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

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.