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Originally published in the Historic Nantucket, Vol 48, no. 3 (Summer 1999), p. 5-8
Read All About It! “Editorial restraint crumbled before the rush of exuberance”
By Kate Stout
GOLD FEVER SPREAD LIKE A PLAGUE, AND on Nantucket, as elsewhere across the country, one of the predominant "carriers" was the local newspaper. Writes J. S. Holliday in his Rush for Riches, "From the Atlantic to the Missouri frontier, from the Great Lakes to the gulf ports, newspaper editors played up California's unfolding gold story with florid phrases and excited rhetoric."
On Nantucket, two newspapers existed at the time of President James Polk's explosive State of the Union address in which he announced — and thereby made credible — reports of the discovery of gold in California. Polk's speech was delivered to the nation on December 5,1848. The Weekly Mirror and the weekly Inquirer both ran the stories as soon as the news reached them, on December 9 and December 11, respectively. Right beside the story of Polk's announcement of gold at Sutler's Mill in the Inquirer ran a companion piece by Governor Mason, written from Monterey, in which he claims that "California is a perfect El Dorado, portions of which are reported to be almost paved with gold." The Weekly Mirror ran the same article on December 16.
What followed amounted to an editorial feeding frenzy — with the two editors, E. W. Cobb of the Inquirer and John Morrissey of the Weekly Mirror, competing in equal fervor for the latest, hottest, most exciting news from the fields — and regularly duplicating stories. Nantucketers got dosed with Gold Fever three times a week, from 1848 well into the 1850s.
There would be six more editions of the biweekly Inquirer before the new year, 1849, and in each was news of, or about, gold. In the very next edition after Polk's address, on December 15, two side-by-side headlines ran on page two — the page given over to national news — "Description of the Gold Region" and "Letter from a Golddigger to his Uncle, Transcribed Accurately." The former extolled the virtues of Suttersville: "The location is one of the best in the country ... being the depot for the extensive gold, silver, platinum, quicksilver and iron mines." The author goes on to claim:
As near as I can ascertain, there are now about 2,000 personages engaged, and the roads leading to the mines are thronged with people and wagons. … From one to nine ounces of pure virgin gold per day is gathered by every man who performs the requisite labor. ... A gentleman informed me that he had spent some time in exploring the country, and that he had dug fifty-two holes with his butcher's knife in different places, and found gold in every one.
The Golddigger's letter, too, is compelling. In it, Ezekiel Barnes, Company B, NY Volunteers "for Californey" writes in a letter sent to the New York Commercial and picked up by the Inquirer.
Dear Uncle — I write this to go horn to you by a vessel that sails when the folks on board are willin to go; but at present all are gone gold diggin . . . Every body quits work now and goes for gold. The whaleman drops his harpoon—the soldier drops the gun and bayonet, and the missionary drops the Bible. . . . I've heard much about 'a golden age'—weft, I think we have got it now.
In fact, the term "Age of Gold" was coined by a newspaper man, one of the most famous of his day, Horace Greeley, in the New York Tribune. Clearly, news was spreading like wildfire of streets paved with gold, of ore that could be mined so easily a knife would do, and of quantities so vast that every man who merely made the effort could become rich beyond his most fanciful imaginings.
And on Nantucket, with whaling in decline by the end of 1848 and the island, overall, increasingly depressed because of it, the gold of California seemed a certain — and irresistible — panacea. Further, Nantucketers were seafarers. Even though they were half a world away, they, better than virtually any East Coast landlubber, knew well how to get to the Pacific by sea. No arduous overland routes nor timely and uncertain trekking across the isthmus for them. No, they had the ships, which could be and were easily re-outfitted from whalers to passenger and cargo vessels bound for San Francisco.
In the Weekly Mirror of December 30, 1848 — just three editions after the news broke — Morrissey printed the first advertisements that were Rush-related. There were three in this edition alone, two of which were generated off-island and all stacked in a row to be sure to grab the eye — one boasted "Important to those going to California," announcing the invention in New Jersey of a gold-washing machine available for purchase; "For San Francisco," news that the Cristobal Colon out of New York was taking passengers; and most important of all for the island, "For California," in which the first Nantucket ship, the Aurora, solicited "A few passengers [who] will be taken at a low rate" to San Francisco. The local rush for California was on.
Two days later, January 1, 1849, the Inquirer ran the same ad for the Aurora. A mere eight days later, all available passages had been booked and the ship had been outfitted for the trip to San Francisco. On January 9, the Aurora cleared the bar and was off to the goldfields, not even a month after the first stories reached Nantucket readers. By the end of that month, eleven other Nantucket ships were ready to sail.
The barrage of gold reports in both papers was continuous from that point on, and was driven both by competitive as well as personal zeal.
For a while, in the early 1840s, John Morrissey had printed the Inquirer before taking over as its editor in 1843. In 1845, Edward W. Cobb bought the paper and took over as editor, forcing Morrissey out of a job. Morrissey responded by starting a rival rag, the Weekly Mirror. The Great Fire of 1846, however, burned them both out of their respective offices. Cobb was forced to the point of bankruptcy by the fire and had to borrow a substantial amount of money in order to get the paper up and rolling again, whereas the Mirror was not as badly compromised.
Any thoughts Cobb, who would be thirty-five in 1849, may have had of heading for California himself most likely were held in check by two things — the vast debt he had incurred only two and a half years before and his young family. Cobb had married Susan Burdett in January 1837. Nine months later she was dead. He did not remarry again until 1844, and by the time of the Gold Rush not only had a relatively new wife but was in the middle of building a family. His daughters Emily and Susan were born in 1846 and 1847 respectively, and two sons would be born as the Rush continued — Charles in 1852 and Everett in 1854. Whatever his desire might have been, Cobb's only outlet was to channel it into the vicarious participation his newspaper allowed him.
John Morrissey, however, had no such reservations and was, by nature, highly competitive and adventuresome; rather than be done out of a job by Cobb, remember, he had responded by starting his own newspaper. Further, when news of gold reached him, he wasted no time in making his own plans to go West. The June 30, 1849, Mirror — an issue that also ran a piece under the column head "California Items" and said "the frequent discovery of new deposits of this precious metal led to the apprehension it would become a 'drug'.. ." — would be his last.
He joined forces with a group of islanders in a gold-driven business venture called the Hope Mining Company. They bought a former whaler, the Fanny, and outfitted it for California. Then they drew up an agreement in which they would work together in pursuit of gold for two years, at which time each man would be given his share and be on his own. By mid-August, the Fanny had crossed the bar. The rival Inquirer of August 14 would gush that the Hope Mining Company, of which Morrissey had been made president, represented "among the most worthy, intelligent and energetic citizens of Nantucket, and if there is money to be made in California, either by gold-digging or in any other honest way, they will have their share of it."
Morrissey, who was thirty-two when he headed West, left behind his wife of eleven years and four children, ages nine, six, three, and one. Hardly uncommon, the lust for gold often broke up families. As Holliday says in Rush for Riches, for every romantic — or greedy — reason for going to California, there were also reasons of pure escape: from bad marriages, lost love, debt, the drudgery of ordinary day-to-day life, to name a few. What drove Morrissey remains a mystery, but his successors at the Mirror, Samuel S. Hussey and Henry D. Robinson, wrote either ironically or with tongue-in-cheek in the August 11 edition:
Among the number who are soon to leave is included our friend Morrissey . . . .We a little wonder that brother Morrissey did not take the Mirror with him, as his subscribers must have already gone, or will soon go to the gold regions .... We do not see how a man who has been so accustomed to looking in the Mirror, can be satisfied with nothing to see himself in ..."
Although Morrissey had a ready outlet on Nantucket for his observations in California, he appears only to have availed himself of it once. In the April 13, 1850, edition of the Mirror, his successors wrote: "We have received the following letter from our friend Morrissey written soon after his arrival in San Francisco . . . ." Dated February 28, Morrissey wrote of their arrival, the ships they had spoken en route, and his first impressions. "It certainly is an astonishing, novel and wonderful place," he enthuses. "The mines yield as richly as ever." He goes on to say, "I believe that an industrious man can do well here; he may not become a millionaire, or even get rich in a year, but still.. . scrape together more money in a year, than he could possibly obtain with the same exertion elsewhere." And, the letter goes on
Three of our Nantucket men returned from the Southern mines a few days ago, who had worked in company, and after paying all expenses, they divided $1800 apiece. Others of your townsmen have done well at the mines. Indeed, so far as I have been able to learn, those from Nantucket, whether as miners, mechanics, laborers, or traders, have met with a full average of prosperity.
Morrissey closes his letter with a final thought: "One thing I will say in closing, that I do not regret being here to try my luck ... ."
He would not return to Nantucket for another five years, when he would rejoin his wife, and in 1855 buy out Cobb, who was by then in failing health, thereby reclaiming his first newspaper, the Inquirer, as his own. The two newspapers would continue printing side-by-side for another decade, merging into the Inquirer and Mirror on April Fools Day 1865.
With every word printed in the newspapers — from letters like Morrissey's to every headline, every exclamation mark that followed the word "California" or "gold," to every advertisement that offered maps of the goldfields or equipment for mining or ships soliciting passengers bound for San Francisco — Nantucketers were tempted again and again. Readers were bombarded with the likes of "Our Prospectors"; "The California Gold"; "Another California Letter"; "From the Isthmus"; "An Artful Dodger for California"; in Gold Dust!"; "Inexhaustible Gold Discoveries!" et al.
Some stories renewed the fervor in a most direct provocative way. When the Sarah Parker returned to the island, for instance, she brought with her forty ounces — twenty-three nuggets — of gold. A piece in the Inquirer issue of May 11,1849, states:
The Nantucket adventurers at the mines, were, last season, very successful. . . Mr. [Jethro] Hussey was at the mines less than a month, yet he collected with his own hands about two thousand dollars; and Mr. [Francis] Swain had only provisions enough to enable him to stay a week, yet he brought away some seven hundred dollars.
It was Hussey's and Swain's gold that was sent back to Nantucket aboard the Sarah Parker. "Captain Russell, of the Sarah Parker" the article says, paid fourteen dollars an ounce for it, four or five dollars an ounce less than it is worth at the mint. . . . Presuming that the people would be curious to see the first important fruits of Nantucket diggings in the mines, Capt. Russell kindly left this gold with a friend who had a store on Main Street, that all who wished to, might go and take a look at the stuff.
The display on Main Street causes quite a commotion, and whipped up renewed urgency to head for California.
Advertisements, too, stirred up get-rich-quick dreams, as they screamed: "California! California!"; "Boots for Gold Digging"; "California Supplies"; "California—Emigrant's Guide to the Gold Mines"; "For California" (announcing another Nantucket ship, Henry Astor's, intention to sail); and "Gold! Gold! Gold!" All six of these ads, in fact, appeared on the same page of the Inquirer on February 19, 1849. By as early as September 1849, another kind of ad began to appear — brokers looking to buy gold dust. By as early as September 1849, another kind of ad began to appear – brokers looking to buy gold dust.
The papers were also full of speculation secondary to the Gold Rush — about building a railroad across the Isthmus of Panama to hasten the journey; reports of ships returning from the mines carried headlines like "$3,000,000 even reports that gold had been found in Indiana. The Mirror of May 11, 1850, ran a piece called "Gold in Indiana," picked up from the New York Tribune, which reported getting the story from "a gentleman of high character."
Inevitably, the papers eventually began reporting news of deaths: Nantucketers lost in, or en route to, the mines. Disease was the major killer, both in the tropical, disease-infested isthmus area and in the dusty and cholera-ridden minefields. Some, however, died of shipboard tragedies, others of simple exhaustion, perhaps even disappointment. The first two deaths Nantucketers appeared in the February 19, 1849, edition of the Inquirer: that of Joseph W. Hussey, "formerly of this town," and Capt. Elijah Grimes, "for many years a merchant in Honolulu." By the 1850s, however, most editions carried news of California deaths. Gorham Worth, for instance, died of drowning in the Feather River; Jacob Baker died "of a shock of the palsy"; Edward A. Swain "In California, at the mines, of dysentery"; and so on and so on. In the end, more than a hundred Nantucket men died, but even the deaths of friends and neighbors failed to discourage islanders from throwing up everything to try their luck at gold-digging. After all, the deaths were relegated to the newspapers' very smallest print.
Enthralled by the promise of gold at their fingertips—and that's what the newspapers told them week after week, that a good man, particularly a man of Nantucket caliber, could not fail, so long as he wasn't bone lazy—island men continued to head West even when the real gold, the actual Rush, was essentially over.
By September 1849, the Inquirer printed a list of 464 Nantucket men who had already sailed for California, the "largest number, in proportion to the population, than from any other place in the Union." This claim would be backed up 150 years later when Malcolm Rohrbough would write in his Days of Gold that Nantucketers made up "the largest and closest knit group" of any in the goldfields.
As Morrissey was wont to remind his readers, better to "try my luck" than just stay home and read all about it.
Kate Stout is publisher and editor of the Map and Legend and a frequent contributor to Historic Nantucket.
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