goldfields

It’s no wonder that Luzena was amazed when a miner offered her a $5 gold piece, “ma’am, for them biscuit.” According to Measuring Worth, $5 in 1849 was worth at least $157 dollars. A man might work a week for that much money. But everything in California was different than anything the 49ers had known back in the States.

One of the most fascinating things (to me at least) in Luzena’s account is the food she cooked and the prices she paid for it. It’s a vivid picture.

Luzena’s salt pork probably didn’t look this good.

My first purchase was a quart of molasses for a dollar, and a slice of salt pork as large as my hand, for the same price. That pork, by-the-by, was an experience. When it went into the pan it was as innocent looking pork as I ever saw, but no sooner did it touch the fire than it pranced, it sizzled, frothed over the pan, sputtered, crackled, and acted as if possessed. When finally it subsided, there was left a shaving the size of a dollar, and my pork had vanished into smoke.

I found afterward that many of our purchases were as deceptive, for the long trip around the “Horn” was not calculated to improve an article which was probably inferior in quality when it left New York. The flour we used was often soured and from a single sieve-full I have sifted out at one time a handful of long black worms.

The butter was brown from age and had spent a year on the way out to California. I once endeavored to freshen some of this butter by washing it first in chloride of lime*, and afterwards churning it with fresh milk. I improved it in a measure, for it became white, but still it retained its strength. It was, however, such a superior article to the original “Boston” butter, that my boarders ate it as a luxury. Strange to say, in a country overrun with cattle as California was in early days, fresh milk and butter were unheard of, and I sold what little milk was left from my children’s meals for the enormous price of a dollar a pint. Many a sick man has come to me for a little porridge, half milk, half water, and thickened with flour, and paid me a dollar and a half a bowl full.

Ten years later John Bidwell was complaining of the same thing. In an address to the State Agricultural Association in 1860 he said:

But a few years ago nearly all the farmers in this valley, and I among the rest, purchased nearly all the butter they used—butter that had been imported across the Isthmus of Panama, or around Cape Horn. Some of it seemed old enough to have made a voyage around the world. I became ashamed of it, and resolved that if I could not, with thousands of cattle, which I had at that time, make sufficient butter to supply my own family—and my family is large, over fifty, and sometimes a hundred in number—I would do without it.

By his family, Bidwell meant his employees and dependents on Rancho Chico. He was not married at the time and had no children. But he treated his workers like family, and he didn’t waste any time in establishing a dairy.

You may have noticed that everything in California cost a dollar. That seems to have been the smallest unit of currency, and was often equated with a pinch of gold dust.

Luzena continues:

The beans and dried fruits from Chile, and the yams and onions from the Sandwich Islands, were the best articles for table use we had for months. The New York warehouses were cleared of the provisions they had held for years, and after a twelve-months’ sea voyage, they fed the hungry Californians.

No wonder that miner was willing to give ten dollars for bread made by a woman! The alternative was bread (hard flat “pilot’s bread”) shipped ’round the Horn.

*Chloride is lime is Calcium hypochlorite, used as a bleaching agent and disinfectant. It’s hard to imagine that it could have made that butter any worse.

Luzena Wilson finally made it to the crowded tent city around Sacramento. There she encountered men who were lonesome for the comforts of home.

It was almost dusk of the last day of September, 1849, that we reached the end of our journey in Sacramento. My poor tired babies were asleep on the mattress in the bottom of the wagon, and I peered out into the gathering gloom, trying to catch a glimpse of our destination.

The night before I had cooked my supper on the camp fire, as usual, when a hungry miner, attracted by the unusual sight of a woman, said to me, “I’ll give you five dollars, ma’am, for them biscuit.” It sounded like a fortune to me, and I looked at him to see if he meant it. And as I hesitated at such a remarkable proposition, he repeated his offer to purchase, and said he would give ten dollars for bread made by a woman and laid the shining gold piece in my hand. I made some more biscuit for my family, told my husband of my good fortune, and put the precious coin away as a nest-egg for the wealth we were to gain.

In my dreams that night I saw crowds of bearded miners striking gold from the earth with every blow of the pick, each one seeming to leave a share for me. The next day when I looked for my treasure it was gone. The little box where I had put it rolled empty on the bottom of the wagon, and my coin lay hidden in the dust, miles back, up on the mountains. So we came, young, strong, healthy, hopeful, but penniless, into the new world. The nest egg was gone, but the homely bird which laid it—the power and will to work—was still there.

All around us twinkled the camp fires of the new arrivals.  A wilderness of canvas tents glimmered in the firelight; the men cooked and ate, played cards, drank whisky, slept rolled in their blankets, fed their teams, talked, and swore all around; and a few, less occupied than their comrades, stared at me as at a strange creature, and roused my sleeping babies, and passed them from arm to arm to have a look at such a novelty as a child.

Children were indeed a novelty in Gold Rush California, and young men who missed home and family and their younger siblings would go out of their way to see a young child.

We rejoin Luzena Stanley Wilson on her overland journey to California–

It was a hard march over the desert. The men were tired out, goading on the poor oxen which seemed ready to drop at every step. They were covered with a thick coating of dust, even to the red tongues which hung from their mouths swollen with thirst and heat. While we were yet five miles from the Carson River, the miserable beasts seemed to scent the freshness in the air, and they raised their heads and traveled briskly. When only a half mile of distance intervened, every animal seemed spurred by an invisible imp.

They broke into a run, a perfect stampede, and refused to be stopped until they had plunged neck deep in the refreshing flood; and when they were unyoked, they snorted, tossed their heads, and rolled over and over in the water in their dumb delight. It would have been pathetic had it not been so funny, to see those poor, patient, overworked, hard-driven beasts, after a journey of two thousand miles, raise heads and tails and gallop at full speed, an emigrant wagon with flapping sides jolting at their heels.

Luzena jumps in her story from the Carson River to the “summit of the Sierra” and says nothing at all about the struggle to cross the mountains.

At last we were near our journey’s end. We had reached the summit of the Sierra, and had begun the tedious journey down the mountain side. A more cheerful look came to every face; every step lightened; every heart beat with new aspirations. Already we began to forget the trials and hardships of the past, and to look forward with renewed hope to the future.

Almost there!

Wagon train pioneers inevitably had to lighten their loads. First to go were heavy items like the rocking chair and the cast iron stove. Some emigrants took equipment that they thought would pay off in their new home, like pickaxes and millstones, and those too had to go. The road to California was strewn with cast-offs.

It was also strewn with dead beasts of burden. The oxen became worn down and when they died they were abandoned by the roadside. Some emigrants were left to pack everything on their backs and continue on foot through a scene littered with dead animals. The stench was terrific. Here is how J. Goldsborough Bruff depicted it:

Luzena has her own story of lightening the load:

After a time the hard traveling and worse roads told on our failing oxen, and one day my husband said to me, “Unless we can lighten the wagon we shall be obliged to drop out of the train, for the oxen are about to give out.” So we looked over our load, and the only things we found we could do without were three sides of bacon and a very dirty calico apron which we laid out by the roadside.

Luzena had long ago discarded her excess pots and pans. They must have been down to very little other than flour, if three sides of bacon and an apron were going to make a difference.

We remained all day in camp, and in the meantime I discovered my stock of lard was out. Without telling my husband, who was hard at work mending the wagon, I cut up the bacon, tried out the grease, and had my lard can full again. The apron I looked at twice and thought it would be of some use yet if clean, and with the aid of the Indian soap-root, growing around the camp, it became quite a respectable addition to my scanty wardrobe.

The next day the teams, refreshed by a whole day’s rest and good grazing, seemed as well as ever, and my husband told me several times what a “good thing it was we left those things; that the oxen seemed to travel as well again.” Long after we laughed over the remembrance of that day, and his belief that the absence of the three pieces of bacon and the dirty apron could work such a change.

Nothing but actual experience will give one an idea of the plodding, unvarying monotony, the vexations, the exhaustive energy, the throbs of hope, the depths of despair, through which we lived. Day after day, week after week, we went through the same weary routine of breaking camp at daybreak, yoking the oxen, cooking our meager rations over a fire of sage-brush and scrub-oak; packing up again, coffeepot and camp kettle; washing our scanty wardrobe in the little streams we crossed; striking camp again at sunset, or later, if wood and water were scarce. Tired, dusty, tried in temper, worn out in patience, we had to go over the weary experience tomorrow. No excitement, but a broken-down wagon, or the extra preparation made to cross a river, marked our way for many miles.

Oxen are slow beasts, steady and strong, but oh so slow. The company that made 15 miles a day reckoned it a good day. Imagine crossing Nebraska, flat, featureless, windy Nebraska, at a pace of two miles a hour. The oxen and the wind stirred up the dirt, and it blew about and got into everything. That was the monotony of crossing the prairie.

Luzena’s first crossing of the Platte River was fairly unremarkable, for the Platte is a shallow river. But the next crossing that she describes was different:

J. Goldsborough Bruff’s drawing of his company crossing the North Platte River

In strange contrast was the North Platte which we next crossed, a boiling, seething, turbulent stream, which foamed and whirled as if enraged at the imprisoning banks. Two days we spent at its edge, devising ways and means. Finally huge sycamore trees were felled and pinned with wooden pins into the semblance of a raft, on which we were floated across where an eddy in the current touched the opposite banks.

And so, all the way, it was a road strewn with perils, over a strange, wild country. Sometimes over wide prairies, grass-grown, and deserted save by the startled herds of buffalo and elk; sometimes through deep, wild cañons, where the mosses were like a carpet beneath our feet, and the overhanging trees shut out the sunshine for days together; sometimes over high mountains, where at every turn a new road had to be cleared, we always carried with us tired bodies and often discouraged hearts.

A monotonous road, strewn with perils. Who is up for a trip to California?