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Thomas was mixing up drinks for his fellow Jack Tars above and beyond some sort of regular rum ration and the captain put a stop to it. Unfortunately, Minor’s journal, which would have certainly made much of such an occasion, peters out somewhere between Rio (where there had been a lengthy layover and much booze purchased) and the Horn. In any case, this voyage, which left New Haven on March 24 bound for San Francisco, would be the last one Thomas made before the mast. When he returned east, it would be as a steamship passenger. 1

IN REALMS OF GOLD
    On November 4, only a few days after Thomas’s nineteenth birthday, the Ann Smith reached San Francisco, whereupon he jumped ship and, as he put it, “ran off into the mountains after gold.” Nor was he alone: The harbor in San Francisco was full of abandoned ships, their crews all having had the same approximate idea. The Gold Rush was on, and it was as great a spectacle as any human history has afforded. The San Francisco Thomas would’ve found when his boots hit the wharf is scarcely imaginable: a seething anthill of human greed, its streets yards-deep in mud, its sand hills poking their bald knobs over a sea of shacks, tents, tented shacks, flimsy one- or two-story frame houses, even prefab wooden huts from China—housing so temporary, so precarious, that one good blow and just about the whole city would be shaved clean off the face of California. Here and there, perhaps, a piece of the more substantial new construction that was just beginning to sprout up might be left standing, but everything else was as permanent as grass.
    And the people—plow-callused Yankee farmers, pigtailed Chinese, “Kanakas” from Hawaii, Southern backwoodsmen, banker’s sons from Fifth Avenue, broad-hatted Sonorans, hard-bitten “Sydney Ducks” from Australia, Illinois dirt-farmers, Chileans, Peruvians, French whores (who charged a pound or more of gold dust a trick, thank you very much), Indians, and lots and lots of just plain Americans, all burning with gold fever. They created a society like no other on Earth. University professors would be frying eggs for a living—and making more doing it that they ever did lecturing on Aristophanes. Ditchdiggers were paying an unheard-of fifty cents a drink for straight whiskey, and none of the best at that, and sending their shirts to Hawaii to be laundered. Everything was topsy-turvy and hurtling along at railroad speed.
    Then there were the saloons. According to Hubert Howe Ban-croft, the Gold Rush’s great early historian, the Argonauts, as those who sailed after gold were jocularly called, were a bibulous bunch: “If hot, they drank to get cool, if cold, to get warm, if wet, to get dry, if dry—and some were always dry—to keep out the wet.” The places they drank ranged from a tent outfitted only with a barrel of Cincinnati rectified or a few jugs of pisco to joints where three-thousand-dollar billiard tables stood on broken-up packing cases under crystal chandeliers. The city’s best and most popular gambling saloon, the El Dorado on Portsmouth Square, was simply four walls and a tent roof, but “it had an orchestra of fifteen persons,” as one old Forty-Niner later recalled. “It was run all night and day, with two sets of hands. It was gorgeously fitted up. What they used to stir up the sugar in the drinks cost $300. It was solid gold.” If Asbury is to be believed, one of the hands wielding that golden toddy-stick was Jerry Thomas’s. “The Professor,” he writes, “. . . became First Assistant to the Principal Bartender of the El Dorado.”
    If only there were some scrap of evidence for this; the El Dorado is almost as central to the myth of the Gold Rush as Sutter’s Mill or “Oh, Susannah!” and to have Jerry Thomas firmly placed behind the bar would be quite something. But not even Thomas himself claimed that he worked there, at least not in the autobiographical sketch he dictated to the Sun . And even if he did