Hope's Imperfection

Chapter 16: Home

On my voyage home I thought about something that Sarah had told me on our way to San Francisco.

It was her contention that the single most transformational moment in the history of the United States was the California Gold Rush of 1849.

The country was not seventy-five years old at the time.  California was not yet a state.  The south had yet to secede from the Union. The civil war was still ten years in the future. A national railway linking the Atlantic and the Pacific was still a pipe dream.  Twenty years on from the discovery of gold out west and the country looked altogether different. By 1848 the great exodus of families to the west coast, be it Oregon or the California territory, had not happened. The west was still a lawless frontier marked by hardship and misery. Most of those that had attempted to commercialize the land west of the Mississippi – such as George Stanhope, Ian McIntosh, and John Astor – became prime examples of business folly. A few unlucky souls, such as Richard Stanhope, became entangled and did their best to make a life from the few resources that could be obtained. Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a second prosperous democracy as a trading partner for the United States was far from being realized.

Consider the state of the country in the days before the Gold Rush: the key issue of the day was the Mexican-American War. The president at the time, James Polk, was keen for the United States to control the western territories and effectively beat back the Mexican army to the area south of the Rio Grande. Of course in true American fashion, Polk used cold hard cash to expedite the process, as $15 million to the Mexican government in exchange for cession ultimately did the trick.

For a few years hostilities seemed to be over until the west struck gold and territorial concerns and economic models clashed: the agrarian southern economy (that relied on indentured labor) and the corporate-unionist north now each tried to force their economic models onto the now burgeoning and mining-obsessed west coast. This was the source of tension that eventually led to the Confederacy and lunacy of the Civil War in 1861.

If that wasn’t enough, the Gold Rush seemed to cultivate a new cutthroat entrepreneurial mindset in the people, and one could argue that it has never left us. It wasn’t enough to live a simple life and raise a family. America would forever after be the land of opportunity, sometimes beautiful and sometimes ugly. This new take-what-is-mine-at-all-cost attitude changed the country forever. The examples of greed and genocide that took place in California are legendary. Prior to the Gold Rush 150,000 Native Americans lived in California, having existed for many centuries supported by their ability to hunt, gather, and live in harmony with the land. By 1870 only 30,000 remained. Yet it wasn’t just the indigenous people that suffered. In fact the rape of the land itself was allowed in epic proportions as twelve billion tons of soil were dug up, rivers were excavated (thereby destroying ecosystems), and hillsides were blasted apart. When these savage means didn’t yield quick enough results, poisonous mercury was used to extract gold from the ore, leaving lakes and rivers as repositories of toxic waste. It was the first real opportunity for the land to be raped in the name of commerce and, because it was permitted, more occasions followed.

No one could tell a story like Sarah.

In 1858 when Richard Stanhope left California the country was still together. I sat on the plane contemplating what would happen next in his life. He left behind his oldest son, a successful mariner in California, and his other two children – one in the United Sates Army and the other the wife of a southern politician – would soon be on opposite sides of the political spectrum. I wanted to know more.