Eldorado

Adventures in the Path of Empire

Bayard Taylor

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781629149301
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A journalist's eyewitness account of the explosive 1849 California gold rush and his travels through Mexico. In 1849, a young, wide-eyed reporter from New York ventured West not to seek riches, but to report on the madness and exuberance of the California gold rush. Sent by Horace Greeley, a highly respected New-York Tribune editor, twenty-four-year-old Bayard Taylor traveled through Panama to reach his final destination, San Francisco, which he described as an "amphitheatre of fire" in the night, gleaming with the promise of gold and progress.In his enthralling and robust narrative, Bayard brings the reader into the wild, lush world of early California, reporting on the nearly overnight growth of townships and infrastructure after the gold rush. During his adventures, Bayard walked one hundred miles from San Francisco to Monterey, and later returned to New York via Mexico by foot, mule, and coach. Bayard describes the characters he met with an honest curiosity—heady gold miners who had once been doctors and lawyers, hospitable Mexicans from all classes of society, and even a highway robber who made off with his books. Eldorado, which borrows its title from the South American–Spanish legend of a hidden land of gold, is a magnificent tale about the birth of California from a deserted land to a modern city sprawl. At once an account of history and of one man's thrilling adventures, Eldorado transports the reader to the beginning of an era, with all its gold, glitz, and glamour.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

VOLUME I

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

CHAPTER I.

From New York to Chagres—The Shores of Florida—Night in Havana Harbor—New Orleans—Chagres from the Sea

CHAPTER II.

Crossing the Isthmus—Quarrel with a Native—The Village of Gatun—Songs on the River—A Priest’s Household—An Affectionate Boatman—Riding Through the Forests—We Reach Panama

CHAPTER III.

Scenes in Panama—Emigrants Arriving—Ruined Churches

CHAPTER IV.

The Pacific Coast of Mexico—Meal-time on the Steamer—A Midnight Call at Acapulco—The Mexican Coast—The Old Presidio of San Blas—Touching at Mazatlan

CHAPTER V.

The Coast of California—A Treacherous Coast—Harbor of San Diego—Narratives of Emigration—Gen. Villamil and his Colony—The Last Day of the Voyage—The Anchor Drops

CHAPTER VI.

First Impressions of San Francisco—Appearance of the Town—The New-Comer’s Bewilderment—Indifferent Shopkeepers—Street Gold—People in Town

CHAPTER VII.

To the San Joaquin, on Muleback—Scenery of the Inland—Ranches on the Road—Colonel Frémont—A Sonorian Comrade—Crossing the Coast Range—The Mosquitos and the Ferry

CHAPTER VIII.

Camp-Life and a Ride to the Diggings—Stockton—Rocky Mountain Men—Fiery Travel—the Mule’s Heart—Arrival at the Diggings

CHAPTER IX.

The Diggings on Mokelumne River—Gold in the River-Bed—The Sonorians—The Process of Dry-Washing—Stories of the Gold-Diggers—Cost of our Visit

CHAPTER X.

A Gallop to Stockton, with some Words on Law and Society—Appropriating a Horse—The Californian Horse—A Flogging Scene in Stockton—Law and Order—Moral Effect of Gold

CHAPTER XI.

A Night-Adventure in the Mountains—An Unceremonious Supper—The Trail Lost—Second View of San Francisco—Col. Frémont’s Mine

CHAPTER XII.

San Francisco by Day and Night—The Streets after Breakfast—A Bull-Chase—The Afternoon—The Inside of a Gaming-Hell

CHAPTER XIII.

Incidents of a Walk to Monterey—Fisher’s Ranche—Agriculture in California—A Mountain Panorama—Belated on the Road—The Gila Emigrants—Monterey at Last

CHAPTER XIV.

Life in Monterey—The Fleas Outwitted—The Growth of Monterey—Domestic Life and Society—Quiet of the Town—Population—National Feeling in California

CHAPTER XV.

The State Organization of California—Steps toward Organization—The Convention Meets—The Question of Suffrage—Trouble about the Boundary—The Great Seal of the State—Distinguished Californians

CHAPTER XVI.

The Closing Scenes of the Convention—A Ball-Room Picture—Signing the Constitution—Gen. Riley and the Members—Moral of the Convention

CHAPTER XVII.

Shore and Forest—Swimming a Ravine—Dinner by the Sea-Shore—Geology and Indian Tradition—The Sea-Lions on Point Lobos

CHAPTER XVIII.

Old California—Its Missions and its Lands—Rise of the Missions—Their Downfall—Extent of the Mission Property—The Law for Granting Lands—Uncertain Boundary of Grants—Disposition of the Gold Land

CHAPTER XIX.

Return to San Francisco—Journey in an Ambulance—Night and Morning in the Mountains—Fording the Pajaro River—A Sirocco in San José—Night-Camp under the Oaks

CHAPTER XX.

San Francisco Again—Post Office Experiences—More Statistics of Growth—An Ague Case—Structure of the Post Office—Sounds on the Portico—Increase of Pay Needed

CHAPTER XXI.

Sacramento River and City—The Straits of Carquinez—New-York-of-the-Pacific—View of Sacramento City—Its Life and Business—Cattle of Experience—Sights at the Horse Market

CHAPTER XXII.

Traveling on the Plains—Night, Rain and a Ranche—The Nevada at Sunset—Prairie and Wood Craft—Among the Hills—A Knot of Politicians

CHAPTER XXIII.

Journey to the Volcano—The Forest Trail—Camping in a Storm—The Volcanic Community—Appearance of the Extinct Craters—The Top of Polo’s Peak—Return to the Mokelumne

ELDORADO.

CHAPTER I.

FROM NEW YORK TO CHAGRES.

ON the 28th of June, 1849, I sailed from New York, in the U. S. Mail steamship Falcon, bound for Chagres. About eight months had elapsed since the tidings of an Eldorado in the West reached the Atlantic shore. The first eager rush of adventurers was over, yet there was no cessation to the marvellous reports, and thousands were only waiting a few further repetitions, to join the hordes of emigration. The departure of a steamer was still something of an incident. The piers and shipping were crowded with spectators, and as the Falcon moved from her moorings, many a cheer and shout of farewell followed her. The glow and excitement of adventure seemed to animate even those who remained behind, and as for our passengers, there was scarcely one who did not feel himself more or less a hero. The deck rang with songs, laughter and gaily-spoken anticipations of roving life and untold treasure, till we began to feel the heavy swell rolling inward from Sandy Hook.

Rough weather set in with the night, and for a day or two we were all in the same state of torpid misery. Sea-sickness—next to Death, the greatest leveler—could not, however, smooth down the striking contrasts of character exhibited among the passengers. Nothing less than a marvel like that of California could have brought into juxtaposition so many opposite types of human nature. We had an officer of the Navy, blunt, warmhearted and jovial; a captain in the merchant service, intelligent and sturdily-tempered; Down-Easters, with sharp-set faces—men of the genuine stamp, who would be sure to fall on their feet wherever they might be thrown; quiet and sedate Spaniards; hilarious Germans; and some others whose precise character was more difficult to determine. Nothing was talked of but the land to which we were bound, nothing read but Frémont’s Expedition, Emory’s Report, or some work of Rocky Mountain travel.

After doubling Cape Hatteras, on the second day out, our monotonous life was varied by the discovery of a distant wreck. Captain Hartstein instantly turned the Falcon’s head towards her, and after an hour’s run we came up with her. The sea for some distance around was strewed with barrels, fragments of bulwarks, stanchions and broken spars. She was a schooner of a hundred tons, lying on her beam ends and water-logged. Her mainmast was gone, the foremast broken at the yard and the bowsprit snapped off and lying across her bows. The mass of spars and rigging drifted by her side, surging drearily on the heavy sea. Not a soul was aboard, and we made many conjectures as to their fate.

We lay to off Charleston the fourth night, waiting for the mails, which came on board in the morning with a few forlorn-looking passengers, sick and weary with twenty-four hours’ tossing on the swells. In the afternoon we saw Tybee Lighthouse, through the veil of a misty shower. The sun set among the jagged piles of a broken thunder-cloud, and ribbon-like streaks of lightning darted all round the horizon. Our voyage now began to have a real interest. With the next sunrise, we saw the Lighthouse of St. Augustine and ran down the shores of Florida, inside the Gulf Stream, and close to the edges of the banks of coral. The passengers clustered on the bow, sitting with their feet hanging over the guards, and talking of Ponce de Leon, De Soto, and the early Spanish adventurers. It was unanimously voted that the present days were as wonderful as those, and each individual emigrant entitled to equal credit for daring and enterprise. I found it delightful to sit all day leaning over the rails, watching the play of flying-fish, the floating of purple nautili on the water, or looking off to the level line of the shore. Behind a beach of white sand, half a mile in breadth and bordered by dense thickets, rise the interminable forests of live oak, mangrove and cypress. The monotony of this long extent of coast is only broken by an occasional lagoon, where the deep green of the woods comes down upon the lighter green of the coral shoals, or by the huts of wreckers and their trim, duck-like crafts, lying in the offings. The temperature was delicious, with a light, cloudy sky, and a breeze as soft and balmy as that of our northern May. The afternoons commenced with a heavy thunder-shower, after which the wind came fresh from the land, bringing us a rank vegetable odor from the cypress swamps.

On the morning of July 5th, I took a station on the wheel-house, to look out for Cuba. We had left Florida in the night, and the waves of the Gulf were around us. The sun, wheeling near the zenith, burned fiercely on the water. I glowed at my post, but not with his beam. I had reached the flaming boundary of the Tropics, and felt that the veil was lifting from an unknown world. The far rim of the horizon seemed as if it would never break into an uneven line. At last, towards noon, Capt. Hartstein handed me the ship’s glass. I swept the southern distance, and discerned a single blue, conical peak rising from the water—the well-known Pan of Matanzas. As we drew nearer, the Iron Mountains—a rugged chain in the interior—rose, then the green hills along the coast, and finally the white beach and bluffs, the coral reefs and breakers. The shores were buried in vegetation. The fields of young sugar-cane ran along the slopes; palms waved from the hill-tops, and the country houses of planters lay deep in the valleys, nestling in orange groves. I drank in the land-wind—a combination of all tropical perfumes in one full breath of cool air—with an enjoyment verging on intoxication, while, point beyond point, we followed the enchanting coast.

We ran under the battlements of the Moro at six o’clock, and turning abruptly round the bluff of dark rock on which it is built, the magnificent harbor opened inland before us. To the right lay the city, with its terraced houses of all light and brilliant colors, its spacious public buildings, spires, and the quaint, half-oriental pile of its cathedral, in whose chancel repose the ashes of Christopher Columbus. The immense fortress of the Moro crowned the height on our left, the feathery heads of palm-trees peering above its massive, cream-colored walls. A part of the garrison were going through their evening exercises on the beach. Numberless boats skimmed about on the water, and a flat ferry-steamer, painted green and yellow, was on its way to the suburb of Regoles. Around the land-locked harbor, two miles in width, rose green hills, dotted with the country palaces of the nobility. Over all this charming view glowed the bright hues of a southern sunset.

On account of the cholera at New York, we were ordered up to the Quarantine ground and anchored beside the hulk of an old frigate, filled with yellow-fever patients. The Health Officers received the mail and ship’s papers at the end of a long pole, and dipped them in a bucket of vinegar. The boats which brought us water and vegetables were attended by Cuban soldiers, in white uniform, who guarded against all contact with us. Half-naked slaves, with the broad, coarse features of the natives of Congo, worked at the pump, but even they suffered the rope-end or plank which had touched our vessel, to drop in the water before they handled it. After sunset, the yellow-fever dead were buried and the bell of a cemetery on shore tolled mournfully at intervals. The steamer Isabel, and other American ships, were anchored beside us, and a lively conversation between the crews broke the stillness of the tropical moonlight resting on the water. Now and then they struck into songs, one taking up a new strain as the other ceased—in the style of the Venetian gondoliers, but with a different effect. “Tasso’s echoes” are another thing from “the floating scow of old Virginny.” The lights of the city gleamed at a distance, and over them the flaming beacon of the Moro. Tall palms were dimly seen on the nearer hills, and the damp night-air came heavy with the scent of cane-fields, orange groves and flowers.

A voyage across the Gulf is the perfection of sea-traveling. After a detention of eighteen hours at Havana, we ran under the frowning walls of the Moro, out on its sheet of brilliant blue water, specked with white-caps that leaped to a fresh north-easter. The waves are brighter, the sky softer and purer, the sunsets more mellow than on the Atlantic, and the heat, though ranging from 88° to 95° in the shade, is tempered by a steady and delicious breeze.

Before catching sight of land, our approach to the Mississippi was betrayed by the water. Changing to a deep, then a muddy green, which, even fifteen or twenty miles from shore, rolls its Stratum of fresh water oyer the bed of denser brine, it needed no soundings to tell of land ahead. The light on the South Pass was on our starboard at dusk. The arm of the river we entered seemed so wide in the uncertain light, that, considering it as one of five, my imagination expanded in contemplating the size of the single flood, bearing in its turbid waves the snows of mountains that look on Oregon, the ice of lakes in Northern Minesota and the crystal springs that for a thousand miles gush from the western slope of the Alleghanies. When morning came, my excited fancies seemed completely at fault. I could scarcely recognize the Father of Waters in the tortuous current of brown soap-suds, a mile in width, flowing between forests of willow and cypress on one side and swamps that stretched to the horizon on the other. Everything exhibited the rank growth and speedy decay of tropi cal vegetation The river was filled with floating logs, which were drifted all along the shore. The trees, especially the cypress, were shrouded in gray moss, that hung in long streamers from the branches, and at intervals the fallen thatch of some deserted cabin was pushed from its place by shrubbery and wild vines.

Near the city, the shores present a rich and cultivated aspect. The land is perfectly flat, but the forest recedes, and broad fields of sugar cane and maize in ear come down to the narrow levee which protects them from the flood. The houses of the planters, low, balconied and cool, are buried among orange trees, acacias, and the pink blossoms of the crape myrtle. The slave-huts adjoining, in parallel rows, have sometimes small gardens attached, but are rarely shaded by trees.

I found New Orleans remarkably dull and healthy. The city was enjoying an interregnum between the departure of the cholera and the arrival of the yellow fever. The crevasse, by which half the city had lately been submerged, was closed, but the effects of the inundation were still perceptible in frequent pools of standing water, and its scenes daily renewed by incessant showers. The rain came down, “not from one lone cloud,” but as if a thousand cisterns had been stove in at once. In half an hour after a shower commenced, the streets were navigable, the hack-horses splashing their slow way through the flood, carrying home a few drenched unfortunates.

The Falcon was detained four days, which severely tested the temper of my impatient shipmates. I employed the occasional gleams of clear weather in rambling over the old French and Spanish quarters, riding on the Lafayette Railroad or driving out the Shell Road to the cemetery, where the dead are buried above ground. The French part of the city is unique and interesting. All the innovation is confined to the American Municipalities, which resemble the business parts of our Northern cities. The curious one-storied dwellings, with jalousies and tiled roofs, of the last century, have not been disturbed in the region below Canal street. The low houses, where the oleander and crape myrtle still look over the walls, were once inhabited by the luxurious French planters, but now display such signs as “Magazin des Modes,” “Au bon marché,” or “Perrot, Coiffeur.” Some of the more pretending mansions show the porte cochère and heavy barred windows of the hotels of Paris, and the common taverns, with their smoky aspect and the blue blouses that fill them, are exact counterparts of some I have seen in the Rue St. Antoine. The body of the Cathedral, standing at the head of the Place d’ Armes, was torn down, and workmen were employed in building a prison in its stead; but the front, with its venerable tower and refreshing appearance of antiquity, will remain, hiding behind its changeless face far different passions and darker spectacles than in the Past.

The hour of departure at length arrived. The levee opposite our anchorage, in Lafayette City, was thronged with a noisy multitude, congregated to witness the embarcation of a hundred and fifty additional passengers. Our deck became populous with tall, gaunt Mississipians and Arkansans, Missouri squatters who had pulled up their stakes yet another time, and an ominous number of professed gamblers. All were going to seek their fortunes in California, but very few had any definite idea of the country or the voyage to be made before reaching it. There were among them some new varieties of the American—long, loosely-jointed men, with large hands and feet and limbs which would still be awkward, whatever the fashion of their clothes. Their faces were lengthened, deeply sallow, overhung by straggling locks of straight black hair, and wore an expression of settled melancholy. The corners of their mouths curved downwards, the upper lip drawn slightly over the under one, giving to the lower part of the face that cast of destructiveness peculiar to the Indian. These men chewed tobacco at a ruinous rate, and spent their time either in dozing at full length on the deck or going into the fore-cabin for ‘drinks.’ Each one of them carried arms enough for a small company and breathed defiance to all foreigners.

We had a voyage of seven days, devoid of incident, to the Isthmus. During the fourth night we passed between Cuba and Yucatan. Then, after crossing the mouth of the Gulf of Honduras, where we met the south-eastern trades, and running the gauntlet of a cluster of coral keys, for the navigation of which no chart can be positively depended upon, we came into the deep water of the Caribbean Sea. The waves ran high under a dull rain and raw wind, more like Newfoundland weather than the tropics. On the morning of the eighth day, we approached land. All hands gathered on deck, peering into the mist for the first glimpse of the Isthmus. Suddenly a heavy rain-cloud lifted, and we saw, about five miles distant, the headland of Porto Bello—a bold, rocky promontory, fringed with vegetation and washed at its foot by a line of snowy breakers. The range of the Andes of Darien towered high behind the coast, the further summits lost in the rain. Turning to the south-west, we followed the magnificent sweep of hills toward Chagres, passing Navy Bay, the Atlantic terminus of the Panama Railroad. The entrance is narrow, between two bold bluffs, opening into a fine land-locked harbor, surrounded by hills.

Chagres lies about eight miles to the west of this bay, but the mouth of the river is so narrow that the place is not seen till you run close upon it. The eastern shore is high and steep, cloven with ravines which roll their floods of tropical vegetation down to the sea. The old castle of San Lorenzo crowns the point, occupying a position somewhat similar to the Moro Castle at Havana, and equally impregnable. Its brown battlements and embrasures have many a dark and stirring recollection. Morgan and his buccaneers scaled its walls, took and leveled it, after a fight in which all but thirty-three out of three hundred and fourteen defenders were slain, some of them leaping madly from the precipice into the sea. Strong as it is by nature, and would be in the hands of an enterprising people, it now looks harmless enough with a few old cannon lying lazily on its ramparts. The other side of the river is flat and marshy, and from our place of anchorage we could only see the tops of some huts among the trees.

We came to anchor about half past four. The deck was already covered with luggage and everybody was anxious to leave first. Our captain, clerk, and a bearer of dispatches, were pulled ashore in the steamer’s boat, and in the meantime the passengers formed themselves into small companies for the journey up the river. An immense canoe, or “dug-out,” manned by half-naked natives shortly came out, and the most of the companies managed to get agents on board to secure canoes for them. The clerk, on his return, was as...