I don't think anybody needs to be told that we're in the American West.
We happen to be high up in a windy mountain valley,
8,500 feet up in the Sierra Nevada,
among the ghostly remains of an old mining town that struck it rich in 1876.
We could be in any number of places between the Rockies and the Pacific
because the West is not only a place, it's a state of mind.
The idea of El Dorado, of getting away from it all,
of leading the new life under the big sky.
90 years ago, this place was roaring with life... and death.
One killing a day, 56 saloons and gambling joints, 12,000 people here,
all brimming with sap and mischief and vice.
And today it's as forgotten and forlorn as the plains of Troy.
(MUSIC: MY DARLING CLEMENTINE)
People often ask, "Where did the West begin?"
It all depends which century you're talking in.
200 years ago, the West began 2,500 miles back east,
wherever the first pioneers were moving along the ridges of the Appalachians.
This was the first frontier.
# 0n Jordan's stormy bank I stand
# And cast a wishful eye
# To Canaan's fair and lovely land
# Where my possessions lie
# I am bound for the Promised Land
# I'm bound for the Promised Land
# 0h, who will come and go with me?
# I am bound for the Promised Land #
These mountains and gorges, only half an hour's flight from Washington DC,
were unfamiliar to the white man two centuries ago.
This was Indian country, so pathfinders didn't advertise their routes
and made their base camps in caves.
Believe it or not, this is one.
No modern conveniences.
This was discovered only a dozen years ago
and there is strong proof that it was built as a hut inside this huge rock shelter
by D Boone, Daniel Boone, the most celebrated of the early surveyors and pathfinders.
You might say that he was the first Westerner,
resting in some such place as this and then going out by day into the mountains
and living the essentially stealthy and self-sufficient life,
hunting, trapping, surveying, killing,
camping, resting again and then moving on on tiptoe.
He disappeared for up to two years at a stretch.
Some men, whole companies, disappeared altogether.
No wonder the phrase "gone west" very early on became a synonym for death,
a meaning that it retained in Europe throughout the First World War.
I don't think I could stay in here for two nights.
And I think possibly the most remarkable thing about this remarkable man
was that he survived into his 90th year.
In 1750 an English doctor found a gap through this mountain range
and named it after the Duke of Cumberland.
It is the southern high road into the interior.
The early pathfinder needed four essentials:
Health, an axe, a rifle and salt - it cured your food. It was THE preservative.
Daniel Boone, by the way, must have had divining rods in his nostrils.
It was said he could sniff salt at 30 miles.
Now, you could get it from a creek
or, better, from the standing water of a brine lake.
The pioneers smelt it out here, which is, appropriately, in Boone County, Kentucky,
but they were not the first.
Two million years ago you'd have heard a noise here like an earthquake.
Dinosaurs, mastodons, sloths came galumphing in here, attracted by the salt.
In the 1770s, a Virginian named James Douglas came surveying through here
and he looked out on the whole valley as a graveyard of gigantic bones.
Teeth weighing ten pounds each, thigh bones, five feet, eleven-foot tusks.
And in the evening he camped.
They made tent poles of mastodon ribs and sat down to supper with vertebrae as chairs.
The fame of this spread all over.
Expeditions came hustling in, the Royal College of Surgeons in London collared quite a pile -
unfortunately destroyed in the Blitz -
but today there are some at the Museum of Natural History in Kensington.
Here, in their natural place, they're very rare. This is a tooth.
I should hope a molar, about as big as Yorick's skull.
It was enough for the early pioneers at the turn of the 19th century
that they could take 1,000 gallons of the salt water from this vast brine lake,
which used to be here, and boil it down to 20 pounds of salt.
This meant there was no further compulsion to push on, and some of them simply settled in.
It was in such clearings that the original frontiersmen first hunted for their food,
planted crops, made a home.
Mostly of English-Scotch-Irish stock with names like Jackson, Marshall, Lincoln,
rude folk starting life like African tribes,
only a couple of hundred miles or more from the merchants of New York,
from the elegance of Williamsburg.
Those with the get up and go to come through the mountains and make homes like these
were the democrats who would live out and transform
the neat, noble system of government written by the lawyers and landowners in Philadelphia.
Those who pushed farther inland came on a race of amphibious pioneers,
Frenchmen mainly, who travelled cheerfully up and down the American interior.
The many great rivers running north and south sustained not only life and limb
but a flourishing trade between Canada and the Gulf of Mexico
in furs, skins, turpentine, tar, lead, grains, rum and whisky.
All the traffic was down these rivers that flow into this basin.
The Missouri, Illinois, Wabash, Ohio.
All coming down into the great current of the Mississippi to Louisiana and New Orleans.
We should understand that, in 1803,
Louisiana was not the compact state in the Deep South that we know today
and that we associate with petroleum and sugar cane and sweet potato and gumbo
and the origins of Dixieland jazz. Watch.
Here's today's Louisiana,
but in 1803 Louisiana embraced the whole watershed west of the Mississippi,
comprising the present-day states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma,
both Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana.
Look at it. One third of a nation, all the way up to Canada.
Nobody ruled these vast lands.
There were a few trading posts, a few garrisons, but only 1% of whites had settled it
and even the most sophisticated of them had only the most romantic notions
of how it looked and what was there.
In 1801, this huge land mass was owned by Spain,
but in that year she was forced to yield it to Napoleon in a secret treaty.
At the same time, he had despatched to the West Indies a French expeditionary force
to suppress a native revolt, but there was more to it than that.
When Thomas Jefferson heard that French ships had arrived in Santo Domingo,
he was the first to suspect that this was a mere rehearsal for the subsequent planting
of a French empire in Louisiana and the United States.
In Santo Domingo, the flower of the French infantry had wilted,
enervated by heat and malaria, baffled by natives on their own terrain.
And they were led by a black general, Toussaint L'Ouverture,
a master of guerrilla warfare, a furtive military type,
quite beyond the talent of the portrait painters of the day to represent.
The upshot was that Napoleon lost 24,000 of his finest soldiers.
Santo Domingo was, in fact, his Vietnam.
He withdrew and decided against any other adventures 3,000 miles from home.
So he sold Louisiana freehold
and the territorial transfer was signed right here in this room in the Cabildo in New Orleans.
And...
it was all kept so secret that only 20 days elapsed
between the knowledge that Louisiana had passed from Spain to France
and then that the Americans had bought it.
The very day the people gathered in the square outside here to celebrate the fact
that they were becoming Frenchmen, they were suddenly Americans,
a confusion of what today, I suppose, we'd call identity that seems to cause no pain at all.
I think this bust in the Cabildo ought to be inscribed, "Thomas Jefferson chuckled here,"
because a president can only conclude a treaty with a foreign nation
with the consent of the Senate.
Jefferson advised and consented with nobody.
He didn't mention a word until it was finished and his comment on why he kept it secret
is a wonderfully bare-faced bit of gall,
worthy of Franklin Roosevelt at his blandest. Listen to this.
"This treaty must, of course, be laid before both Houses.
"Both, I presume, will see their duty to their country in ratifying and paying for it.
"The Executive, I grant, has done an act beyond the Constitution,
"but it is the case of a guardian investing the money of his ward
"in purchasing an important adjacent territory and saying to him, when of age,
"'I did this for your good."'
Of course, it was unconstitutional. It was outrageous.
But in the end even Jefferson's enemies accepted it
for the most reliable of American reasons - it worked.
Clinching the smoothest deal in the history of real estate,
Jefferson doubled the territory of the United States for the price of a Miami Beach hotel -
$16 million, or four cents an acre.
Jefferson decided at once to measure and survey it
with a military expedition led by his secretary Meriwether Lewis
and an old soldier buddy of his, William Clark.
Like Cortez, they picked up an Indian girl, a 16-year-old Shoshone named Sacajawea,
who, with her French-Canadian husband, would be guide, interpreter and go-between.
In the one really threatening encounter with the Indians,
she got between Lewis and the menacing chief,
who, astoundingly, turned out to be her brother.
Jefferson's orders were, as always, crisp and all-embracing.
They were to open up a river route for a continental fur trade,
to study Indian tribes, their languages and customs,
to be nice to them on all occasions,
but convey the message that they now belonged to the Great White Father back in Washington.
The expedition was blithely required to do for the whole unseen continent
what Jefferson had done for his familiar Virginia - to list and describe
all the birds, trees, plants, fish, weather systems, geology,
to sketch the characteristic profile of every native they came across.
This pinhead is a member of the Flathead tribe.
After mapping all the interior river systems,
they were to march over the single range - as Jefferson imagined - of the Rocky Mountains.
As a clincher, they were to get to the headwaters of the Columbia River,
claim the whole continent for the United States and so float sweetly in triumph to the Pacific.
When they saw it, after nearly two exhausting years,
it was as if the first two men had landed on the Moon.
Lewis and Clark died young enough not to doubt the blessing they bestowed on their countrymen,
but the Indian girl lived to be 90.
She must have been an embittered old lady,
for the great expedition doomed the right of her people to keep their native land.
The decisive blow fell a quarter-century later on the peaceful tribes of the Deep South.
The Chickasaws, the Choctaws, the Creeks, the Cherokees. They were forcibly dispossessed.
Now, clearly, there were many, many forces and attitudes
to explain why the banishment of the Indian from his own lands was inevitable,
but this was one - a very powerful force, though a harmless looking thing. Cotton.
Young cotton, three weeks away from full bloom.
When the southern pioneers broke through the mountains and came into these flatlands
and the Mississippi Delta beyond,
they saw what they wanted their West to look like.
An empire of cotton, not a camp ground for Indian tribes.
So the great cotton states - Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia -
they outlawed the tribal kingdoms and in 1830 Andrew Jackson, who was then president,
pushed a bill through Congress ordering that all the Indian tribes,
whatever, farmers, hunters, whether they were hostile, peaceable,
be removed west to the west of the Mississippi.
Well, they started to pad away. The Choctaws, the Creeks, the Chickasaws.
There was a brave pause when the Cherokee appealed to the Supreme Court.
Chief Justice Marshall ruled they were right.
There was no constitutional right to remove them from their ancestral lands.
President Jackson said this decision is, and I quote, "too preposterous".
And in one of the most shameless and arbitrary acts of an American president
he simply ignored the Supreme Court and he said to the army, "Get them out."
And so began what is poetically and truly called the Trail of Tears.
30,000 Cherokee were persuaded, chained, gently led,
viciously driven, hunted as far west as Oklahoma.
And along the way a quarter of them died.
This imperious order came to apply as far west as the white man cared to explore.
It was meant to confine the remaining Indians to the Siberia of the far west,
but out there were tougher tribes who escaped confinement
by their blessed possession of the horse.
Their mobility, a heritage from the Spanish, helped them to hunt for food
and go on warring among themselves.
Until the day, 50 years later, when the white man would subdue them all,
they maintained their freedom and their defiance.
In the meantime, the far west was still an exploitable wilderness for any white land pirate
who had the stamina to knock around it.
The most footloose of these freebooters roved and ambled across the plains
right into the Rockies.
Now, why should these men come hacking and tracking 2,000 miles or more
to the Rocky Mountains?
Maybe they'd heard of Lewis and Clark and knew it was up for grabs,
but they were not, shall we say, idealists.
They didn't say, "Yes, sir, Mr Jefferson, we'll conquer it for Jeffersonian democracy."
They came here for a very practical reason.
They came here for an animal.
The animal was the beaver
and this was his homeland.
Now, why should anybody want to invade the homeland
of this most intelligent and industrious and useful of animals?
In those days, the rivers and streams abounded with beavers,
the famous bridge, tunnel and home builders,
but it was not for himself, it was for what he could be made into.
And this was mainly it by a whimsy of fashion. The beaver hat.
This was the racy headgear in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Paris, London, Vienna.
And, of course, it was an immense trade. Both the British and the Americans got into it.
In a curious way, a microcosm of the British 18th century versus Jeffersonian democracy
happened right here in this setting, 6,000 miles from Regency London
and over 2,000 miles from Mr Jefferson's study.
Two opposing systems - the British system was a straightforward class system.
At the top, management - the Englishman and the Scots.
They did the hiring and they kept the books.
Then the canoeists - usually French Canadians.
At the bottom of the heap, the Indians, the trappers.
They shipped out from England three different grades of Indian tea
for the tastes of these three classes.
The Indians were the people who caught the pelts,
they were the people who delivered the skins to the British posts for a dollar a throw.
And the British then sold them in the international trade for $10.
In came the Americans. With no idea of a system or a hierarchy, they just set their own traps.
And they got their own pelts
and were delighted also to annex the Indian trade and pay 3-4 times what the British did.
So the Indians deserted the British companies in large numbers.
They were under contract and could have been sued for breach, but they weren't.
In the final document, it says that they were condemned, several tribes condemned,
for personal disloyalty to the Crown.
Isn't that a marvellous echo of feudalism?
The Americans didn't give a damn about loyalty or whether you corrupted an Indian with money.
They were just content to pay three times the price and collar the trade, which they did.
It didn't last too long, but you may wonder where they got together to do all this buying.
As I said, there were no settlements,
but in this kind of setting, there was something known as a rendezvous.
In wide pastures at the foot of the mountains, the trappers gathered with their pelts
and the buyers came in with axes, kettles and various seductive trinkets, not least whisky.
They might come all the way from St Louis and British Columbia, down the Pacific coast.
It was, you might say, the forerunner of the American trade fair.
Gradually, the rendezvous gave way to trading posts protected by stockades.
In other words, forts, but the private forts of very free enterprisers.
Much later, they were bought up for hard cash by a modest government institution
known as the United States Cavalry.
This was built far away on the Pacific coast.
It was the fort of a roving soldier of fortune, a debt-ridden buccaneer from Switzerland.
Johann August Sutter, a self-styled Columbus with big mustachios
and a bigger ambition to found and rule his own California colony.
Well, he began humbly by hiring as his vice president a Scottish carpenter named Marshall.
They set up business on the American River at Coloma, California,
and what happened here changed the history of America and convinced a gloomy Karl Marx
that the collapse of American capitalism would have to be postponed.
They decided to go into, in a modest way, the timber business together.
At the end of 1847 they built, right here, a sawmill.
And, one day the following January,
James Marshall was doing one of his more tedious chores,
he was inspecting and cleaning out the tailrace of the sawmill, the water channel,
for clogged debris and so on.
And then he spotted something he'd never seen before.
Small particles about the size of peas,
very hard and shiny... and yellow.
And he later said, "I sat down on the bank
"and began to think mighty hard."
One of the simplest and most fateful sentences in American history.
He took the particles to Sutter and they weighed them on apothecary's scales,
checked their findings in an encyclopaedia and then they made a breathtaking guess
and they swore each other to secrecy about it.
But within a week, it was out
and within a year the whole world had heard about it
and the American River became suddenly as famous as the Mississippi.
When the news hit the East and spread to Germany, France, Scotland and Cornwall,
people thought all you had to do was lower a pan into a sluggish stream,
shake it several times and sift out a fortune in gold.
You could go by one of four ways - by clipper around the Horn, which was long and tedious,
by ship to Panama and Nicaragua or down to Mexico to dash across the desert to the Pacific.
These ways cost money. For the ordinary hopeful, the cheap, the only way was to walk
after a train trip to the mid-west.
And this was the point of departure - St Joseph, Missouri,
where the railroad ended and the Middle Ages began.
So here by the Missouri River, near the town of St Joe,
is the supply centre, the outfitting post, the launch pad of the '49ers.
And this is what you had to have. First, mules.
Or ox, or both, if you were lucky.
The oxen were much better on the early stretches of the prairie
because they could get their feed wherever they browsed.
But in the most precipitous mountains,
the mules could maintain any foothold they chose, and it was their choice.
Not for nothing did the idiom come into the language, "As stubborn as a Missouri mule".
Now, if you had some mules of your own and they were already broken in, so much the better.
If you didn't, you had to buy what was available at the going price.
Many a family sank its savings in the purchase of a few mules,
and because this supply base was so far from home,
you can imagine that there was a good deal of sharp practice.
Then the wagon.
Take a good look at this because this is the genuine article,
not the Hollywood omnibus that we've grown so fond of.
It's really a strengthened regular farm wagon.
High-axled, very often caulked so that they could ford the streams that they would have to cross.
And they wouldn't think twice about taking the essential necessities
of a pistol or a shotgun and a rifle.
The usual ratio was five persons to one wagon.
Here they kept their lot of horse shoe nails, axes, repair kit.
All right, what did you put in the wagon?
The great trick was not to overload or underload, to hit it just right.
By the time you got here, you'd certainly read, maybe even memorised, one of these things -
"The Emigrant's Guide To California", published in a dozen languages,
which told you that you must have...
...150 pounds of flour,
25 pounds of bacon, 25 pounds of sugar, 25 pounds of salt,
15 pounds of coffee.
That was the base.
Then, if you were fairly well-to-do, let's say, or prudent,
you could take along maize, corn meal, rice, prunes,
which reminds me, except for the prunes, you'll notice it's an immensely starchy diet,
but they hadn't read about carbohydrates.
Here we come to the portable kitchen - all the pots and pans, the water barrel,
the water jug, the lantern candle.
Here the soap, lye soap.
Also they took along some homely medicines,
especially petroleum, which at that time was being touted as a wonder drug.
Here is the hopeful item, which is the pick and the pan.
That was for the fortune which you would take out of El Dorado when you got there.
Then the personal belongings in those chests.
An overcoat, eight shirts, two pairs of boots, an oil cloth cap, a rubber knapsack.
And then anything... any hobby, maybe a mouth organ.
Some people even took a harp, by way of the late-night show.
So you stowed and secured all these things and then you started off up the river,
or right here you could take a ferry.
Snows had gone from the prairie, the spring rains had come and gone
and there was forage for the animals
and the long trek started across the wide Missouri.
These companies kept journals and for a few halcyon weeks they remarked on good pasture,
clear running rivers and shade trees for rest.
But then they came to these high plains
and from here on nature was not so kind.
The journey was 2,000 miles long
and it would take four months, if you were lucky.
And the ideal rate of speed was no more than 15 miles a day.
That was sensible for both the animals and the humans.
And this was the ideal manageable team.
Six, seven, no more than eight wagons.
There were companies that took 15, 20, 30 wagons,
but they found when they came to this bare land where the timber gave out
that so did the ample forage and the big companies simply slowed to a crawl.
In fact, there were companies that split up quite amicably
into units of just this size.
These units would have to be self-sustaining when the going got rough,
but for long stretches different parties could follow the known trail in packs.
Far from salt licks when their bacon went bad,
God provided protein on the hoof in the shape of the bison,
always called in America the buffalo.
The next big problem was the wide rivers.
A few river men made a living by ferrying the timid at outrageous prices.
Mostly, they floated their wagons and mules
and hoped they would not add to the surprisingly high casualty list of deaths by drowning.
These are actual wagon ruts left by the '49ers as they went through Wyoming.
They're so well-defined today because of the great volume of traffic that chose this trail
and because of the rocky base of the soil.
The trails could be 10, 20 miles apart, according to whose emigrant's guide you used,
but the word got around that the really safe trail,
as the land crumpled and rose towards the foothills of the Rockies, was this one
that had been discovered by a fur trader, a trapper, in 1830, and so they all came here.
If you'd stood here in the June, any June, of 1849-50, right through that decade,
you would have seen something like a quarter of a million people come through
with their wagons and their possessions.
(CRASH OF THUNDER)
Now they were going over the high, flat hump of the Rockies.
They'd steered a safe way between the towering peaks of the north and south.
They paid for this easy passage by finding themselves up in the clouds
where the storms are brewed.
Slowed by boggy trails, they discovered rather late how badly they were overloaded
and they dumped bedsteads, stoves, frying pans, anything to lighten and quicken the journey.
By mid-summer, they were in central Wyoming and came on this rocky landmark.
Climbing it became almost a patriotic duty
and inscribing the usual graffiti a point of pride.
Since they usually hit it around the 4th of July, they christened it Independence Rock.
This night formation is the classic Western shot
to suggest an emergency defence against Indians.
In fact, they had very little Indian trouble.
The point was that as the forage got scarcer and the animals had the urge to roam,
they corralled them in circles.
# You calculate on 60 days to take you over the plains
# But there you lack for bread and meat For coffee and for brains
# Your 60 days are 100 or more Your grub you've got to divide
# Your steers and mules are alkalied So foot it, you cannot ride
# There's not a log to make a seat along the River Platte
# So when you eat you've got to stand or sit down square and flat
# It's fun to cook with buffalo chips Take one that's newly born
# If I knew once what I know now I'd have gone around the Horn #
The people clattering along here were still ahead of the rich men puking around the Horn,
but they weren't much happier.
They were now in western Wyoming, where a river is in flood one day
and a dry bed the next.
By now a bubbling spring was a gift from God.
They thought the surrounding pasture was a guarantee of more springs and plain sailing.
Indeed, they christened this place Pacific Springs,
but they were still 1,000 miles away from California,
where this man, if he keeps it up, will be tomorrow night.
They, with luck, would push on 15 miles a day
across the rolling desert of Utah.
The dry flatland west of the Rockies goes on forever, too,
and once across Utah they still faced a 350-mile span
following the Humboldt River across the bone-bright wilderness
that is now the state of Nevada.
And, in the beginning, all was well,
but by the time they got down certainly as far as here, which is 300 miles down the Humboldt,
then the grass gave out.
This stuff is not asparagus, it's sage and creosote
and mesquite, cat's claw, some of it actually poisonous, all of it arid.
And, much worse, their lifeline, their water, the river itself,
now began to get sluggish and fetid and, as you see,
it took on this ominous, yellow, milky-green look which shows it's impregnated with alkali.
And very often, in places where it was most dense, cattle that drank it actually died.
Some of them were poisoned. The humans boiled it, but nevertheless had perpetual dysentery.
By this time, they had of course been together three, four months.
It was now 100-110 degrees at noon
and human nerves began to snap.
There were several accidental Freudian killings. People went mad.
One man shot his brother because he could no longer stand the sound of his voice.
This was, they thought at the time, the nadir of the trek.
Certainly brotherly love gave out.
Something else gave out, which the people who knew about it dreaded to mention
and the people who didn't discovered too late.
The river itself, foul as it was, it dribbled out into a marsh
and dried up under the burning sun.
This was something the travellers could not credit till it happened.
They were all from Europe and the East.
They had never seen rivers that simply evaporated and left a scum.
Beyond the Humboldt sink was nothing but the alkali desert.
65 miles without any water at all.
It was at this point that they began to appreciate very late
that their own lives depended on their animals.
They could make this waterless 65 miles in 52 hours.
The animals needed to rest more than usual, but they couldn't let them. They had to push them.
And when they collapsed they had to leave them to die. One man said,
"You could not possibly mistake the trail through the Humboldt Desert.
"It was littered at intervals of only 30 yards with the skeletons of horses, oxen and mules
"and the corpses of human beings."
Some people died of starvation, thirst or dysentery.
Some people died of just having had it.
They put up wooden markers for their dead.
It wasn't that they hadn't time to bury them, which they didn't,
but that you can't shovel a grave out of crumpled concrete like this.
So it would just have a little board. "Tom Warmsley, born Yorkshire,
"died this spot, August 2nd, 1849."
And then it occurred to some people that you couldn't get word back to the relatives
that he died nowhere, so they made place names.
Wherever the trail turned or there was a new vista, they would make up a name.
And so the news would get back to Geneva or Glasgow or... Frankfurt
that their son had died in Endurance, Nevada. That was the kind of name they thought up.
And you can still see them.
I have automobile road maps that still contain, over this great wilderness of Nevada,
the names given by the '49ers to a stretch of nothing.
Such names as Fortitude, Desolation,
Last Gasp.
For those who survived the ghastly ordeal of the Humboldt,
there was the sudden miracle of tumbling water and shade trees and rising hills.
But these blessings were a warning
of one last huge hurdle which some Europeans had never even heard of.
They thought the last great western mountain range was the Rockies,
but these are not the Rockies.
They are the great granite fortress of the High Sierra.
The later parties learnt well that you must get through here before the heavy snows,
which began in early September.
If you didn't, if you yielded to travellers' tales of short cuts,
which often turned into lethal long cuts,
then you were frozen in your tracks.
An earlier party, misled and running late, was hemmed in for the winter
and took to cannibalism.
This was the time when the freewheeling teams no longer laughed with scorn
at the companies that had started out with military discipline in written constitutions.
They kept good order and made it.
The others might have to junk their wagons and stumble on foot down the western slopes
to come at last on the balmy paradise so lovingly painted by eastern artists
who had never seen it.
One way or another they tumbled down to the gold fields,
the ultimate goal of the '49ers.
We're on that road now, which is appropriately called California State Highway Route 49.
But the '49ers didn't leave any grim place names here.
The snow was over, heat came, they had grass.
They called their little camps Pine Vista and Cool and Lotus.
But it wasn't lotus-land for a lot of them.
The rich diggings were collared by a few people
who became the founding families, the nobs of San Francisco.
And the rest of them, getting pretty desperate, having a very rough time, getting no gold,
pounded up and down these valleys and invaded the neighbouring vast acreage of Sutter himself
and burnt up his house and his farms because he wanted to stop them.
Marshall himself, here by his derelict mill in 1852, was bilked out of every claim,
died in poverty and was rewarded, five years after his death, with a bronze statue.
If you didn't have the luck and the guile, as well as the muscle,
you didn't, as they said, pan out.
Literally, most people found nothing,
sent home ironical photographs of non-existent fortunes,
fought over tiny stakes, murdered each other or lived on a pittance alongside luckless diggings
to which they gave grim, hilarious names - Humbug Canyon, Knock 'Em Stiff,
Brandy Gulch, Poverty Hill.
And in the growing port of San Francisco,
grown in five years from a group of wind-blown shacks into a booming port,
fed by a seaborne invasion round the Horn.
The bay was crammed with the ships of owners willing to stake a passage home
to men who could chalk up a 2,000-mile walk to nothing but experience.
(MUSIC: CALIFORNIA, HERE I COME)
I don't think we should get too carried away by the famous ordeal of the Gold Rush.
Of course, it took courage to walk across the empty continent. Courage or insensibility.
But, historically, it was a freak.
The people who built this city on nine sand hills were sudden adventurers.
Their aim was not to settle Mr Jefferson's open West.
The American continent was an intermediate nuisance between them and a quick fortune,
but way back there, 2,000 miles, where the blue Appalachians arise,
those were the truer pioneers, the people who slogged across Kentucky and Illinois and Ohio,
and gradual settlers,
people whose only aim was to extend the stretch of America
that could be called the homeland.
Do you remember the people we called the first frontiersmen,
the ordinary folk making a home in a clearing?
I think of one such family that started a farm on rocky soil,
a dim sort of husband, married to a frail mountain girl.
They failed and picked a new place and, in time, they had a barn
and a few animals, a little corral, a split-rail fence.
And they planted corn and flax and beans.
Then their neighbours went down with the milk sickness from cows that chewed on snakeroot.
Our farmer's wife died.
So the vagabond father and slow-moving son pushed on again to a new state, new ground,
the son passing from an almost animal childhood to a bleak boyhood.
They were not adventurers and they were not scoundrels, or even very good farmers.
But out of that frail woman and her listless husband and the poorest ground,
there came something strange and wholly admirable -
that slow-moving pioneer son,
who seized the republic and held it through its first cataclysm.
We are talking about nothing less than the most moving life in the American experience,
that of Abraham Lincoln.