THE CITY OF GOLD For hundreds of years the Conquistadores of Spain searched throughout Mexico for Eldorado, the city of gold. The legend had it that it was a city made of gold, built on a mountain of gold so plentiful the streets were paved with gold. They didn’t find it. But that City of gold did exist. There was an Eldorado. The conquistadores were simply looking in the wrong spot. That fabled city was not in Mexico, it was in California. In 1848, in California, in a mill race on an undistinguished stream, an astonishing discovery was made. It was gold. Gold said to be so plentiful that it just lay there waiting to be picked up. Nuggets of gold that you could just bend down and put in your pocket. Big nuggets, some weighing six ounces or more. A six ounce nugget was worth $120 in 1849. That’s $10,000 in today’s dollars! How excited would you be to look down on the ground and pick up a single nugget that was worth $10,000? And it could be easily had. All you had to do was get to California and grab a shovel. You didn’t need an education. You didn’t need a family connection. You didn’t need anyone’s permission. You just had to get there and start digging.
Now a days, we don’t think of the 49er gold rush as Eldorado but that stream near San Francisco had nuggets lying in the open just as the fable said. Then in 1859 an even bigger gold and silver strike was discovered about 250 miles away. And just as the fable foretold, it was a city built on a mountain of gold and silver, The Mountain was Mt Davidson; the city was Virginia City Nevada. It was the Comstock lode. It made Virginia City the richest city in America for a twenty year period and brought Nevada into the union.
But there was also something else. Land. More land than any single individual could farm. Untold acres of land that had never been touched by a plow and had lain undisturbed for millions of years. In 1803 the Louisiana purchase was completed and added 828,000 sq mi to the United States. Thomas Jefferson thought it would take a thousand years to fill it up. Instead the land was settled by 1890.
All this potential farmland was worth a fortune and the United States wanted to cash in that prairie and fill it with taxpayers. There was so much land available that the United States Homestead Act of 1862 was offering it to all comers for free. Free land. All you had to do was stake a claim, register it, and live on it for five years. Then, it was yours.
Wasn’t farmland available all over the world? Of course, but somebody else owned it. Most of that land had been settled for a thousand years. You couldn’t buy it. Most of it was owned by some aristocrat who had inherited it from his Father and his father had inherited it from his father. And on and on. The aristocracy owned everything and you had nothing. Sound familiar? It should. That is one of the reasons the United States rebelled and cast off the King of England and the Parliament.
Freedom. Liberty. A new start. People came from around the globe seeking a new life. Most risked everything they had. What they went through they wrote down in their journals just as it happened
So what was it like to walk across 2000 miles from St Joseph Missouri to San Francisco? What was it like to travel in a wagon train through hostile country fighting Indians, sickness, snow storms and raging rivers? What was it like to cross over South America across Panama to avoid the battering of the travel around the horn only to face the jungle and cross the Andes mountains? And once you arrived in San Francisco, the golden gateway to the gold fields, what was that like? These journals captured what it was like and you can’t get that in any other way.
Finding the Elephant is that story. It’s available as a printed book from Amazon. It’s available as an audio book with a large cast. It’s available as an e-book. Go to Finding-the-Elephant.com to see for yo
