Some 300,000 people surged into California in the months and years after news of a gold strike at Sutter’s Mill in what would become Coloma (Culloma), California, in January 1848. They came from every point of the compass, desperate to strike it rich.
The University of the Pacific’s “Gold Rush Life” collection is made up of diaries, correspondence, and other primary sources documents. These present us with a doorway into the lives of some of those who came to be called Forty-Niners. Such documents may be as close to the experience of some of the participants as we’ll ever get, and they make for absolutely fascinating reading and research.
Some came by land, across the California Trail and California Road. Others came by sea: a ship out of Boston or New York could take months to journey around Cape Horn to San Francisco. Portages across the isthmus of Panama could shorten that, if there was a boat waiting on the Pacific side—all this was more than half a century before the Panama Canal existed.
Pennsylvanian David Gillis, for one, began his journey to the promise of gold in early February 1852. It took him until August to get in San Francisco. In his shipboard diary, he chronicled the frequently miserable circumstances of the trip. He was sick with colds and mumps. Fights broke out over water; at one point they were more than two months without landfall. And his fellow passengers died with some frequency. Here are only some of the instances he jotted down:
Two more young men of Georgia died last night and cast overboard this morning one of a fever one of dysentery Some more are very sick […] A young man died of fever in the Steerage at 8PM he was from New Orleans […] Dyed last night with measles a man by the name of Reed of Georgia […] Died a young man from NY name White disease measles & phthisic.
Phthisic, better known today as tuberculosis, was commonly carried to California thanks to the weakened immune systems of the gold-seekers.
Another Easterner, John E. Fletcher, had made the hazardous trip west a couple years earlier. In June 1850, he wrote to his wife in Massachusetts from “Little Deer Creek 2 miles from Nevada City,” noting
[i]t is a hard case to get a fortune out of California, for everyone who goes home with his pile there are six who find their graves here. Five acquaintances of mine have died here since I landed at San Fransisco. I try not to get discouraged…