Gold! by Fred Rosen Page B

just like that,overnight strike it rich and enter the upper class by discovering gold in California?
    It couldn’t be. Yet … if the stories were true, the country was not physically ready for the population movement that would occur as people struck for the gold fields. There were few roads west of St. Louis, and none were safe from the perils of the western frontier. The eastern publishing industry saw that.
    Book and pamphlet publishers were always on the lookout for something to make money. To date, they had survived, but the industry was not firmly established. Books had to be able to give the reader something they couldn’t get anywhere else, such as in newspapers and pamphlets. And no story to date had been able to do that—until Marshall’s discovery.
    By the end of 1848, New York’s publishers were vying to put out books and pamphlets on the California gold fields and their infinite possibilities. Pamphlets also were published that brought together letters of Thomas Larkin and John Frémont describing the California landscape and the gold fields.
    Suddenly, California guidebooks began to appear in stores. Sometimes they came from firsthand reporting—the first consistent example of travel writing in U.S. history. They promoted travel to California and the state’s beauty and possibilities.
    In 1848, Henry Simpson published his best seller The Emigrant’s Guide to the Gold Mines . On page 27 Simpson offers advice to emigrants on how to get to the California gold fields. There are five routes to choose from:
    1. The Isthmus route, across the Isthmus of Panama from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
    2. The Cape Horn route, around the tip of South America and up the Pacific Coast.
    3. The Rocky Mountains route—that is, climbing the Rocky Mountains after crossing the Great Plains and eventually arriving in the gold fields of California.
    4. The Nicaraguan route, around the Isthmus of Nicaragua and once again up the Pacific coast.
    5. The Mazatlán route, which required crossing northern Mexico to the Mexican coast city and then taking a ship north, to San Francisco.
    â€œOnly two [are] feasible,” Simpson writes, “with any degree of comfort or economy and we may add safety.” Simpson preferred the southern routes. “The Chagres steamer leaves New York monthly as also the British West Indian Mail Steamers and they reach Chagres on the Atlantic side in two days, where they will get a steamer or sailing vessel for San Francisco. The distance by this conveyance from New York to San Francisco is about 17,000 miles and will occupy 150 days or five months. Passengers should provide themselves with the means to guard against contingencies as they may arise from the no arrival of the steamers at Panama.”
    If you chose the Isthmus of Panama route and your steamer to California didn’t show up on time, you’d better have enough cash to get by on until the steamer finally docked. The shipping schedules were erratic and not to berelied on. Going the isthmus route was rough going from one side of the North American continent to the other. To go through the isthmus took ten days.
    â€œCanoes are here employed and passengers carried thirty miles up, when they are transferred to the backs of mules, and in this way reach Panama in two days where they will take another steamer or sailing vessel for San Francisco.”
    â€œThe safest route,” Simpson asserts, “is doubtless via Cape Horn. 25 to 30 days to get there. The price of passage first class is $400.”
    If the choice was the Rocky Mountains route, the prospector would find himself going “across the Rockies, and the Great Desert, a route which by no means we can recommend.” The jumping-off point for such a trek was Independence, Missouri, from which wagon trains bound west, usually on the Oregon Trail, were every day plowing a highway across the country. “[Across the Rockies] the