Once in San Antonio, recalls Colonel Jack Potter in Floyd Streeter’s The Kaw, he applied to Ab Blocker for a job.  The famous trail boss asked him: “Can you ride a pitching bronc?  Can you rope a horse out of the remuda without throwing the loop around your own head?  Are you good natured?  In case of a stampeded at night, would you drift along in front or circle the cattle to a mills? …Just one more question: can you sing?”  As Jack Potter learned to his dismay, the cattle couldn’t stand his singing.  Every time he went on guard and san, the cattle would get up and mill around the bed ground.  But as soon as Ab Blocker began singing, the cattle commenced to lie down.  Potter was fired.  Another old-timer , Edward Charles Abbott was more successful.  He could not only sing but also make up verses – “anything that came into your head.”  He had a hand in composing the Ogallaly Song”, as he tells in We Pointed Them North.  This was “just made up as the trail went north by men singing on night guards, with a verse for every river on the trail,” starting form the Nueces in Texas and ending with the Yellowstone in Montana.  “When I first heard it it only went as far as Ogallaly on the South Platte, which is why I called it the Ogallaly song.”  Considering that so few cowboys could sing and that it wasn’t the quality of the singing that counted – just the reassuring sound of a familiar voice or even a humming or whistling or yodeling – it is a wonder that cowboy songs are as good as they are.  As a matter of fact, most cowboy songs, especially cowboy ballads, were written by known cowboy poets, to older tunes.  Everyone sing along with me “As I was walking one morning for pleasure, I spied a young cow puncher riding alone, his hat was thrown back and his spurs was a jingling as he approached me a singing this song.  Whoop-ee ti-yi-yo, git along little dogies, it’s your misfortune and none of my own.  Whoop-ee ti-yi-yo, git along little dogies, for you know Wyoming will be your new home.” 

In many a mining camp and cattle range, vigilantes did more to drive out desperadoes than did elected officials.  The committees of vigilance were formed because there was no other effective action against crime.  The vigilance committees of the West differed from the lynchers of the South in that, instead of circumventing the law, they enforced it.  They had a large hand in making the frontier communities from anarchy and bridged the gap between lawlessness and the formal administration of justice that came later.  Frontiersmen who found a horse thief or two dangling from the limb of a tree did not automatically conclude that justice had been violated.  Action by the vigilance committee not only was swifter and surer than that of some of the feeble courts but often was fairer.  Proceedings of these committees were informal-more so in some instances than in others.  But the committees were organized only after conditions had become desperate, and the men they punished were usually those whose guilt was clear beyond doubt.  If this were the Old West I know exactly who I’d like to invite to a necktie party

The Rosebud Vigilantes were one of the most notorious vigilante groups of the Old West.

This bit of information about the California Gold Rush is for all the students studying this historical event and email me to find out about its significance.   From all parts of the United States, from Latin America, and from China, they all flocked to California.  Those who made the 18,000-mile sea voyage around South America were called Argonauts.  The steamer Californian brought the first 265 into San Francisco Bay on January 28, 1849.  Others took a ship to Panama, braved their way across isthmus jungles packed with snakes and mosquitoes, and boarded another boat for San Francisco.  Whoever made it to California had “seen the elephant.”  Everybody who was hunting for gold, and that was most able-bodied men and a few women, were called 49ers.  Instant riches lying everywhere was the definitive image of the gold rush.  A “new Eldorado” was waiting a continent away.  Just walking by a stream, a person could net $24 worth of gold in a few minutes.  The average miner might sock away $1,000 a day.  One man found $9,000 in gold after lunch one afternoon.  A rainy season greeted the 30,000 gold seekers who came overland in the spring in 1849.  An outbreak of cholera claimed 5,000 of the prospectors who worked the fields that year.  The town of Marysville recorded 17 murders in one week.  One out of every five who came to hunt for gold was dead within six months of his or her arrival.  Still, they came in droves.  Five hundred shiploads arrived in 1849, filled with dreamers chasing visions of golden nuggets.

A building in Coloma, California, the site where gold was discovered.

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.