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The Days of Forty-nine

Youngstown, New York

And now, my dear, allow me to ask, are your most sanguine expectations realized or at least being so? Or do you find things very much exaggerated? Would you advise anyone to go to California? There are many anxious to hear from you and learn the prospects.
Sabrina

Everything had gone wrong for William Swain. He'd spent the whole cold, rainy winter in a claustrophobic cabin on the Feather River. In the spring, he and his partners moved to Foster's Bar on the Yuba, only to be kept from panning by a heavy spring snow melt that turned the clear stream into a roaring brown river. "Five month's rain," he wrote, "four month's high water, and three months... almost too hot to work." Day after day without success taxed him. But so did his fear of returning home a failure.

"Pride is a powerful force. The pride that kept so many men in California. They want to go home. But I can't go until I've got something to prove my success. They've been reading about success back home. I know, says the miner, how many people are failing. Failure is the most common fact of life in California. They don't know that. How can I go home a failure, when they expect me to come home a success? So they stay.
J. S. Holliday

Foster's Bar, Yuba River

Dear Sabrina, My specific answer to your kind question is that my expectations are not realized. We have been unlucky -- or rather, by being inexperienced, we selected a poor spot for a location and staked all on it, and it has proved worth nothing... I mostly regret the necessity of staying here longer.
William Swain

By the summer of 1850, William Swain had been away from home for more than a year. All he had to show for his trek across the continent was $500 -- nowhere near his goal of $10,000. Then he got a letter from his brother.

Youngstown, New York
Dear William,

Keep your courage up. If you fail there, you are not to blame. You have tried your best to do well, and if you can't do it there, you are better off than many who have gone there with their all and left nothing behind to fall back on. You have something, and friends who will meet you just as cordially unsuccessful as successful... To tell the plain truth, I wish most sincerely you were out of that (if you are alive) and at home, no matter if you haven't got a single mill. Your Brother,
George Swain

Reassured by his brother's letter, in November Swain left the diggings and headed for San Francisco. By the time he paid for his passage home by sea, he had no more cash in his pocket than when he'd left Youngstown eighteen months earlier.

November 6, 1850
San Francisco

Dear Friends
It is a long time since I have written home... I have got enough of California and am coming home as fast as I can.
I remain, as ever, your Son, Brother, and Husband,
William

Within a few short years, the surface gold in California was all but gone. Most of what gold remained could no longer be retrieved by a single miner with pick or shovel or pan, no matter how hard he worked. It lay at the bottom of rivers, in veins of quartz that could only be reached by deep shafts; or hidden in hillsides from which it had to be blasted by powerful streams of water.

Big machinery required big money. California's goldfields were soon controlled by investors with headquarters in San Francisco, and worked by miners who now labored for a weekly pay check.

As discouraged Forty-niners headed home, some paused to pan for gold in places they had bypassed in their hurry to California. Others fanned out in every direction. There were new strikes: in Idaho, Oregon, New Mexico, and Arizona, Last Chance Gulch in Montana, Pikes Peak in Colorado -- and in Nevada, the great Comstock Lode.

And wherever gold was discovered, the pattern set in California repeated itself. Americans rushed in. Towns sprang up. And Indian peoples -- the Apache and Paiute, the Shoshone and Coeur D'Alene, Cheyenne and Nez Perce -- found themselves outnumbered in their own lands.

Stealing began. Land, cattle, horses, everything began to disappear. There is a saying that men will steal everything but a milestone and a millstone. They stole my millstones.
John Augustus Sutter

John Sutter had expected the gold rush to make him richer than ever. Instead, it ruined him. Squatters took over his land, creditors dogged him, and he began to drink heavily. Finally, someone burned down his house. Sutter moved east, and haunted Washington for years, seeking compensation he said he was owed for having owned the land on which gold was first found. He died still waiting for Congress to act.

But Sutter's ruin would provide an opportunity for someone else.

Nancy Gooch had come West as a slave, was emancipated when California entered the Union, and got a job as a cook and washerwoman. She managed to earn enough to buy the freedom of her son and his wife back in Missouri. They came west and eventually bought the site of Sutter's sawmill on the bank of the American River, where the gold rush had begun.

Packet Ship Mosconome
500 miles from San Francisco

Absence from my friends has given me a true valuation of them, and also it has taught me to appreciate the comforts and blessings of home...
William Swain

William Swain had found no gold in California, and had gone home and started farming again, as if he'd never been away. He and his wife Sabrina had three more children, and Swain eventually became the biggest peach grower in Niagara County, New York.

But in the evenings on his farm, when the work was done, he never tired of telling his wife, and his children and grandchildren, about the great adventures he had had crossing the country when it and he had both been young.