Reflections of the Gold Rush
A survey of the park's collections
by Stephen Canright
The primary value of any historical museum lies in its ability to bring visitors into immediate visceral contact with the stuff of the past.
In the history of California and the West Coast, the Gold Rush of 1849 is the beginning of the modern era. The explosion of population and development transformed all aspects of life in the new American territories. The collections of San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park offer some very tangible connections to this momentous period. Within the various materials collected (the written word, graphic images, and physical artifacts) we find evidence of the reality of life during the Gold Rush years.
The number of people arriving in California by sea in 1849 and 1850, coming around Cape Horn, by steamer from Panama, or from Pacific ports, approximately equaled those coming overland. Sea routes were much more important than land routes in supplying the material needs of the new immigrants as overland shipment of goods was virtually impossible before the railroads of the late 1860s. The rise of San Francisco as the major commercial and population center of both California and the West Coast directly resulted from Gold Rush dependence on waterborne transport. The city grew only because it linked ocean transport with the inland waterway system. Forest of Masts
The quintessential image of the maritime Gold Rush is the view out over Yerba Buena Cove in 1851. The cove, later filled in to become the financial district of downtown San Francisco, was the principal landing area of the booming city and therefore the center of access by sea to California. The cove was packed with an incredible array of sailing vessels, mostly the small, ordinary square-riggers that were the mainstay of ocean commerce at the time. The most remarkable aspect of the scene is that they lie abandoned and discarded, jumbled in disorder. These vessels were deserted by their officers and crews -- all lured to the gold fields by the promise of quick riches.
We can get a closer look at some of these vessels through the written accounts of passengers who arrived in them, most often from the eastern United States. Dozens of such accounts are available in published form and San Francisco Maritime holds a few in manuscript form, most notably those dealing with the ships Niantic and Apollo. From such accounts we can reconstruct a picture of the conditions endured by these immigrants. The Niantic
For a select few vessels, we have physical remains, which we can see and touch. The most notable of these is the ship Niantic, a whaler built in Connecticut in 1833, which arrived in San Francisco from Panama in July of 1849. Like hundreds of other vessels, she was abandoned by her crew. The Niantic became the first of a number of vessels to be hauled ashore for use as a store-ship in August of 1849. She lasted in this role only until the great fire of May 1851, when she was burned down to the mud line. The site (at the corner of Clay and Sansome Streets) was quickly covered over with a new building and, as the filling in of Yerba Buena Cove continued, was eventually located five blocks from the final shoreline. The remains of the Niantic were discovered somewhat unexpectedly during excavations for a new building in 1977.
Although the location of the hull was well known, it was believed that the remains had been removed during earlier construction. Instead, the lower portion of the hull, packed with goods dating from her use as a warehouse in 1851, was virtually intact. The forward portion of the ship remained buried under the adjoining TransAmerica Pyramid, but the rest of the hull was there, sheathed in copper and exceptionally well preserved. The goods in the hull included dozens of cases of French champagne, soaked in watery mud but some entirely intact. The entire site smelled like wine. There was also the stock of a stationer's store: book presses, pencils, and wonderful brass paper clamps in the form of duck heads. Unfortunately this was a construction site, not an archeological dig, and we only had about three days to make what we could of the remains. A crew from the old San Francisco Maritime Museum measured and diagramed the site, removing the contents in a systematic fashion and protecting the waterlogged items in plastic. In the end, two sections of the hull were removed for preservation: a cross section of the middle of the hull about six feet fore-and-aft, and a ten-foot section
of the stern including the rudder. The recovered artifacts were conserved as well as possible without any real budget.
In 1997 the Oakland Museum of California asked to borrow the stern section for their Sesquicentennial Gold Rush exhibition. Through the collaborative efforts of the Oakland Museum and San Francisco Maritime, the section was stabilized and prepared for exhibition. The stern section will be returned for exhibition at the Maritime Museum late this year. We are building a diorama showing the Niantic as a store-ship for exhibition as well, which will be shown with a number of never-before-seen artifacts recovered from the hull.
The recent Museum exhibition "Found! The Wreck of the Frolic -- A Gold Rush Cargo for San Francisco" concerned yet another of the square-riggers drawn to Gold Rush San Francisco. The brig Frolic, however, never completed her intended voyage from Hong Kong to San Francisco, instead wrecking on the rocky Mendocino Coast. An assortment of the Frolic's cargo of Chinese goods, including ceramic ware, silver, glass and a bit of gold, was recovered by sport divers during the 1960s and 70s. This material was later collected by Dr. Thomas Layton of San Jose State University, who spent years exhaustively researching the history of the little brig.
She was a fast-sailing Baltimore clipper, built as an opium runner for American merchants operating in China. Her story added greatly to our appreciation of the mix of cultures drawn to San Francisco during the Gold Rush period. The Clipper Ship
The need for fast passage to Gold Rush California led to the development of the famous clipper ship. Built on the East Coast, most notably at New York and Boston, clippers were large cargo ships with hulls and rigs designed for speed above all else. The clipper ship is widely regarded as the high water mark of the American experience at sea. Perhaps the finest of the clipper ships was the Flying Cloud, which holds the record for the fastest trip by a commercial sailing vessel between New York and San Francisco with her eighty-nine day passage in 1851. She is represented in the collections of San Francisco Maritime by a lovely model, now on display on the second floor of the Maritime Museum. The Park's collections include significant structural remains of another clipper: the Snow Squall of 1851. Built in Maine, the Snow Squall first called at San Francisco in 1853 and continued to sail until she was condemned in the Falkland Islands in 1864.
The figurehead of the ship David Crockett, an extreme clipper built in 1853 which ran from the East Coast to San Francisco between 1857 and 1882, has leaned out over the Maritime museum's main floor since it opened in 1951. A full figure of frontiersman Davy Crockett, this figurehead is so elaborate that it was routinely unshipped and stowed when the vessel got to sea. We have the bell of the clipper ship Noonday, built in 1855 and lost in 1865 when she plowed into an isolated rock lying northwest of the Farallon Islands. The bell was recovered in 1934 in the net of a local dragger. Part of the magic of this bell lies in the fact that the rock which sank the Noonday bears her name to this day.The lore of the clipper ship is available in abundance at the J. Porter Shaw Library.
Everything from copies of plans from the hand of Donald McKay and William Webb, to accounts of passages and lists of daily rates of sailing. There are even accounts of the passage of the Neptune's Car, on which the gallant young Mary Patten took command off Cape Horn and guided the vessel safely to San Francisco. Harbor and River Craft
As the transfer and distribution point for incoming cargoes which would later travel up river toward the gold fields in inland craft, San Francisco was the scene of a continuous bustle of cargo lighters, small craft, shoal-draft sailing cargo vessels, and river and bay steamers. The lack of deep water piers along the Gold Rush waterfront made the early port unusually dependent on boat traffic of all sorts. No intact vessels are known to have survived from this varied fleet. Enough of the traditions of the inland boats survive in the Park's collections, however, to give some sense of their role in the Gold Rush period. The first vessels to carry cargo up the Sacramento River toward the gold fields were often ships's boats -- rowing and sailing craft pulling from four to eight oars. The Park's two naval-type cutters, an American-type twenty-four footer built at the Small Boat Shop and a British thirty-footer collected at Fort Bragg, would have been very much at home in this early river traffic.
The scow schooner Alma, a primitive box of a boat, is very close to the lighters and inland cargo boats that were used locally during the Gold Rush. A scow of the Alma's general sort is known to date from as early as 1854. The hull and rig of these boats was ideally suited for heavy cargo work on the Bay and Delta, and the type would have been easy to build with a few simple tools. In the face of the critical need for inland tonnage, scows of the Alma's type were an obvious solution. Sailed by a crew of only three, the scow proved so efficient for slow-speed inland transport that it survived in this role until the advent of the gasoline motor. Steamers
Almost from the beginning, the inland transport fleet included steamers. Side-paddle boats were the favored type on the river as well as in deep water during the period. The Park's little British tug Eppleton Hall, although built in 1914, is reminiscent of these early paddle boats. The ever-increasing need for speedy river transport led quickly to the arrival of a number of larger side-wheel steamers, many coming from the Long Island Sound or Hudson River trade.
Boats such as the New World were soon racing between San Francisco and Sacramento on regular schedules. The favored engine for these fast, single-ended side-wheelers was the single-cylinder walking beam, the same engine that powers The Park's ferry Eureka. Heavy and simple but ruggedly reliable and well suited to side-paddle work, the walking beam type was retained for inland work into the 1890s. The Eureka's massive engine was among the last of its kind produced locally. Built forty years after the fact, it is a rare survivor of a true Gold Rush period power plant.The ocean steamers of the Gold Rush period were all wooden-hulled side-paddle boats, all built on the East Coast, many with beam engines like that of the Eureka. None of these hard-driven early steamers has survived and little remains to remind us of them. San Francisco Maritime has a handsome contemporary lithograph of the Pacific Mail steamer Tennessee, wrecked off the Golden Gate in 1854. Plans for the vessel, drawn by her builder William Webb, are in a published collection of his drawings.
A gilded eagle, which was the paddle box decoration of the ill-fated Brother Jonathan, built in 1851, adorns the Maritime Museum's Steamship Room. The ornate carving contrasts with the gloomy end of the vessel, wrecked off the coast near Crescent City in 1865 with a loss of almost 200 passengers. Reflections of Gold Rush Maritime Industry
As the port of entry for the Gold Rush, San Francisco quickly developed a range of support industries to service the maritime commerce clamoring to its shores. The Union Iron Works, established in 1849, built marine engines and cast fittings in addition to supplying mining machinery. The company later operated the first steel shipyard in the Pacific Basin; it was established in 1883 in the Potrero District of San Francisco. San Francisco Maritime manages the Union Iron Works plan archives, with thousands of sheets of crisp linen engineering drawings -- the earliest dating to the 1850s. The Tubbs Cordage Company, manufacturers of manila rope, was established in 1852. When Tubbs shut down their San Francisco rope-walk in the mid-1960s, the Maritime Museum took in much of the rope-making machinery.
The Park's collection of artifacts and photographs, of maps and charts, and layers of documentation offer the visitor insight into the history of San Francisco. The transformations brought by the Gold Rush can be seen in our collections, through oxidized metal and yellowing paper, with here and there a reflected gleam of gold.
Reflections of the Gold Rush, is reprinted with permission from the San Francisco Maritime National Park Association's history publication Sea Letter.
Stephen Canright is Curator of History at the Park.
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