FORTUNE’S FRENZY: A California Gold Rush Odyssey, by Eileen Lyons
How do we remember the forty-nines? The hundreds of thousands of prospectors who flooded California, drove out the native population, reshaped the landscape and laid the foundations of a state? Perhaps we imagine a grizzled prospector, looking for gold, broke and desperate, praying for the motherlode. Whatever we imagine, according to a new book by Eilene Lyon, the reality was much worse.
“Fortune’s Frenzy” follows the path of Henry Jenkins, an Indiana farmer who left for California in 1851. Like many miners, he took on massive debt to fund the adventure, agreeing to pay a 59 percent interest rate on the assumption that he would return. a rich man. What followed were years of hardship and misery, during which Jenkins risked everything and won nothing at all.
Jenkins was a Philadelphia resident who moved west to make his fortune on the frontier and found himself becoming less wealthy each year. Lyon describes him as “a responsible, level-headed adult” whose faith in temperance and toil was no match for a lack of hard currency and an excess of bad luck. His trip to California was not a reckless gamble, but a carefully planned effort to regain his financial position before his family starved to death.
He and his comrades traveled by sea from New Orleans to Panama and San Francisco, enduring bad food, infernal accommodations and endless choruses of the rasping earworm: “Oh! Susannah.” For Jenkins, who was reserved, the greatest annoyance was his exuberant fellow passengers, whose wickedness, “swearing and mirth” made him long for his quiet home.
This irritation is preserved in letters to his wife, Abby, who stayed behind to oversee the family and farm. Although it would take months for his letters to reach her, he wrote faithfully. When he reached California and discovered that the area he intended to prospect contained an estimated 80,000 miners—ten times the population of Indianapolis in 1850—his letters received the false cheers of someone ruined by a multi-level marketing plan trying to convince himself that success is just around the corner.
“One person on Carsons Hill would have made more out of his claim than Jacob Astor was worth at his death,” he wrote. “We don’t expect such a big pile, but next spring we’ll be happy with two thousand each, but nothing less.”
After more than a year in the fields, Jenkins cut his losses and managed to muster enough to get home. “Gold or no gold,” he wrote, preferring “poverty with my family to divorce.” He returned to Indiana and defaulted on his debts, starting a years-long lawsuit with the lender.
A descendant of Jenkins, Lyon makes full use of her family records and uses the letters to put Abby’s struggle on the same level as her husband’s. Though she often quotes these posts in more detail than they deserve: “There are few apples in the orchard. The trees look good. Our oats in the field and next to the house look pretty good, but our corn looks pathetic” – what emerges is a detailed portrait of two ordinary people united by faith, family and love.
The book’s dedication to the Jenkins family tree makes it feel like a genealogy reading at times, but some parts are exciting. Of greatest concern was Henry’s son-in-law William Ransom, who was undeterred when Henry’s lack of success prevented him from following in his wake. When he reached Panama City, he found a months-long waiting list for steamship tickets, and so booked passage on the Emily, an ill-supplied sailing vessel whose captain had no knowledge of its route to San Francisco. A forty-day journey turned into a three-month nightmare. Food ran out, water became scarce and fever spread; more than a dozen passengers were killed. By the time he reached California, Ransom was a walking skeleton.
He recovered quickly and became the only figure in the book to find success there, perhaps because he avoided the goldfields and instead found work growing food to feed the state’s exploding population. Lyon concludes Ransom’s story with the tantalizing detail that he “eventually went through medical school and became a licensed physician in Indiana.” He committed bigamy at least twice, and in 1894 he tricked the citizens of South Haven, Michigan, and the entire country into a wild plan to circumnavigate the world on a research vessel.”
That the book’s most successful character ended up being a con artist is apt, as “Fortune’s Frenzy” recasts a pivotal American myth—that of rough-and-tumble miners who go out to wrest their fortune from the land—as an idiot, a con artist. . It reminds us that since the founding of the country, capitalism has ground the likes of Jenkins and Ransom to dust.
Once upon a time there was a dust of gold.
WM Akers is a novelist, editor of the Strange Times newsletter, co-host of the movie podcast I’ll Watch Anything, and creator of the game Deadball: Baseball With Dice.
FORTUNE’S FRENZY: A California Gold Rush Odyssey | By Eilene Lyon | 307 pp. | TwoDot
