T the beginning of the year 1849 one topic was uppermost in men's minds everywhere—the gold fields of California.
There
was reason enough for this. America was fidgety, for one thing. Young
men, only a generation away from the excitements of their country's
pioneering beginnings, were growing weary of the counting-house, the
rocky New England farms, the dawn-to-dark hard labor of making a living
on the new lands their fathers had broken to the plow on what was then
thought to be the extreme rontier. The Mexican War was over, too, and
had left a new spirit of restlessness in its rake. Now, providentially,
here was a fresh adventure. In California a man might pick up is
everlasting fortune for no more than the trouble of the bending over.
Gold, as it has lways been, was a powerful word, a charm to unlock who
knew how many gates. As the year began, the New York Herald described the state of affairs accurately in he circumlocutory journalese of the day:
"The
excitement relative to the gold fields of California," wrote its
editor, "continues with unabated fervor. It is daily fed with all
sorts of reports. Every statement is caught up and swallowed with the
greatest avidity ... all are rushing head over heels towards the El
Dorado on the Pacific—that wonderful California, which sets the public
mind almost on the highway to insanity. Every day men of property and
means are advertising their possessions for sale, in order to furnish
them with means to reach that golden land. Every little city and town
beyond the great seaports, or within their reach, is forming societies
either to cross the isthmus or to double Cape Horn."
rhe Herald's editor
added the perhaps superfluous note that husbands were preparing o leave
their wives, that sons were saying farewell to their mothers, and—it
was evidently forth commenting upon—that "bachelors are parting with
their comforts," to go to the ;old fields. He did not exaggerate. That
rush of 1849 was America's first great migration. There had been a
beginning in 1848, to be sure. Gold Was discovered at the very
begin-ling of that year, and the news soon leaked out in spite of the
efforts of interested people o keep it quiet. By the latter part of
May, Sutter, on whose land the discovery had been lade, was writing in
his diary, "Hosts arriving by water and land for the Mts." Down in he
sleepy capital at Monterey, Walter Colton complained that "The
blacksmith dropped lis hammer, the carpenter his plane, the mason his
trowel, the baker his loaf." People, Le said, were going even on
crutches, and he records that one was carried on a litter. At
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