Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea Read Online Free

mail and merchandise and new settlers, and brought news and ideas and fashion from the outside world. California became a state on September 9, 1850, but no one in California knew until six weeks later, when the Oregon steamed into San Francisco Bay draped in banners and national flags and firing its big guns.
    From 1849 to 1869, 410,000 passengers traveled west over Panama, and another 232,000 journeyed back east. Of those who crossed the Great Plains on foot, most returned by sea. The Panama route was the quickest and the safest, and the ships carried passengers of means, persons helping to shape the American West, and for the first twenty years they carried nearly every ounce of California’s precious export, the only thing besides land that California had and everyone else wanted: gold. Officially cataloged, duly recorded and delivered, $711 million in gold passed over the Panama route, and $46 million went via another route later established across Nicaragua. On steamer day, crowds of merchants, shippers, passengers, and well-wishers packed the wharf and scurried among hand carts and wagons, coaches and cabs, past agents of the press gathering information for the shipping register. It was a time of settling accounts, remitting to eastern creditors, and taking stock of mercantile affairs, “a time of feverish activity,” noted one merchant. Goods and gold had to be properly consigned with official receipts, first- and second-class staterooms had to be readied, barrels of beef and flour had to be loaded, and the baggage for five hundred passengers leaving San Francisco for several months had to be stowed. Below, coal tenders ran coal from the bunkers to the furnace amidships, stoking the fires for departure. Every two weeks, a steamer departed San Francisco, with cargo and passengers bound for the East, and carrying a commercial shipment of gold weighing close to three tons.
    T HE MORNING OF August 20, 1857, the sidewheel steamer SS Sonora lay tight to the wharf on Vallejo Street, her gangways aflow with human bodies dodging big trunks, little trunks, valises, carpetbags, bedding, andbundles. Men in long jackets and stovepipe hats conversed in clusters. Light breezes off the bay caused the hooped dresses of the women to dance about their waists. From the heart of the city, a wedding procession wound toward the wharf, a horse-drawn carriage surrounded by the wedding party. When the procession arrived, the bride and groom alighted from the carriage and mounted the gangway, the bride still in her wedding gown. She was Adeline Mills Easton, the petite, vivacious sister of Darius Ogden Mills, who later founded the Bank of California and was one of the richest men in the state. Addie’s husband, Ansel Easton, had immigrated to California in early 1850 and built a fortune selling furnishings to the new steamship lines. He now raised thorough-bred horses on his fifteen-hundred-acre estate south of San Francisco. As they hurried up the gangway swinging baskets of wedding gifts and carrying hampers of wine and sweet cakes, the wedding party swept Ansel and Addie across the promenade deck with wishes for a bon voyage and a happy life together.
    Approaching the quay was another young couple easily recognized in San Francisco, the famous minstrel and actor Billy Birch and his bride of one day, Virginia. Recently, the newspaper Alta California had applauded Birch as “the bright, particular star of the San Francisco Minstrels.” He sang “The Grape Vine Twist” and “I’m Fatter Than I Wish to Be” and starred in farces like The Rival Tragedians . A year earlier, the theater critic for the San Francisco Alta had written that “the very sight of Billy Birch is enough to make a cynic laugh.” Birch had just concluded a successful engagement at Maguire’s Opera House and was on his way to join Bryant’s Minstrels in New York City. His new bride, as one