Back to the Gold Rush : In Which the Author Retraces the Steps of His Great-Grandfather in 1849, When Things Looked Mighty Different in California

MY great-grandfather, Benjamin B. Harris, was one of the restless men lured to California by the Gold Rush. Oddly, he came from the least restless of backgrounds, an old Virginia family of the sort whose greatest ambition is to stay in Virginia and become even older. Nevertheless, he left his home, first for Tennessee and then Texas, which in 1847 had been a state for only two years.

He practiced law there for a while but without great success. “For about eight months of each year,” he later recalled, “malarious fever like a juggling devil assaulted me front and rear. . . . During the four healthy winter months, the wild turkey, deer and black bear oft enticed me into camp and fine hunting.” Like a lot of Forty-Niners, he felt that he hadn’t much to lose, and on March 25, 1849, in his mid-20s, he unhesitatingly joined one of the first parties to leave Texas for the California gold fields. It took the Gila Trail, the usual Texas route through northern Mexico and Southern California.

Forty years later, he wrote a memoir of his Gold Rush days, which is still in my family. I’ve known about B. B.’s single-spaced, typewritten manuscript since I was in college, and I’ve always wanted to retrace his steps and see the California he saw, even though I know that’s a mirage, and not just because of cities and highways that weren’t there in 1849. Far greater areas of our state have been changed beyond recognition by the water-control projects that have spared California its ancient curses of flood and drought.

This turns out to be obvious right from the start of my journey. In Yuma, Ariz., there’s a sign pointing out the only fordable spot on the Colorado River, and though it has an ageless Western look--shallow, brushy, full of sand bars--I know it’s not the river B. B. Harris saw. Before Hoover Dam, the riverbed was wider and deeper. The Yuma Indians had a profitable business here swimming travelers’ goods across. And, so B. B. had heard, drowning the occasional mule so that they could eat it.

B. B.’s party of about 50 had already heard many bad things about the Yumas, who were among several Indian nations that at the time preyed on northern Mexico. Back in Texas his party had met a band of Comanches returning from Mexico with stolen horses, herded by Mexican boys the Comanches had enslaved after massacring their villages. Later, near Janos in the state of Chihuahua, they met Red Sleeves (Mangas Coloradas), war chief of the Mimbres Apaches, who tried to enlist B. B.’s party in a war against the Mexicans. Wherever the Texans went in Mexico, villagers welcomed them as deliverers and held feasts and fandangos for them because los gringos carried guns.

B. B. had even come very close to a fight with Yumas on the Mexican side of the Colorado when his mule was stolen, but his companions had managed to trade his blankets for another mule before he started a war. Ironically, though, as soon as the Texans crossed the Colorado into California they did get into a battle with the Yumas.

It was due to American naivete, as B. B. saw it. The Texans met up with another group of Forty-Niners that included a dozen Eastern dudes “as green as greenness on the prairie,” B. B. wrote, “and sentimental for the red man.” They apparently held the view, fashionable in Boston, that Indians were all more or less like Hiawatha.

Against the Texans’ advice, two of the Bostonians went fishing and were promptly kidnaped. The Texans then took things in their own hands by kidnaping a couple of Yumas. Over the protest of the remaining Bostonians, there was an inconclusive battle at the end of which the Texans reluctantly agreed to give up the hostages. The two foolish Eastern dudes were found in the desert days later, naked and starving.

The landscape of brushy, gray-green trees around Winterhaven, across the Colorado from Yuma, probably looks much as it did during that abortive battle of Aug. 15, 1849, particularly if you squint a little and ignore the houses and power poles. This is fairly easy to do from a speeding Mazda 323 on Interstate 8, more or less the path (paved now, of course) the Texans followed on their horses. From here they pushed west through stretches of creosote bush so regularly spaced they look planted, then through peach-colored sand dunes. In 1849, so many pack animals died here that as a macabre joke travelers stuck the animals’ feet in the sand and stood the dry, stiff corpses upright.

At the time, the Colorado Desert was greatly feared. But these days, once you’re past the Imperial Dunes Recreation Area--where you don’t see dead animals anymore but lots of bikes and dune buggies--the Colorado Desert is the terrifically fertile Imperial Valley with its labeled fields of wheat, carrots, onions and asparagus. You can see cowboys feeding cattle against a very California background of palm trees.

The west side of the Imperial Valley is desert again, and I can’t follow B. B.’s exact trail for a while. The nearest thing to a road would take me through the Carrizo Impact Area, closed to travel because of unexploded shells from the Navy’s aerial gunnery range. Instead, there is Highway S2 through the Anza-Borrego Desert. From a lookout point on this road it is possible to see the heavily eroded Carrizo Badlands, a ghastly landscape that looks pretty much like crushed wads of tissue paper dampened with something not terribly clean; “an appearance more sorrowful than I ever dreamed nature could express,” B. B. wrote. “The place should be named Lugubria.”

A few miles later the Trail of ’49 runs pretty close to S2, often joining it. From here on, ocotillo and brittle bush fade out of the landscape and live oaks appear. B. B. stopped at a place called Vallecito, now a historical monument and park because years later the Butterfield Stage Line maintained a substantial adobe building (still there) as a stage stop. On California 79, a prosperous exurb called Warner Springs preserves the name of a ranch where the Texans rested. Here they met a phony--the first of many they were to meet in 1849--claiming to be the James Marshall who originally discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill, and B. B. noticed for the first time how much cooler California was than Mexico and began to regret having let himself be talked into trading his blankets for a Yuma mule.

Oak Grove, where the Forty-Niners also rested, still has shady oaks, which now shelter two RV parks. Twenty-three miles north of Oak Grove is Temecula, where some Indian women performed a tribal “jump-up” dance for the Texans (having seen the Mexican fandango, they considered it small beer). This is the junction of Interstate 15, and these days, of course, there are billboards and shopping malls everywhere. At Lake Elsinore, where in 1849 B. B. Harris bought a 600-pound cow for $6, I stop at a Carl’s Jr. and have a Famous Star for $1.79. In the men’s room, there is a sign saying “Wash Your Hands” in English, Spanish and Vietnamese.

The morning after he arrived in Lake Elsinore, in dense fog, B. B. thought he saw a tree full of crows and fired a shot at it. “To my surprise,” he wrote, “the entire mass went to the ground.” The Texans were astonished--it was a single bird with a 9 1/2-foot wingspan, a California marvel known as a condor. A little farther down the road, Harris exchanged his $300 rifle, for which he had originally traded 640 acres of good Texas land, “for a gun rough in exterior but about equally as efficient and $18 cash, two fine dueling pistols, and a half-bushel of gingerbread.”

For the next 110 miles or so, B. B. would recognize nothing today but an occasional barren hillside, and not necessarily even that, because the grasses that make our hills brown in summer are newcomers from Europe, and he would have seen hills covered with green native grasses. He visited Chino, known for a landmark--Don Bernardo Yorba’s adobe (now called the Yorba-Slaughter Adobe)--and marveled at a stand of wild mustard 10 feet high. He stopped at Los Angeles, roughly present-day Olvera Street, where people waterproofed the thatched roofs of their adobes with brea , or tar. He noted that in summer this stuff had a tendency to melt and drip off the eaves.

He crossed Cahuenga Pass and visited the San Fernando Mission as a tourist. In 1849, the way through the mountains was not Interstate 5 but San Fernando Road, which now winds near the electrical substation at Sylmar and connects to Sierra Highway. San Fernando Road appears again at Newhall, passing up through this odd, scattered old town, now part of the new city of Santa Clarita and surrounded by vast suburbs. Today, after a left turn on San Francisquito Canyon Road and a sharp left at the Seco Canyon turnoff, there is a sign begging visitors not to shoot animals. The Texans saw thousands of bear tracks here. Farther along, San Francisquito Canyon is home to dozens of horse farms, each with a propane tank and a satellite dish.

The road goes through Angeles National Forest and sticks close to the bottom of the canyon. There are willow thickets and stands of cane, even puddles of water down there. Over the hills march high-tension wires and water conduits from the Owens River. San Francisquito Canyon is narrow and picturesque and downright full of solitude until Lake Isabella. Then there are scattered houses and mobile homes. Bikers on the road. A billboard in Korean.

Eventually the road comes out at Gorman, and I’m back on I-5 heading down into the San Joaquin Valley. At the bottom of Grapevine Pass, the Texans emerged from a canyon and found Indians starting a farm. “We donated them a fagged-out mule, abandoned a mile behind, representing it to be fat, good to eat and only tired. To our surprise came the answer that they were Christians, therefore not mule-eaters, but they thankfully accepted the gift for use.” Their chief and B. B. became lifelong friends.

I’d have expected the Texans to travel up the eastern side of the valley, where U.S. 99 runs today, but they chose to go up the western side, which was all lakes and tule swamps, because of the good hunting. Waterfowl were so abundant, and so noisy, they had to camp half a mile from the lake to get any sleep.

Elk were their main game, though. I take California 119 west toward the Elk Hills Naval Petroleum Reserve, then Tupman Road north to the Tule Elk State Reserve. There, a residual herd of 32 of these dwarf elk survive thanks to pellet food and piped-in water, now that the rivers are controlled and annual flooding no longer creates tule bogs. They are odd creatures, like rather bulky-looking antelopes, and used to being gawked at by tourists. Tule elk nearly died out in the past century, and not only because of hunters--they were also getting pushed aside by domestic animals. Already in 1849 the San Joaquin Valley was full of wild horses escaped from Spanish herds. One day, skirting the western shore of Tulare Lake, B. B. and his party were met by a herd of wild horses that galloped around them in a circle like creatures out of a dream.

From time to time, the Texans encountered Yokuts Indians. B. B. admired their rude technology, particularly their ability to make anything from boats to bird nets out of woven grass. I see impressive technology around here today: vast agro-biz farms, stupendous energy projects (a veritable traffic jam of high-tension power poles near Buttonwillow), petroleum refineries. Throughout the San Joaquin, you are reminded of our technology by the sight of grasshopper pumps steadily sucking up petroleum.

It’s hard to know exactly where B. B. went in all this flat, modern farmland. I decide to steer close to the California Aqueduct, which puts me on thoroughfares with names like Corn Camp Road and Main Drain Road. Hydraulic engineering is literally on every side. On my right is a carefully maintained ditch, apparently the Main Drain, and on my left is a line of trees marking a formerly wild river now tamed by levees.

The Texans traveled along the Kings River, both for the game and the fishing (a little-known fact: Forty-Niners often carried fishing poles). After taking I-5 again for a while, I get off at Kettleman City trying to follow the Kings River, a tricky project because the roads shy away from it. The farms around here are older and smaller than the ones in the reclaimed swamps to the south. The population is also a lot denser in such places as Riverdale, and some people have a little fun with their grasshopper pumps, painting smiling faces on them or attaching antennae.

Just past Tranquillity is the Mendota Waterfowl Management Area, which preserves a sizable chunk of tule bog as it was. A dirt causeway goes back into the slough for miles, and if you just subtract the odd power pole, this is what a lot of the trip to the gold mines must have looked like: quiet and soggy and full of immemorial reeds like one of those dioramas of the Pleistocene in the Museum of Natural History.

The Forty-Niners were surviving entirely on their rifles at this point. “Living on meat alone sensibly told on our disposition,” B. B. recalled. “Everyone seemed to become wolfish.” They found Indians making cakes of wild tobacco, and when a man named Kelly ate some, B. B. told him that it was wolf poison as a somewhat savage practical joke. A little later, Kelly had his revenge on B. B. by serving him wild horseflesh--which as the son of generations of Virginia cavalrymen B. B. always refused to eat--and telling him that it was elk. Tempers grew so short that a few days later, in a trivial argument with Kelly over how to arrange elk meat on a drying scaffold, B. B. “laid from my belt my two dueling pistols on the scaffold midway between us, challenging him to grab one and fire.”

Fortunately, the other Forty-Niners separated Kelly and B. B. A trivial argument had already led to a killing in their party. Back in Texas, one man had gut-knifed another in an argument over how to cook beans.

Accustomed to the rich hunting of the tule region, the Texans planned an easy journey to the Fresno River. They were in for a surprise. No more rich tule bogs, just a barren plain covered with low scurfy grass; today, with irrigation, it can support perhaps cotton or grapes. The Fresno River turned out to be a bust--no game, no fish, scarcely even any water--and so it is in 1988.

They decided to drive on to Bear Creek. I turn right on Sandy Mush Road, then north on Plainsburg Road, crossing U.S. 99. Plainsburg Road ends at Bear Creek Road, and beyond a plowed field there is a line of trees that must mark the creek. Bear Creek was also dry, and at this point B. B. and his party were reduced to eating elderberries and wild rose hips. As for myself, I find a pretty good barbecue joint just outside Planada. The owner, Mel, makes his own Tabasco-type hot sauce, highly recommended.

From here, California 140 leads up into the Gold Country. On Sept. 29, 1849, B. B. Harris and his party finally arrived at the town of Mariposa, all hoping to strike it rich. It didn’t turn out to be so easy. In the end, after trying his luck up and down the Sierras for three years, my great-grandfather gave up mining and settled where he’d first arrived, in Mariposa, to practice law.

And here, at the end of the journey, I unexpectedly find something just about unchanged from his day: the Mariposa County Courthouse, a sort of New England-style temple to constitutional law in the wilderness. The echoey, plank-walled courtroom, with its rows of pews for the public and wooden chairs for the jury, is a place he knew well. It was heated by an iron Franklin stove that’s still there. I can imagine my great-grandfather arguing a case here, addressing ragged, bearded miners and tobacco-chewing judges. Somehow I see him combining Southern charm and frontier irony, saying things like, “Gentlemen, I have been a miner like yourselves, and I dare say that in digging wealth from Mother Earth, none has ever been more minor than I.”

Eventually he left California to fight in the Civil War, but he had evidently liked what he saw in 1849, because in 1870 he came back and settled in San Bernardino, where, he wrote, “the land is so rich you need but tickle the ground with a hoe and it laughs corn.” He was still full of hopes that were not to pan out, and once again he ended up having to support himself as a lawyer. Eventually he was elected city clerk; at his funeral the eulogy included the remark: “The Spanish people, especially the poor, have lost their standby.” If it is true, and not just funeral eloquence, that he was a champion of Spanish-speaking Californians, I like to think the generous welcome he received in Mexico in 1849 was the reason.

His home in San Bernardino was at 2nd and G streets, and I went looking for it one time, but it appeared to be under a shopping mall. I suppose B. B. would have said, with a sort of Southern accent, “ Que sera, sera. “