Samuel Brannan — California’s First Millionaire, and Last Pauper

Summary

Samuel Brannan never swung a pick or panned a single creek, yet he became the richest man in California by understanding something the gold-mad multitude did not: that the surest fortune in a rush is made selling shovels, not digging with them. A Maine-born printer and the leader of a shipload of Mormon emigrants, he had landed at the sleepy pueblo of Yerba Buena in 1846 and built the first newspaper San Francisco ever had. When word reached him in the spring of 1848 that gold had been found on the American River, he did not publish it. He bought it up first.

In May 1848 he came down the streets of San Francisco holding a quinine bottle of gold dust above his head and shouting, by the accounts that have come down to us, "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!" Before that performance he had quietly cornered every pick, pan, and shovel between the bay and the diggings. A tin pan he bought for twenty cents he sold to a frantic miner for fifteen dollars; his store at Sutter's Fort, the only one of consequence between the city and the gold country, took in as much as five thousand dollars in a single day and grossed something like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month in 1849. He was, by common reckoning, California's first millionaire.

With the money came land — vast holdings in San Francisco and Sacramento, parcels in Hawaii, the springs he would name Calistoga in the Napa Valley — and power, as first president of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance and a state senator. For roughly two decades Brannan was one of the most consequential men on the Pacific coast, an empire-builder who, the historian Hubert Howe Bancroft wrote, "probably did more for San Francisco and for other places than was effected by the combined efforts of scores of better men."

Then it all came apart. Drink, overreach, and above all a ruinous 1870 divorce that forced him to liquidate his real estate at fire-sale prices stripped the fortune away. The man who had touched off the rush and grown rich on it died in 1889 in a rented room in Escondido, so poor that his body lay unclaimed for more than a year. His is the rush's most exact inversion of the discoverer's tragedy: not the man who found the gold and lost it, but the man who never needed gold at all, made millions from other men's hunger, and still finished with nothing.

The Rush

Samuel Brannan was born on March 2, 1819, in Saco, in what was then the Massachusetts District of Maine. At fourteen he fled an abusive father, following his sister Mary Ann and her husband to Painesville, Ohio, where he learned the printer's trade that would carry him through life. In 1842, in nearby Kirtland, he joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and within a few years he was printing church newspapers in New York City and rising to be one of the most prominent Mormon leaders in the East.

When the Saints determined to leave the United States after Joseph Smith's murder, Brannan chartered the ship Brooklyn and, on February 4, 1846, sailed from New York with some 238 Mormon men, women, and children bound for Mexican California by way of Cape Horn. He carried a printing press and a flour mill in the hold, the tools of colony-building. After a stop in Honolulu, the Brooklyn reached Yerba Buena on July 31, 1846 — only to find the place already taken for the United States by the Navy, the very flag the emigrants had hoped to leave behind. Brannan's shipload roughly tripled the little town's population overnight.

He set up his press and on January 9, 1847, issued the first number of the California Star, San Francisco's first newspaper. He opened a store at Sutter's Fort in the Sacramento Valley, and as the de facto Mormon leader on the coast he collected tithes from the scattered Saints — money that, the records suggest, never reached Brigham Young in Utah. When Young chose the Great Salt Lake over California, the tie frayed; Brannan kept the funds, kept the store, and kept his eye on the main chance. He was perfectly positioned, with a newspaper, a fort-side store, and a merchant's instinct, for the thunderclap that was about to come down the American River.

The Diggings

Early in 1848, men in the employ of John Sutter began paying for goods at Brannan's store with raw gold from the sawmill at Coloma. Brannan grasped at once what the dust meant — and, crucially, what it would be worth to be the man holding the tools when the news broke. Rather than print the story in his own newspaper, he traveled the gold country, bought up the picks and pans and shovels and provisions he could lay hands on, and stocked his store to the rafters. Only then did he stage his famous walk through San Francisco with a quinine bottle of gold dust raised over his head, calling out, "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!" Within days the town half-emptied; even the staff of the California Star bolted for the diggings, leaving the paper unable to publish.

The figures that survive are the stuff of legend, and the legend is roughly true. A twenty-cent pan resold for fifteen dollars. The Sutter's Fort store cleared as much as five thousand dollars a day at the height of the frenzy and grossed on the order of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month in 1849. Brannan opened more stores along the routes to the mines and poured the proceeds into land while it was still cheap, buying heavily in San Francisco and in the new city of Sacramento that was rising near Sutter's Fort. By the early 1850s he was reckoned California's first millionaire, said to own substantial fractions of both cities.

He did not stop at storekeeping. He helped lay out Sacramento, bankrolled wharves and a steam locomotive, served on San Francisco's first town council, won a seat in the state senate in 1853, and in 1851 founded and led the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance — a self-appointed body that hanged accused criminals and for which the LDS Church formally disfellowshipped him that August. In 1861 he bought the hot springs of the upper Napa Valley and built a resort he named Calistoga, blending "California" and "Saratoga." For a time it seemed there was nothing the printer from Saco could not buy, build, or talk into being.

The Reckoning

The unraveling was gradual and then total. Brannan's appetites grew with his wealth — he speculated widely and drank heavily — and his ventures began to swallow money faster than even his stores had made it. The Napa Valley Railroad he built to ferry tourists to Calistoga was foreclosed and sold in 1869. His grip on his own affairs loosened as the bottle tightened its grip on him; by some accounts opposition to his land dealings ran so hot that he was once shot multiple times and used a cane ever after.

The decisive blow was domestic. His wife, Ann Eliza, had spent years living in Europe as the marriage withered, and in 1870 she divorced him. The court awarded her half of the couple's holdings — in cash. But almost everything Brannan owned was tied up in land, and to raise the settlement he was forced to dump his real estate onto a soft market at whatever it would bring. The empire that had taken twenty years to assemble was liquidated in a few ruinous transactions. The first millionaire had made himself poor to pay a judgment.

What followed was a long, sad coda. Brannan tried brewing, drifted south into Mexico, and ran a small ranch in Sonora, having been granted land by the Mexican government for help against the French occupation. In 1888, near seventy, he collected some forty-nine thousand dollars in interest owed him by Mexico, returned to California, paid off his debts, and by his own resolve stopped drinking. It was a sober, honorable ending to a dishonorable decline — but there was nothing left. He had cleared his name and emptied his purse in the same gesture.

What Decided It

What Became of Them

Samuel Brannan died on May 5, 1889, in a rented room in Escondido, California, of inflammation of the bowels, at the age of seventy. The man who had been California's first millionaire died without enough money to bury himself. His body lay unclaimed in the San Diego County receiving vault for more than a year before it was identified by chance and given a Christian burial; for a long time only a stake marked the grave at Mount Hope Cemetery in San Diego.

His name, unlike his fortune, endured. Brannan Street runs through San Francisco's South of Market; Calistoga remains the resort town he conjured from the Napa hot springs; he is remembered as a founder of Yuba City and a builder of early Sacramento. Bancroft's verdict — that he did more for San Francisco than scores of better men combined — has outlasted the bitter particulars of his fall.

Brannan's life is the rush's other cautionary tale, the mirror image of the discoverer who finishes last. James Marshall found the gold and got nothing; Brannan found a way to profit from everyone who chased it, made millions, and still got nothing. The lesson the two men leave together is bleak and complete: in a gold rush, neither the man who finds the metal nor the man who sells the shovels is guaranteed to keep what he gains.

Lessons

References

• Samuel Brannan Wikipedia
• Samuel Brannan: Gold Rush Entrepreneur PBS American Experience
• Samuel Brannan – California's First Millionaire Legends of America