“Got a dream boy, got a song! Paint your wagon, and come along!”

Director's Notes by Charles Morey

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(An abridged version of these notes can be found in the September 07 issue of the Backstage newsletter.)

The story of Paint Your Wagon and by extension, of the Gold Rush it depicts is the fundamental American story: the search for home. That is the essence of our national myth and the essence of our national character. It can be described in many forms--the search for personal freedom, religious freedom, economic freedom. But it all comes down to one basic impulse--the search for home.

California has had a hold on the world's imagination since the first European explorers sailed California's coast in search of a water route through North America from Europe to Asia: the fabled Northwest Passage.

Early in the sixteenth century, Spanish writer Garcí Rodríguez Ordóñez de Montalvo published a book called Las Sergas de Esplandián (The Exploits of Esplandián). One of the characters in this fantasy was Calafía, the queen of California, "more beautiful than all the rest." Montalvo described this mythical California as an island inhabited solely by black women who lived "in the manner of Amazons."

Historians assume that Montalvo's novel was known to the Spanish explorers who first sailed along the coast of Baja California in the early 1500s as they named the peninsula  after the mythical island in the novel. Cortés, the conqueror of the Aztec empire, reported in 1524 that he expected to find an island of Amazons along the northwest coast of Mexico.

Montalvo's novel includes these words:

"Know ye that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California, very near the Terrestrial Paradise and inhabited by black women without a single man among them and living in the manner of Amazons. They are robust of body, strong and passionate in heart, and of great valor. Their island is one of the most rugged in the world with bold rocks and crags. Their arms are all of gold, as is the harnesses of the wild beasts which, after taming, they ride. In all the island there is no other metal."

For the fanciful, California held the lure of gold  and the attractions of "Calafia", but the area's potential resources, strategic position across the Pacific from Asia and potential control of a Northwest Passage  attracted the more prosaic interest of every major European power. The Spanish colonized California in the late 18th century and the territory became part of Mexico in 1821 after independence. The Russians established a trading post in Northern California at Fort Ross in 1812. The British, through Sir Francis Drake's expedition in 1578-1579 had claimed the North West Coast of the American continent. And by the mid 19th century, the phrase "Manifest Destiny" was coined to justify the United States expansionist dreams of a continental nation.

A French diplomat visiting California in 1840 reported, "Whatever nation chooses to send a warship and two hundred men" could take California. On July 7, 1846, this is precisely what the United States did in the early months of the Mexican-American war (1846-1848). California had never had close ties to the central government in Mexico City and in fact in the early 1840's there were fewer than 7,000 Mexican citizens in all of California.

The Mexican-American war is generally looked at today as an American war of expansion, the expression of "Manifest Destiny." Like everything else, it is a little more complicated than that, but not much. In 1836, the Republic of Texas had seceded from Mexico. Thereafter, Mexico considered Texas a rebellious territory and made it very clear that if the United States ever attempted to annex Texas, the result would be war. In 1845, the U.S. did just that by receiving Texas as the 28th State. And then, probably unintentionally, the U.S. provoked war through what is known as the Thornton affair in which an American patrol of sixty three cavalry made contact with a Mexican force of two thousand in disputed territory North of the Rio Grande River. The Americans were routed, many were killed and wounded and others taken prisoner. President Polk used this as the "casus belli" to ensure a formal declaration of war by Congress on May 11, 1846. In general, the war was strongly supported by the South, looking to the acquisition of Mexican territory that could become slave states. The war was opposed by Northern Whigs and abolitionists for exactly the same reason.

By 1848, California had, in military fact, become a territory of the United States. That situation was formalized by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo that ended the Mexican American War on February 2, 1848. Mexico ceded Texas to the U.S. plus "Alta California": present day California, Nevada, Utah, parts of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming  for the sum of $15,000,000. Quite a deal.

Had the Mexican government known what had occurred in the Coloma Valley of California a few days before the treaty was signed, they might have tried to drive a harder bargain.

James Marshall had been sent by the Sacramento land baron, John Sutter, to build a sawmill on the American River. A sawmill in 1848 would, of course, be powered by water, so part of Marshall's task was to cut a tail race, a channel that would carry water from the river to turn the water wheel and thereby the saw blade. On the morning of January 24th, Marshall was inspecting the tail race when, as he subsequently recalled:

Marshall brought the gold to Sutter. Sutter tried to keep it a secret, but it could not last. The rumor was started and several weeks later Mormon workers at Sutter's flour mill near Sacramento began panning for gold downriver of the sawmill. They were successful and their site became known as Mormon Island, the first mining camp to be established.

In March, Sutter wrote in his diary that his men  had "left for washing and digging gold and very soon all followed and left me only (the) sick and lame behind."

By May of 1848 the word had reached San Francisco and the gold frenzy had surely begun. A San Franciscan of the time wrote:

On May 29, San Francisco's newspaper, "The Californian" ceased publication announcing:

By early June an estimated 2,000 men had descended upon the gold fields. San Francisco was, briefly, a ghost town. But that was soon to change. In August the New York Herald first reported rumors of the gold strike. A month previous, in July the military Governor of California, Richard B. Mason, made the trip to Mormon Island where he found two hundred men, many of whom claimed they were making $100 a day by panning the American River--an enormous sum for the time. Mason subsequently wrote to President Polk stating:

By the close of 1848, Mason's report, coupled with independent accounts from the gold fields caused Polk to state in his message to Congress:

It is interesting to remind ourselves the difference in communications and travel in those days. January of 1848, gold is discovered. In March of 1848 the gold strike is reported in a San Francisco newspaper; in August, in the New York Herald. But since it took a minimum of five months to get from the east coast to California--hence, the "argonauts," as the gold-seekers called themselves, became known as 49ers, not 48ers! (They called themselves "Argonauts" incidentally as a reference to the Argonauts of Greek legend, the sailors, who journeyed with Jason in search of "the golden fleece.")

So, the Gold Rush was on. At the time of the discovery at Sutter's mill, California's population was estimated at approximately 14,000 of European descent, mostly Hispanic and located in the coastal settlements, around the missions and in the central valleys on enormous cattle ranches. There were an estimated 100,000 Native Americans spread across the state. By the end of 1848 there were 10,000 men in the gold region alone; a year later 40,000 and by the end of 1849, 115,000. Ninety-percent male.

The first surge of immigrants by sea began to reach San Francisco in April of 1849. Between April and December of that year the harbormaster estimated 31,303 disembarkations of which 599 were women. By July of 1850 more than five hundred ships had been abandoned in San Francisco Bay--their crews having jumped ship. The population of San Francisco grew from under 1,000 in 1848, to 25,000 by 1850, the year Statehood was granted to California--there now being no question as to the value of the territory to the Federal Government. By 1852 the population had increased to an estimated 255,000 and by 1860, California's population had grown to 380,000. Though the European and Asian populations of California increased geometrically during the Gold Rush, the Native American population was roughly halved--mostly from exposure to diseases such as small pox to which they had no immunities, but also from wholesale slaughter.

Emigration to California was not for the faint of heart. There were basically three ways to get there from what was, at the time, the United States: First, a 14,000 mile sea voyage around Cape Horn, one of the most arduous sea passages any vessel could make and a trip that could take anywhere from five to eight months; next, by ship to the Gulf of Mexico side of the Isthmus of Panama, then by pack mule across Panama to the Pacific, and then by ship again up the coast to San Francisco. The Isthmus of Panama route cut a significant amount of time off the journey. However, in some ways it was even more dangerous than the sea voyage as death or serious illness from malaria or dysentery were common.

The third route, of course, was across the plains via the wagon train so familiar to us from our national myths. To digress momentarily: many gold seekers followed the Mormon trail through Salt Lake City on their way west--and in fact, the Gold Rush had an enormous economic and cultural impact upon early Salt Lake City. The Mormon Pioneers had arrived in the Salt Lake valley in 1847, of course. One of the things they were looking for, quite simply, was distance and isolation from the rest of the United States. The flood of western bound emigrants only two years after the valley had been settled quickly destroyed that dream; but very likely ensured the economic survival of the new community as every emigrant needed supplies for the rest of the journey and had the cash or goods to barter for them. It is interesting to speculate on how Utah would have developed had gold not been discovered; if the region had remained as isolated and cut off from the rest of the United States as it had been previously. One can only assume that thousands of non-Mormons heading for the gold fields on the one hand and the federal Government's need to ensure a secure overland route for the transportation of gold back East on the other fundamentally altered the development of both the territory of Utah and the Mormon Church itself.

Not all of the "Argonauts" were American citizens abandoning the tenements of mid-19th century New York City or the hardships of a New Hampshire farm for the gold fields. A not insignificant proportion was made up of emigrants from Europe, Asia or Latin American. In Europe the revolutions of 1848, not to mention the famine in Ireland, drove hundreds of thousands of emigrants towards America and in many cases towards what were reported to be the endless fields of gold in California.

There were basically three main areas of gold camps: the northern mines, an area generally North East of modern day Sacramento in the area of Auburn, Nevada City and Grass Valley. If you've ever driven I-80 west from Salt Lake to San Francisco you pass right through it. The southern mines were just a bit South East of Sacramento down around Sonora. The third area was in far Northern California, up around Shasta and the Trinity River.

The mining camps were extremely primitive in all respects. Summers were dry, dusty and hot - as they still are in the foothills of the sierras. Winters were cold, wet and muddy. Many of the camps were just below the snow line, but close enough to make for a very long winter in a tent or log lean-to. Food and supplies were scarce. Gold dust was the common currency. The work was back-breaking. Much of a gold miner's day was spent standing, kneeling or squatting in freezing cold mountain streams. The early methods of mining were all based on one principal. Gold is heavier than other minerals and therefore will sink to the bottom when a mass of gravel and dirt containing gold is run through water. In the early years, just as James Marshall had found gold nugget in the mill race, "placer" gold, as it was called, was found in streambeds and river banks. Miners used pans to scoop sand and gravel from the stream bed, then swirled the pans in a circular motion to remove the water and lighter materials, leaving the heavier particles of gold in the bottom of the pan. Later, they used a rocker box in which water and sand were mixed, then rocked back and forth. The sand and water would pass out a sieve at one end, leaving the gold behind. Subsequently, miners extended the size of the rocker box  to  about fifteen feet, calling it the "long tom," the bottom of which had small, angled slats called "riffle bars." River gravel was shoveled into the box; water was run through it, the riffle bars on the bottom would catch the gold flakes. In all cases the same principle was used to find the gold - gold is heavy, therefore will sink to the bottom.

By 1852, the "easy pickings" were gone. The streams were mostly panned out. Much of the remaining gold was in veins of quartz below the surface and large mining operations began to appear to extract the ore in "hard rock mining" operations that tunneled into the earth. Mining became less and less a wild individual adventure and more and more a well capitalized, corporate enterprise.
 
Thousands upon thousands of mostly young men had descended on the gold camps. They left behind their families, their wives, their children, their churches, their schools - virtually all "civilizing" influences. The Grass valley telegraph reported: "California turns men profane, drunken and lawless." A miner writing from Mormon Island in 1850 said:

Another letter writer commented:

The names of the mining camps reflect the society of those years: Poker Flat, Whiskey Flat, Whiskey Gulch, Brandy Flat, Drunkards' Bar, Hangtown, Hells Delight, Robbers Roost, Rough and Ready, Dead Man's Bar, and so on, to the inevitable Whorehouse Gulch.

In the very early days of the Gold Rush there was remarkably little crime, but as the fields were over-run with new arrivals and competition over diminishing resources became more fevered, lawlessness increased as the sense of relatively easy co-operation between the Indians, Mexicans and the American emigrants that marked the early days, diminished. In 1850 the newly minted California Legislature passed a Foreign Miners tax of twenty dollars a month. Although, many of the miners had emigrated from foreign countries, the law was principally enforced against the Spanish speaking, many of whom gave up their claims and returned to Mexico, South and Central America. At the same time Native Americans were driven off their lands if it appeared to be a likely site for gold.

A very, very few miners actually got rich; many more struggled to just get by and  eventually drifted on to other ventures like both my great grandfathers. Some of those made great commercial successes like Salem Levi Strauss. Others returned home to the east severely chastened. And many others died in the mining camps of smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, typhoid.

But, the real story of the Gold Rush is not a story of the very few fortunes made, the many not made or lost in the California gold fields.

The real story of the Gold Rush lives elsewhere.

First, this mass migration turned a sleepy agrarian Mexican territory into an integral part of the United States virtually overnight. In an instant, the Gold Rush created a continental nation. Without the enormous population growth the Gold Rush engendered, the history of the western expansion might have been very different; as would have been the history of the civil war. If California had not entered the Union as a free state in 1850 to balance Texas' entry as a slave state a few years previous-something that would not have happened so precipitously if gold had not been discovered-the Civil War may have begun a decade earlier and the outcome may have been very different as might the entire history of this nation from the mid 19th century onward.

Second, the California Gold Rush was certainly not the whole cause, but the explosive expression of a fundamental change in an essential part of the American character--a pull away from our puritanical roots. As the historian H.W. Brands noted, the Gold Rush fundamentally changed the "American Dream:"

And finally: it is as an expression of that uniquely American story, that undeniably American myth of a rootless, wandering, questing people's "search for home." The myth of the Gold Rush expresses what is best and maybe what is worst in our national character. We are an impatient, foolhardy, adventurous, romantic, sentimental and all too frequently violent people with a very bad collective memory. We are also hopelessly naïve, generous, humane, quarrelsome, trusting, courageous and always seeking.

As David Rambo, the author of our new libretto for Paint Your Wagon puts it:

Banner picture is PTC's 2007 production of Lost In Yonkers.

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