The Argonauts

FORTY-NINERS (340 pp.)--Archer Butler Hulbert--Little, Brown ($4).

GOLD RUSH ALBUM (239 pp.)--Edited by Joseph Henry Jackson--Scribner ($10).

The year of discovery was 1848. The cry of "Gold!--gold on the American River!" roused the California towns. But it took months for the news to reach the Atlantic seaboard, spread to Europe and the remote Pacific. Then, 100 years ago this winter, the rush began.

Within four years, drowsing California was to grow from 20,000 people (excluding the Indians nobody ever bothered to count) to more than 200,000; some $200 million worth of gold was to be scooped and strained from stream beds and hillsides, and California itself was to enter the Union (in 1850) as the 31st state.

Thousands of Argonauts found bitter disappointment in California; other thousands died without ever getting there. Those who chose the long trip around Cape Horn (best time: 89 days) risked storms and shipwreck; on the land-and-water route via the Isthmus of Panama (33 to 35 days), the perils included yellow fever and cholera. By the Overland and Santa Fe Trails, over which 50,000 traveled in 1849 alone, the trip could take all spring and all summer--and the gold seeker, plodding onward beyond the alkali desert in the Humboldt Valley, thought himself lucky to get across the Sierras* before the first snows.

Ignorant & Unbeatable. The 100th anniversary of the gold rush has been celebrated in an armful of volumes so far this year, and at least two of them are outstanding. Gold Rush Album is a handsome collection of pictures, cartoons, handbills and newspaper facsimiles from the great days of the rush. Forty-Niners is a new edition of what is now almost a classic work of research by Author Hulbert into the daily life of those who traveled overland. Together they give an unforgettable impression of a mighty movement of people, unorganized and yet queerly efficient, undisciplined and yet tenacious, unbeatable, ignorant, misled, unprepared, unaided, persisting despite almost every obstacle.

The news of Gold Rush Album is that such superb pictorial records of the migration were kept. Editor Jackson's collection begins with pastoral glimpses of California, includes the early accounts of the discovery of gold, and scenes along the various routes--the Lassen Road, the Salt Lake-Los Angeles road, the southwestern route through Santa Fe, Tucson and Fort Yuma, the route across the Isthmus, the voyages around the Cape. It includes as well such unexpected items as eleven pages of the work of two Cuban artists, Augusto Ferran and Jose Baturone, whose quaintly bearded, drunken and belligerent miners, drawn from life in San Francisco, bear a vague resemblance to the Seven Dwarfs.

Among the best is a series of drawings from official documents of the 29th-34th Congresses, by unidentified artists: scenes of camps and deserts, with the exquisite finish and the unearthliness of Dali's early work--a train of mules vanishing, single file, into the haze of the desert, ridden by grave, top-hatted emigrants; a mirage of tall minareted cities, floating on the horizon.

Prayers & Poisoned Water. Forty-Niners (first published in 1931) is the work of the late Professor Archer Hulbert of Colorado College, who gathered the materials for it while mapping the great trails across continental U.S. Hulbert imagined a "typical" wagon train--16 wagons, with four mules to each wagon and three spares, 125 Ibs. of flour for each man, as well as 50 Ibs. of ham, 50 Ibs. of bacon, 30 Ibs. of sugar, 6 Ibs. of coffee. He tells what the emigrants talked about, what songs they sang, their feasts and prayer meetings, the condition of the road and the weather, the imagined hazards (Indians and Mormons) and the real ones--fleas, whiskey, mules' hind legs, cholera, poisoned water. Fear, worry, loneliness and monotony took a toll, too. A man suddenly began to run in circles, declaring that Providence had decreed that he was to be buried in that circle (he was soundly trussed up and placed in a wagon). A woman suddenly began to set fire to anything that would burn. Halfway from the Missouri to the goldfields, the number of abandoned wagons increased noticeably. Some of the outfits began to shoot their dogs --the barking caused too many of the travelers' cattle to stampede. But the caravans kept coming.

Word at the Forks. A strange unreality lies over the world visualized in these two books. Much of the Overland Trail had been well traveled long before these emigrants started, yet they still had the hardships of pioneers. The Indians were like stage Indians, no longer menacing, but certainly not safe. At the forks in the road there were travelers with word of how much better some other route was or could be, and at the river crossings there always seemed to be someone to overcharge them for ferrying each wagon and each mule.

There was something synthetic about the advertisements and appeals, the rumors and reports of gigantic nuggets, that set them on their way, and in Author Hulbert's account they seem to be half-aware of it. They persisted nevertheless.

The result is a study of people responding to something they do not quite believe in, arming themselves against imaginary dangers, moving forward irresistibly to a titanic disappointment, and yet overcoming, on the way, so many hardships that their effort became heroic in spite of themselves.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.