three Germans had used penknives to pick $36,000 worth of gold out of cracks in the rock. News of the find had drawn thousands of other miners, several of whom washed $2,000 in gold in a single pan. A small party of men from Georgia pulled in $50,000 in one day.
Upon his arrival at Nelson Creek, Manlove wrote, “I had traded my rifle at a trading post for some clothing. This left me with only my satchel to carry, which contained my clothes with a Testament and a revolver—a six-shooter—strange company to be together. In my pocket book there was a half dollar, all the money I had in the world.â€
Like Manlove, most of the miners exhausted their money and supplies just getting to California, and they were dumbfounded at the cost of living and the difficulty of the work when they did. As promised, the gold was there, but the luck to find it and the labor to remove it had been greatly underestimated. To stay alive in the diggings, a miner had to find between a half ounce and an ounce of gold, between eight dollars and sixteen dollars, each day to keep abreast of the cost of living in the camps and lay a little aside for the trip home. But most miners averaged no more than a few cents to a few dollars, and that was after squatting on their haunches at the edge of a stream for ten hours and washing fifty pans of sediment.
For three years, Manlove watched men blow off fingers and hands with blasting powder, drink, scar each other in fistfights, read the Bible, scrape fingernails to the quick handling river rock, and wander fromone claim to another, looking for profitable diggings, hoping and praying that the next shovelful would bring salvation. The miners wrote thousands of letters home, many telling of weariness, discouragement, and homesickness. The tales of rich finds were spectacular but few and always just over the next ridge.
When he left the diggings in July 1857, Manlove had been away from his Wisconsin farm nearly three and a half years. In that time he had sent a little money home, and he had a few hundred dollars left, just enough to pay for a berth in steerage on the fortnight steamer rather than walk back across the prairie.
L ATE THAT MORNING at the quay, the decks of the Sonora erupted in a frenzy when the captain sounded the final departure bell and those not sailing tried to depart against the tide of those still struggling to board. When the uproar subsided, the captain ordered the crew to cast off, and a pilot boat led the Sonora into the bay past Alcatraz Island and the lighthouse. Then free of her pilot, the Sonora passed through the Golden Gate and steamed out upon the broad Pacific, heading south, carrying five hundred passengers, thirty-eight thousand letters, and a consigned shipment of gold totaling $1,595,497.13.
For fourteen days, the Sonora would steam south and east toward Panama, where her passengers would transfer to the new open-air rail-cars and shimmy for forty-eight miles to the Caribbean port city of Aspinwall. There the passengers would embark on the Atlantic steamer SS Central America bound for New York, a final trip of nine days across the Caribbean and up the East Coast, with an overnight call in Havana.
SHIP OF GOLD
HAVANA
T UESDAY , S EPTEMBER 8, 1857
T HE GAS LAMPS of Havana cast erratic ribbons of light out across the harbor, zigzagging among the dark silhouettes of more than a hundred ships at anchor. In the darkness, the SS Central America lay wrapped in the moist tropical air, her engines silent, her decks dimly lit and trod only by the night watch. In these predawn hours, her five hundred passengers slept with the ship motionless for the first time since departing Panama four days earlier.
High above the ships, at the mouth of the harbor, a massive brown escarpment called El Morro swept upward out of the sea. On top, the flag of Spain awaited the first light of day as it had ever since Columbus celebrated mass on the island three and a half centuries