Diner Forty Niner

There may have been gold in "them thar hills," but there wasn't much to eat

Lewis Manly wanted nothing more than to be back at the dinner table in his father's Michigan home, a heaping plate of beans and bread before him. It was the winter of 1849. For weeks he had been traveling through the Great Basin Desert, "the most wonderful picture of grand desolation one could ever see," as he later described it. He had run out of food and water, and was lost besides. He could see nothing but salt-encrusted flats and low, black mountain ranges for miles around. Alkali dust filled the air. "Here was I," he lamented, "away out in the center of the Great American Desert, with an empty stomach and a dry and parched throat, and clothes fast wearing out... It was a darker and gloomier day than I had ever known it could be, and alone I wept aloud, for I believed I could see the future, and the results were bitter to contemplate."

The future was less bitter than Manly supposed. From the great desert he eventually escaped into the green fields west of the Sierra Nevada, where he joined thousands of men and women in searching for gold.

In 1848 gold fever became something of an epidemic. "Husband and wife were both packing up; the blacksmith has dropped his hammer, the carpenter his plane, the mason his trowel, the baker his loaf, the tapster his bottle," observed Reverend Walter Colton in the early days of the great California gold rush. "All are off for the mines, some on horses, some in carts, some on crutches and one went in a litter." Along the way these "Argonauts," as prospectors were called, encountered bandits and wild animals. They had to navigate steep mountain passes, ford rivers, and, once their provisions dwindled, hunt game. For many of these men and women, the overland journey to the mining camps was their first taste of the great outdoors.

Rumors of wealth ripe for the taking drew Argonauts from places as far away as China and Germany, perils of the great outdoors notwithstanding. They had read of a San Francisco newspaperman who had run along Montgomery Street, two quinine bottles stuffed with nuggets in hand, and of a prospector who panned some $75,000 worth of gold from a riverbed. Word had it that these fortunate fellows feasted on caviar and oysters, bonbons and bear steaks, which they washed down with champagne in restaurants that rivaled the East coast's finest. Whether fact or fiction, these reports weaved a heady spell: The first five months of 1849 saw 17,661 people pass through the Ft. Laramie, Wyoming way station as they journeyed west.

Many came to learn that these riches were no easy pickings. Prospecting proved hard work. Burdened by shovels and other tools, prospectors stood hip-deep in water for hours on end, their daily recompense often amounting to only a few flakes. Some used heavy cradles, oblong-shaped wooden boxes about three-feet long and set on rockers, while others preferred troughs called Long Toms. Whatever their equipment, it was inevitably heavy and liable to strain muscles, wrench joints, and chafe skin. One miner complained that his friend suffered "a sort of felon on his hand caused by rubbing on the cradle," while he himself struggled with a "lame back." Sand fleas compounded the discomfort.  These noxious insects, which "filled the air like dust," bit prospectors as they toiled, leaving uncomfortable welts. Indeed, rarer than a mother lode was a prospector who boasted no injury.

Injured and bug-bit prospectors dragging themselves home faced further ordeal. Found at the bottom of deep riverbeds and ravines, mired in mud and strewn with trash, mining camps were miserable places, the names they bore -- Bedbug, Poverty Flat, Gouge Eye, Delirium Tremens -- attesting to their conditions. One prospector described his camp as a veritable midden of "old boots, hats, and shirts, old sardine-boxes, empty tins of preserved oysters, empty bottles, worn-out pots and kettles, old ham-bones, broken picks and shovels." Atop such refuse prospectors pitched their tents and slept. They washed their clothes in a river's rank eddies; their meals they fixed on small sheet-metal stoves or over smoky greenwood fires.

These meals left much to be desired. Though a lucky few did dine on oysters and sundry delicacies, the majority had to content themselves with potatoes, meal, dried pork, molasses, and coffee. Eaten day in and day out, this diet often inflamed eyes, bloodied gums, and blackened legs -- all symptoms of scurvy.

Yet even this limited bill of fare was preferable to the food prospectors ate when their supplies ran low, as often happened in some of the more remote camps. "I am too weak to attempt traveling," California prospector Joseph Bruff wrote after having exhausted his grub stake. "Maybe I can shoot a bird." This he attempted to do and, after one or two errant volleys, finally managed to bring down "a very poor and tough blue-bird, about the size of a brown sparrow." Bruff then hunted up "2 old dirty flour-sacks," which he scraped to get "2 ounces of very mixed compound -- of dark & yellow lump & cakes of sour flour, hairs, cotton lint, & additions the mice had made." Removing what he could of the mice's additions, he mixed sour flour and bluebird together in a kind of soup. A few days later starving again, he caught sight of "the fresh tracks of an Indian." "Oh! if I can only overtake him!," Bruff mused, "Then I will have one hearty meal!" To those who might think him bloody-minded Bruff plead cruel necessity. "I have heard how people would starve to death rather than eat human flesh! Fools! How little could they form an idea of the cravings of hunger! ... My mouth fairly watered, for a piece of Indian to broil!"

Though few prospectors went to the extreme that Bruff contemplated, they did commit other crimes, jumping claims, stealing crops, looting homes, ransacking farms, destroying roads, and killing livestock when it suited them. Wherever they went they left their mark. "People looked on my property as their own," complained John Sutter, the hapless sawmill owner whose gold-rich land became ground zero for the California rush. "I was alone and there was no law."

Many shared Sutter's complaint, but little could be done in the face of such zeal. The decades preceding the rush had seen tremendous economic and social change, more so than after the Civil War. For many of the miners the gold rush offered the only escape from the competition, chronic unemployment, low pay, and incessant boom-and-bust cycles that had come to characterize American life. Gold raised the standard behind which marched countless strivers facing otherwise limited prospects. Some marched to their fortune, some to their doom.