A Yankee Trader in the Gold Rush Letters of Walter Gardner, 1851-1857

Abstract

GOLD FEVER Of the California variety first swept the Atlantic seaboard in the closing days of 1848. It was nurtured on a few random letters, an official report by the military governor of the distant province, actual specimens of gold carried east by army and navy couriers, and the President's endorsement in his December message on the state of the Union. The fever struck hard. And three years later, as attested in these letters by Walter Longley Gardner, it was still virulent in New England. California, he was informed, had become an orderly place; merchants there were prospering; the mines were paying off better than ever; every steamer was bringing back millions in bullion; the climate was the healthiest in the world; and many returned Californians were preparing to go west again. All this, he reported, has given me the California Fever, the hardest kind, and nothing but a voyage will cure it. The handful of letters that describe his gold rush experiences begin on this note, in the form of an appeal-he was then not quite nineteenfor his mother's consent to his going. Addressed sometimes to his mother and sometimes to his father, they continue with accounts of travel on the Panama route, life and clerkship in San Francisco, and, after some years, a venture in quartz mining. In time of centennial his letters may be read chiefly for their straightforward description of the gold rush. They tell of preparations for the journey that are out of the ordinary only because of their simplicity. Even by 1852, it appears, the steamship company had not thoroughly regularized its business, and some of his intended companions missed the boat because they expected a Thursday instead of a Tuesday sailing. Traffic on the Panama route was heavy. The Central America was crowded with 430 passengers. They suffered the same seasickness, grumbled as loudly at the messes, and reveled as much over the sights of Kingston as had the original forty-niners. Paying Chagres its customary compliment-a miserable dirty hole, Gardner says little of the bongo trip up the river, but he brags moderately about his prowess as a walker the rest of the way to Panama. Most of the C411