I left Chillicothe, Ohio, on the fifth of February, 1849, with forty-three dollars, a set of carpenter's tools, a long rifle, and the absolute certainty that I was going to be rich. I was twenty-seven years old. Most of the men I traveled with were the same age and held the same certainty, which in retrospect tells you something about certainty and its relationship to age.
I came overland, the southern route through Santa Fe and across the desert, which took five months and killed three of the twelve men I started with — one from cholera, one from an accident with a mule, one from something the doctor in Santa Fe called mountain fever and which I later concluded was simply exhaustion that had decided to become permanent. We buried them in graves that I knew would not hold their markers for more than a season.
I reached the American River country in late August, four months after the first rush and approximately a year after the men who had gotten rich.
The Work
Mining is not romantic. I say this as someone who had read the newspaper accounts in Ohio and believed them to be accurate and who discovered, upon arriving, that they were accurate only about the existence of gold.
The work: you stand in cold water — the American River in August is cold, running off snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada — and you shovel gravel into a pan or a sluice box and you agitate it and you examine what remains. What remains, most of the time, is gravel. The gold, when you find it, is in flakes or fine dust that must be carefully separated and weighed. A good day in 1849 might yield three or four dollars. A very good day might yield ten. The stories of men pulling nuggets from the streambed by hand were from 1848, and most of them were not true even then.
My hands, which had been a carpenter's hands — calloused in the right places, dexterous — became a miner's hands within a month: cracked, always cold, the skin broken at the knuckles in ways that did not heal. I thought about this often: the specific shape of the damage the work did to you, how the land inscribed itself on your body.
The Town
Sacramento was a city of canvas and mud. Every building was temporary because the men who built them believed they were temporary — here for a season, here for the gold, and then home. The result was a place that looked like it was waiting to be something else.
Everything cost three times what it should. An egg was a dollar. A pound of flour was four dollars. A night in a tent that someone had partitioned with blankets and called a hotel was two dollars. The men who were reliably making money were the men selling things to miners, which was the lesson everyone arrived at eventually and which, by the time you arrived at it, was too late to act on because the profitable positions had been taken.
I met a man named Li Wei from Guangdong province who had come via San Francisco. He spoke better English than most of the Americans on the river and was a more careful miner — patient in a way that I was not, thorough, willing to work ground that Americans had abandoned as exhausted and finding gold they had missed. He had been in California longer than I had and would be there longer after I left. I think about him sometimes and hope that the years that came after were kind to him, though I know they were probably not.
What I Came Home With
I left California in November with two hundred and thirty dollars. This was more than I had arrived with, which technically made the venture profitable. After subtracting what I had spent on passage, equipment, food, and the gravel-colored months of not finding anything, I had made approximately forty cents a day for nine months of work.
I am a carpenter again. I built three houses last year in Chillicothe. The work is not exciting. The hands are still cracked in winter though the knuckles have healed. On clear days in January, when the light is flat and the sky over Ohio is the particular white of a sky that has given up on color, I sometimes think about the American River in August — the cold of it, the specific weight of a pan of wet gravel, the way a flake of gold catches the light when you finally find one.
I do not regret going. I am not sure I can explain why.
Narrator's note: Samuel Briggs is a fictional figure. The conditions of overland travel, mining economics, Sacramento prices, and the experience of forty-niners are drawn from diaries and letters collected in J.S. Holliday's The World Rushed In (1981) and Malcolm Rohrbough's Days of Gold (1997).