Gold Rush Daughter Tells All, Leaves Us Wanting More

They called it the mother lode, but in gold country and throughout a good part of early Gold Rush California, mothers or any women--by which was meant, of course, white women--were thin on the ground. Tales were told of a miner’s wife who hung out her washing to dry, and miners who hadn’t seen a female in months stood at a respectful distance, just to gaze at feminine articles flapping in the breeze. A dispute over what to name the town of Marysville ended when one man chivalrously suggested naming it for its only woman.

When gold fever enticed painter and decorator Joseph Kendall to California from New York in 1849, he learned quicker than most that a surer living was to be made off the miners’ gold than by working the placers oneself. By 1852, the waning Gold Rush and the waxing presence of churches and other hallmarks of civilization led Kendall to conclude it was safe for his wife and two daughters to join him in San Francisco.

So this was the California that 24-year-old English-born Lucy Fiennes Kendall--the future Lucy Herrick--sailed for, a land far less wild and woolly than the one her father encountered but where the sound of her piano music was still rare enough that passersby would stop on the street to listen.

The Huntington Library has published the diary of her 1852 sea voyage to California; the Huntington has other Gold Rush-era diaries, most of them largely prosaic accounts of food and weather. The rarity of Lucy’s diary is manifold: It is lively, literate, observant, heartfelt and intimate, a small and tasty bite out of the large, long life of a woman whose adulthood was bookended by two of the chief events in Americanized California: the Gold Rush that brought her west, and the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, which struck two months before she died.

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Andrew Rolle was in the Huntington’s parking lot in a rainstorm when one of the docents hurried up to him with an old family diary. Historian that he is, mindful of how much history has been lost to fire and rot and carelessness, “I bawled her out, ‘You really shouldn’t be dragging this around in the rain.’ ”

It was Marcia Russell Good, bearing her great-grandmother’s diary, bound in a brown-colored sackcloth; Rolle, a California historian and writer who has held in his hands documents by everyone from pioneers to Adolf Hitler, would come to feel a special affection for this diary, whose introduction he would eventually write.

In the mid-19th century, California was still impossibly distant, and the Kendalls’ voyage of 137 days down the length of the Americas and back up again was as arduous as it was exotic. Joseph Kendall sketched a French restaurant in Stockton, and yet the miners’ laundry often had to be sent to Hawaii or sometimes to China.

Still, the world was small enough that when Lucy’s ship stopped at Valparaiso, Chile, there, waiting for her, as expected, was a letter from her father, which for her seemed as unremarkable as one of us pulling a postcard from a mailbox.

The passengers passed the tedium with dominoes and conversation and reading; Lucy had just read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and wrote that it was “enough to arouse the indignation of the whole world.” It was certainly enough to engage her in spirited argument with another passenger, a man from a slave state. Any small celebration was a welcome relief, and a great one--such as the Fourth of July--was an occasion for plum pudding and dressing up and the reading of the Declaration of Independence.

She writes with a horror that 150 years cannot diminish of a sailor washed overboard and beyond rescue in a high gale, and of the captain ordering the cook flogged--though flogging was by then illegal--for burning the soup.

Lucy spent hours sitting on a huge coil of rope on deck, writing in a small notebook about the exotic flying fish and whales and birds. A sailor caught an albatross with a seven-foot wingspan, and a passenger (the man with whom she had argued over slavery) cut off the wings and made her a gift of them.

At night, she transcribed from her notebook into her journal by the light of a kerosene lamp. The Kendalls had canceled an earlier booking on the Vanderbilt line because one of its ships had blown up; not until halfway into the voyage did they learn that the ship they sailed carried a priceless but perilous cargo of gunpowder and coal.

Lucy stopped her journal when the ship reached port on Oct. 20, 1852--regrettably, because her lively and forthright telling of life in mid-century San Francisco would have been a delight.

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What struck rolle was the remarkable ability and literacy of an ordinarily educated middle-class 19-year-old back then. Lucy and her fellow passengers knew their Shakespeare, their Dickens, their poets, their history, their music. Even their steward put in his opinion that “no person is fit to mix in society who cannot recognize any passage in ‘Ivanhoe.’ ”

And what, Rolle wonders, will historians of the future do when there are no sackcloth-bound diaries, only the evanescence of e-mail and vanished telephone calls?