tough, swaggering pioneer woman played by Jean Arthur, but her ways become decidedly more feminine when she falls for California bound Peter Muncie played by William Holden. But Peter won’t be distracted from his journey and Phoebe is left alone and plenty busy with villains Jefferson Carteret and Lazarus Ward plotting at every turn to destroy her freighting company. You just know William Holden will be changing his plans to stay and help Jean out of a jam. The bug Holden describes in the film is decidedly different from the ones emigrants had to sleep with on the way West. One of my favorite lines from the movie are as follows-Holden to Arthur: “I figure it sounds crazy to most people… going to California just to see it. But there’s a gallivanted bug in my blood and that’s the way I am.”

Captain John Augustus Sutter (1803-1880) was a German Swiss who had been a shopkeeper in his native country. In 1834, beleaguered by debt and an unhappy marriage, he took off for five years of travel, looking to start fresh in a new locale. He visited New York and Honolulu and finally arrived in California in July 1839. There, the Mexican government awarded him a land grant of about 50,000 acres. At his colony of New Helvetia, he built Sutter’s Fort on the present site of Sacramento. When the Russians left Fort Ross, Sutter bought all their supplies and livestock. Sutter’s fort then became the principal supplier for the trappers, farmers, and ranchers of the whole are. He employed gunsmiths and amassed 12,000 cattle, 2,000 horses and mules, 10,000 sheep, and 1,000 hogs. Business was so good that he had over 1,000 people on his payroll. If you had told him he was sitting on a proverbial gold mine, he would have agreed with you. In September 1847, Sutter sent James Marshall with a work crew of 10 Americans and 10 Cullumah Indians to start construction on a mill. By December, it was almost ready for operation, but for a small problem. The river had been dammed to divert part of the stream into a channel, called a millrace, that would carry water through the mill. Below that, another diversion of the river, called the tailrace, carried water away from the mill and back into the American River. The tailrace was not deep enough, so the water was backing up, and the big mill wheel wouldn’t turn. To solve the problem, the builders decided to deepen the tailrace channel down to the bedrock. Every day, they removed more boulders and dirt; every night, water ran through the channel, washing away more of the loose debris. James Marshall had been a New Jersey carriage-maker. In 1844, he had headed west, traveling the Oregon Trail to Puget Sound. By the time of the Bear Flag Revolt he was already working for John Sutter. But his true mark on history would be made on January 24, 1848. On that morning, while working to clear the tailrace of Sutter’s new sawmill, something shining in the mud caught his eye. “Boys,” the 36-year-old carpenter said to his crew, “by God I believe I found a gold mine. He then showed them the flakes. The men laughed it off. Later that night at chow, Marshall again showed his find to his co-workers, and then tossed the nuggets into a boiling pot. They didn’t melt or reshape. Marshall went out again the next morning and found a few more samples. He’d done a little reading in the night and was beginning to think it was a bonehead thing to have told his cohorts about his discovery. With even more glistening pebbles, he left on January 28 to tell his boss at Sutter’s Fort, about fifty miles away. See where James Marshall stated it all at the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park off Highway 49 in Coloma, California. It features period exhibits of mining equipment, horse-drawn vehicles, household implements, and other memorabilia, as well as films on the gold discovery and early mining techniques. Some of the nicest people in the world work at the part too. You’ll learn a lot and have a ball doing it. If you’d like to know more about James Marshall and Captain John Sutter, email me at www.chrisenss.com and I’ll send you a copy of the book Tales Behind the Tombstones.

Once upon a time in the West, there flourished, according to one frontier editor, “the nearest thing to a universal service company ever invented.” The biggest business in the Old West was so good at what it did that when people swore, they often did so “by God and Wells Fargo.” Seasoned East Coast express men Henry Wells and William G. Fargo began American Express with John Butterfield in 1850. Two years later, they wanted a link with the California gold fields. On March 18, 1852, paper were drawn up organizing Wells, Fargo & Company with initial capital of $300,000 (The comma between the two names was eventually dropped.) Two company representatives opened the first office on San Francisco’s Montgomery Street that July. From the red brick building, a network of routes connected the company with exotic markets such as Hangtown, Yankee Jim, and Poker Flat. The company kept letters flowing between the gold seekers and the folks back home, and it shipped gold back east safely and cheaply. You could even ship people by Wells Fargo. To accomplish these Herculean tasks, Wells Fargo applied cutting-edge 1850s technology. Some shipments, such as the fire engine ordered by the city of Sacramento from a Baltimore manufacturer, were shipped around Cape Horn. But what made Wells Fargo great was its massive fleet of Concord stagecoaches, hand-crafted in New Hampshire, that crisscrossed the Old West with such regularity that their roads often had to be watered to keep down the dust. Cargo was protected by armed guards riding shotgun.

A few years ago I agreed to be a part of a local mentor program for disadvantaged young women. I was to help a thirteen-year-old girl with a short story she wanted to write. I drove to her home, picked her up, and we headed off to the library to start work. Midway through one of our first extended conversation she shared with me that her science teacher was “making her life miserable” by giving the class a lot of pop quizzes. She told me that if he didn’t stop giving everyone such a hard time she was going to go to the principal and tell her that the science teacher was sexually molesting her. She admitted the accusation was a lie, but knew it was the only way to get rid of him. I promptly returned the teenager to her home and ended my involvement with the mentor program. Given what happened to my brother I’m wasn’t surprised to learn that people make up awful lies, but I didn’t want to find myself at the end of such an accusation. The teenager I was to mentor possessed no remorse about spreading a lie only pride in being able to come up with a way to eliminate a problem in her life. I had a chance to share this story, as well as the tragic events that happened to my brother Rick, at a book signing event yesterday. I was pleased to see how receptive the audience was about the topic. The problem, which many people know, but few talk about, is that far too many people use accusations of sexual assault for their own gain. In other words, many people have been known to fling false accusations of sexual assault at someone to “get even” for some wrong they feel they have been done. The person who is falsely accused of sexual assault and the family of the person falsely accused may well never recover from the serious damage that is done to their reputation. Even when the accusations are proven false, people often have the thought of the accusation in the back of their minds. That means that the falsely accused person will have lifetime repercussions because of a lie. No matter what a person has done in their lives, they should never have to deal with being falsely accused of sexual assault. You take away everything a person is and everything they are ever going to be. I appreciate the readers who attended the signings this weekend and am grateful for the testimonies others in similar circumstances shared. It’s surprising how many have gone through the nightmare. Wednesday’s journal notes will be back on the Gold Rush.