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.
In the summer of 1859, on the bleak eastern slope of Mount Davidson above the Carson Valley, a pair of Irish prospectors named Peter O’Riley and Patrick McLaughlin cursed the heavy blue-gray clay that kept clogging their rockers and gumming up the gold. When the clay was finally assayed, it turned out to be the thing they had been throwing away: silver ore of staggering richness, three parts silver to one part gold. They had stumbled onto the Comstock Lode, the richest silver strike in American history, and the camp that grew over it — Virginia City — became for two decades one of the wealthiest square miles on earth.
The Comstock produced something on the order of three hundred million dollars in silver and gold, helped pay for the Union’s war, hurried Nevada into statehood in 1864, and built the banks and mansions of San Francisco. It minted a new aristocracy of “Silver Kings” and “Bonanza Kings.” Yet the men whose names are stamped on it — Henry Comstock, O’Riley, McLaughlin — sold out early for a pittance and died broke or mad, the lode’s first proof that finding the silver and keeping it were two different things.
No life captures the Comstock’s whole arc — the dizzying rise and the total fall — better than that of Eilley Orrum Bowers. A Scottish-born boardinghouse keeper who took mining “feet” from miners who couldn’t pay their bills, she and her third husband, the muleskinner Sandy Bowers, found their two small adjoining claims sitting atop one of the richest seams in the lode. They became, almost overnight, among the first Comstock millionaires, with money, as Sandy boasted in a famous toast, “to throw at the birds.”
They built a granite mansion in Washoe Valley, toured Europe to furnish it, and reached for a respectability that always stayed just out of grasp — Eilley, by the old story, was refused an audience with Queen Victoria. Then the surface ore played out, Sandy died young, their children died, and the fortune drained away. Eilley lost the mansion, reinvented herself as a fortune-teller called “the Washoe Seeress,” and died penniless in an Oakland charity home in 1903. The Comstock made and unmade her exactly as it made and unmade its discoverers.
On July 17, 1897, the steamer Portland tied up at Schwabacher’s Wharf in Seattle, and the Post-Intelligencer announced the line that would empty offices and farms across a continent: a ton of gold. There was nearer two tons aboard, hauled out of a Yukon creek almost nobody outside the North had heard of a year before. Two days earlier the Excelsior had landed the same news in San Francisco. Within weeks the last great gold rush of the century was on, and roughly 100,000 people pointed themselves toward the Klondike.
Most never got there. The country between the salt water at Skagway and Dyea and the goldfields at Dawson was a wall of mountains, lakes, and river, and the trip broke men by the thousand. Perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 reached Dawson City; of those only about 4,000 ever found gold, and those who got genuinely rich and kept it numbered in the hundreds. The good ground on Bonanza and Eldorado had been staked before the outside world even knew the rush existed, and the latecomers arrived to a townsite where the claims were gone and the only thing left to mine was each other.
This is the story told not through the lucky few who held a paying claim but through the ordinary stampeders who climbed the Chilkoot’s golden stairs with a year of food on their backs — and through the dance-hall women, gamblers, and saloonkeepers who understood from the start that the surest gold in Dawson lay in the pockets of suddenly wealthy men, not in the gravel. Chief among them was Kathleen Rockwell, the vaudeville performer the North called Klondike Kate.
Kate mined the miners. With her flame dance she became the Queen of the Klondike, showered in nuggets across the footlights of the Savoy. She also bankrolled a young Greek waiter named Alexander Pantages, who took her money and her devotion and then took another woman to wife. The rush that minted theater magnates and Seattle fortunes left Kate, like most who ran to it, holding far less than she had given it.
For the gold-seekers of the eastern United States and Europe, the great difficulty of the California rush was not finding the gold but reaching it. The continent’s interior was a barrier of plains, deserts, and mountains, so tens of thousands of ’49ers chose to go by water instead — committing themselves to one of two long ocean passages that became, for many, the defining ordeal of their lives. One was the voyage around Cape Horn, a journey of some 15,000 nautical miles and five to eight months that carried a ship the full length of the Atlantic, around the storm-battered southern tip of South America, and back up the Pacific. The other was the shortcut across the Isthmus of Panama, which could be done in as little as six to eight weeks but ran through a tropical lowland where cholera, malaria, and yellow fever killed travelers by the score.
The sea routes were the choice of the men who came to be called Argonauts, after the crew of Jason’s ship in Greek myth — a name they wore half in earnest, half in irony. They sailed from Boston, New York, Salem, and a hundred smaller ports, often as members of joint-stock mining companies that pooled funds to buy or charter a vessel and divide the proceeds. Passage was expensive, frequently $300 or more at a time when that sum represented a year’s wages for a laborer, and the price bought no guarantee of comfort, safety, or speed.
The ships that carried them met a strange fate at journey’s end. When a vessel dropped anchor at San Francisco, its sailors — and often its officers — deserted en masse for the diggings, leaving the harbor crowded with abandoned hulls. By 1850 several hundred ships, by some counts five hundred to eight hundred or more, lay rotting or beached in Yerba Buena Cove, a forest of bare masts off the boomtown shore. Enterprising men turned them into storeships, hotels, saloons, warehouses, and even a jail; others were run aground and buried as the city filled in its waterfront, so that parts of San Francisco’s Financial District today sit atop the buried timbers of the gold fleet.
For the men themselves, the passage was only the prelude. Many arrived gaunt and broke, months behind the first wave, to learn that the surface gold was already worked out and that the real fortunes were being made by merchants selling shovels and bread. The sea voyage is, in this sense, the truest emblem of the rush — an enormous expenditure of money, hope, and life to chase a prize that for most receded as they approached it.
In August 1862, on a stretch of Williams Creek that more experienced men had written off, an English-born ex-sailor named Billy Barker and his small company of shareholders kept sinking their shaft after others quit. At around fifty feet down — below the canyon where conventional wisdom said the gold would stop — they hit pay dirt so rich it became the stuff of legend. The strike turned a played-out gully into the heart of the Cariboo Gold Rush and built the boomtown that bears his name: Barkerville.
For a season or two Barkerville was one of the largest settlements on the Pacific slope north of San Francisco and west of the older cities of the east, a clamorous string of stores, saloons, and miners’ cabins clinging to the mud of the creek. Billy Barker became, briefly, a rich man, his claim reckoned among the great producers of the Cariboo. As so often in these stories, the gold ran out faster than the money habits it created.
Barker spent freely, married, drifted, and prospected on without ever striking it big again. By the end of his life the man whose name graced a famous town was broke, working as a camp cook, his jaw eaten away by cancer. He died in 1894 in a charitable old men’s home in Victoria and was buried in a grave that for many years went unmarked — the founder of Barkerville buried as a pauper hundreds of miles from the creek that made him.
The Cariboo rush played out on the lands of the Dakelh (Carrier) and neighbouring Secwepemc and Tsilhqot’in peoples, who had travelled, traded, and lived in this interior country long before any shaft was sunk. The roads, towns, and diggings of the rush were imposed on their territory without treaty or consent, bringing disease, disruption, and dispossession even as they made fortunes for newcomers. Barkerville is preserved today as a restored heritage town; the deeper history of whose land it stands on is only more recently being told.
In the summer of 1858 a party of Georgians and Cherokee led by William Green Russell found a modest amount of placer gold where Cherry Creek meets the South Platte River, at the foot of the Colorado Rockies. The find was small, but the news — magnified by promoters, newspapers, and a country hungry for good fortune after the financial panic of 1857 — exploded into one of the great stampedes of the era. They called it the Pikes Peak Gold Rush, after the towering landmark visible across the plains, and they painted their slogan on the canvas of their wagons: “Pikes Peak or Bust.”
Perhaps a hundred thousand people set out across the prairie in 1859. Many of them found almost nothing. The easy diggings could not begin to support the flood of “Fifty-Niners,” and through that spring the trails filled with disillusioned men trudging home, their wagons now reading “Busted, by God.” The rush teetered on the edge of being remembered as a colossal humbug.
What saved it was hard rock. In May 1859 a Georgia prospector named John H. Gregory found a rich gold-bearing lode in a gulch in the mountains above the plains — the Gregory Lode, in what became Gregory Gulch between the new camps of Central City and Black Hawk. Other strikes followed within days. Gregory’s discovery proved the region’s real wealth lay in veins buried in the mountains, not flakes in the creeks, and it turned the bust back into a boom. The supply camps at the mouth of the canyons grew into Denver, the mining camps grew into towns, and within two years Congress created Colorado Territory.
All of this unfolded on the lands of the Cheyenne and Arapaho, and, in the mountains, the Ute — peoples whose territory had been recognized in the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie and was now overrun by a hundred thousand newcomers who built cities on it without consent. The same rush that founded Denver set in motion the pressure, broken promises, and violence that led, only five years later, to the massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people at Sand Creek. Colorado’s gold built a state; it was taken from nations who paid for it dearly.