Nathaniel Philbrick's New Book Could Give You Whiplash

However chaotic life may seem, cracking open the latest book from historian Nathaniel Philbrick will make it calm by comparison. The author behind the best-selling In the Heart of the Sea is out with a new work, The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World, which chronicles the mad dash to San Francisco in 1849 after gold was accidentally discovered there.

The book is action-packed, with page after page of gun-toting politicians, treasonous plots, and unspeakable misery heaped on humans by other humans. Philbrick takes a tale we all think we know enough about—the 49ers—and unravels that tight little story into a series of characters and vignettes that leave one slack-jawed at the topsy-turvy era.

All of the tales in the book are in service of a very ambitious goal Philbrick lays out in the title—rethinking the gold rush as more than a merely curious event in American history and instead as one that transformed the country and sent it hurtling toward its fate—the coming civil war.

National Geographic caught up with Philbrick and talked to him about how much of a connection he sees between the San Francisco of yesteryear and that of today, how hard it is when history undermines the narratives we believe about ourselves, and the surprises he found while researching the lives of miners, entrepreneurs, and dreamers.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

We think of California now as kind of this paradise. And a lot of the characters in the book feel that way before they go, but then feel let down: “It appears all golden and then from close at hand the gold disappears.” I was curious if you could talk a little bit about that contradiction, of the image we have now of California and the reality on the ground 170 years ago.

Nathaniel Philbrick: California as a kid was the place of all the TV shows I watched, the movies, all of that. It's a place of the imagination, and that's how it began. The name comes from a Spanish romance novel. But what struck me was how everyone who was attracted to California initially in the Gold Rush, with expectations of becoming an instant millionaire, soon discovered that the reality was very different, that the gold was not there just to pick it up and put it in your money belt. It was very hard labor and only a few of the tens of thousands of people in the gold mines actually struck it rich. It's really a story of great expectations dashed. It's basically what life is all about when it comes to our hopes and dreams foundering on the dismal reality.

It’s kind of a depressing book, you know? Particularly the juxtaposition of the remarkable things that were achieved and the human cost of that. How do you grapple with that conflict as a historian—as you're laying out this story, as you're thinking about the themes of American history?

Nathaniel Philbrick: I've written three books about the American Revolution, about the beginning, and here we are in this 250th year. Those are the ideals with which this country began. And in my five years of working on The Rush, I began to realize, “Wow, something really happened to this country in the 19^th century!”

[The Rush] is a tale, ultimately, of human misery met with all of these amazing technological accomplishments. You have a vast movement of people building a transcontinental railroad, and yet, when you look at the people who are actually involved in them, even the people who struck it incredibly rich, they were miserable, they were not happy.

And that really was kind of difficult. I write tales of survival, ever since In the Heart of the Sea, where I'm dealing with people in enormous stress, trying to deal with it. And it's hard, especially when you identify with people. And so the cumulative effect of all this was to say, “Man, Thomas Jefferson's pursuit of happiness ... look where it's led us.” I mean, it's the ideal we're all striving for. It's what America is all about. And off we go, supercharged with the persistent dream of amazing wealth just in our grasp. And it doesn't go that way. I don't know about you, but living my life, I've always been amazed at how much misery there is in life beyond the very personal joys we have in family and things like this. That it's, this is the society that the Gold Rush helped create. It's what we're in the middle of now. The Rush is a cautionary tale.

(New Map Reveals Ships Buried Below San Francisco)

There's this sense in the book of: There's the world and America before the gold rush, and then the world after the chain of events it kicks off.

Nathaniel Philbrick: Absolutely. I was born in Boston and have spent 40 years on Nantucket Island. And, as a coastal person, I grew up sort of thinking of the gold rush as its own compartmentalized thing. It was this instance where all these people went out there, then it stopped, and then we now have California, but it was its own thing. Working on this book, it became clear to me that, oh no, for one thing, just about every town in New England or throughout America sent people to California. I think we've lost a sense of how almost universal the gold rush was at its time and the excitement it created. It created a model that we've been reliving over and over again.

The big revelation was how intimate the relationship between the California gold rush was and the Civil War. The whole concept, the realization that when this happened, there were an even number of slave and free states. And California comes galloping in. The miners want to make their state free, not because they have any abolitionist leanings, quite the opposite. They don't want to share the gold mines with Black people. And so California becomes a free state. For the South, it's a pretext for getting all sorts of concessions from the North, particularly the Fugitive Slave Act, and the fuse is lit. In 10 years' time, we're going to see how slavery is sending the nation into civil war.

And then to realize that California was a battlefield unto itself between slavery and freedom, that it was a free state in name only, that it was dominated by pro-slavery Southerners who really saw this as, “Hey, it may be a free state, but we're going to control this and roll back every freedom the state constitution guarantees. And if this growing divide over slavery comes to war, we're going to bring all this gold in with us to the Confederacy.” And it almost happened. And so for me, it was like, wow, it wasn't just this adventurous cul-de-sac in American history. It was kind of a place of origination of what America would become with all the divisions, with all of the violence and, basically, creating what we're living in a very different modern form today.

(How One Shipwreck and a Cargo of Lost Gold Sparked a U.S. Financial Panic)

There's a great quote in there where somebody says that what the North won was the treasury. Everybody talks about, well, [the North’s advantage over the South] was manpower or it was Northern industrialism. And one of the neat things in the book is—there was this font of gold literally coming out of San Francisco that in many ways shaped things probably as much as anything else.

Nathaniel Philbrick: It puts the war in an interesting perspective. Rather than a heroic tale of [Ulysses S.] Grant and [William Tecumseh] Sherman subduing Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy, you have Grant himself saying, “I don't know what we would have done without the gold from California,” because the North was taking on tremendous debt to fund this. But it was able to do that because there were $3 to $4 million, which is a lot of money back then, being shipped from San Francisco east every month. It's a different take on things and yet more evidence of how the gold rush had tentacles that reached very far.

Earlier you mentioned the violence. That's the other thing that jumped out at me in the book. We always think of the past as having a lot being a lot more violent, but there's staggering amounts of violence in this book. To a level that shocked contemporaries from other parts of the world.

Nathaniel Philbrick: Absolutely. One of the characters that says it best is a Frenchman, who's there in his little apartment in San Francisco. He's a cultured guy from Paris. And he essentially goes, “What the heck is going on here?!” An argument in the streets becomes this shootout with people applauding it. He says it's almost as if the freedoms guaranteed in America inevitably lead to this anarchic barbarianism. And this is a guy who comes from a country where there's a revolution every 25 years, where there's the guillotine. It was stunning to people. The Chileans, same thing. “My God, what is going on here?” And you have in San Francisco in 1851 and 1856, a creepily organized form of vigilante justice where, you know, a group of businessmen start an army and 5,000 men take over the government and start hanging and deporting people and all in the name of reducing crime and it's just like, wow, okay, you can convince yourself you're reducing crime by overthrowing, you know, the elected officials and hanging people. It's not really an anomaly. It's just this hyped-up version of what's going on in America.

There is this “only in America / California” quality to a lot of these very colorful characters.

Nathaniel Philbrick: It was interesting for me to like latch onto characters and then only begin to realize how nutty and strange things were as I really got into it. Even Thomas Starr King, a Unitarian minister, he comes from staid New England. He decides he needs to test himself by going to California in 1860 as all of this is going on. And he begins to be transformed by the experience. Things are just happening much more quickly and more violently. He goes out to the Yosemite Valley. He says, “Oh my gosh, compared to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, this is entirely different.” He gets himself on a horse at the time where the Pony Express is happening. He says he found himself, you know, maybe the rush of what is happening. It was almost chemical what was happening to people once they were a part of this California society, whether it was in the gold mining towns or in San Francisco.

One of the little narratives I had to get in the book was where this guy decides he's going to bring up a herd of horses from Southern California to sell in Sacramento, which has been flooded for a couple of months. And he decides he needs to get to Sacramento even though the roads are impassable and he goes on this little horse that he falls in love with. I had to go with this because in this tale of all sorts of craziness and violence and betrayal, here this guy bonds with this lovely little pony to the point where the pony follows him around. This was one of the few incidents where there was genuine love and affection, even though it was just between a guy and a horse.

The other thing that was surprising was the drinking...

Nathaniel Philbrick: Everyone is basically drunk as far as I could tell. You have Sullivan, a retired wrestler who reputedly drank 80 shots of whiskey a day. Sam Brannon, at one point perhaps the richest man in California, who had been a Mormon and is now a businessman developer and constantly drunk and courting actresses.

NAT GEO: Part of the impetus for this story came from when you were researching in Nantucket and you saw documentation of people back then leaving in droves. Your research surfaced some well-known writers like Bayard Taylor, but were there any that you hadn’t been as familiar with?

Nathaniel Philbrick: I was familiar with some of them but not all and it was great. This was the golden age of journalism as far as I could tell. To be sent by the New York Tribune to San Francisco in the spring of 1849 and to have the opportunity to write what would become an absolute classic, [Eldorado; or, Adventures in the Path of Empire by Bayard Taylor]. He was by no means the only person. And there's [J. Ross] Browne, who had the unenviable literary position of writing the whaling novel that would inspire Moby Dick, and then the humorous travel novel that would inspire Twain's Innocents Abroad and be completely eclipsed by them. There he is on the ground and just a wonderful voice. Finding people like that, it felt like a real gift.

Then there's Rosales, the Chilean. Some have described him as the Chilean Mark Twain. And there he is with his three brothers right in the middle of San Francisco in that amazing year. [His writing] just has an elfin wit and humanity about him that gave such a wonderful perspective to this insanity and violence and prejudice that is happening all around it.

Were there narratives or people that you had going in that were upended by the process of researching and writing this?

Nathaniel Philbrick: I am a big Richard Henry Dana fan. My father edited the Penguin edition of Two Years Before the Mast. I literally grew up with that book. And so I went into this thinking, oh man, Richard Henry Dana, he's going to be my entry point. And he's just got a wonderful voice himself, but it was one of those things where I began to realize it doesn't work. It doesn't work. Even though he would return to California in 1859, just as things are heating up, he's only in the notes. [Herman] Melville ends up in San Francisco. Me and Melville, we go way back. And I just desperately, every book, I try to get Melville into it. And I really wanted to get him, he meets up [with] Thomas Starr King and they go out to Jesse Fremont's Black Point. But I'd have to have contorted the narrative. So it ended up in the notes. I love these guys. I would love to see the gold rush through their eyes but realizing, damn, it's not gonna work.

NAT GEO: I think about sort of where the book ends with [Leland] Stanford and Palo Alto. It seems to hint at this idea that there's DNA to that region that continues into the 20th and 21st centuries. Am I wrong in reading that into that?

Nathaniel Philbrick: I became a historian by moving to Nantucket and deciding I wanted to write about the history of my new home. History has always been about place. When I do my research for all of my books, whether it's about the pilgrims or Custer and Sitting Bull, I have to go to these places. I think there's something about California and the Sierra Nevadas, those foothills, San Francisco. That landscape, to this day. It's amazing. I don't know if there is something in the place, but it seems to be something more than an accident.

But it also feeds to the fact that California from the beginning was imaginary. Now it is a real place, but is it really a real place? Movies, computers, artificial intelligence? I don't know, it just all seems to be part of that great swirl or out-of-control train that we're all on. I really felt as I locked into these stories beginning in 1849 and followed my way through, it just felt like it was heading out of control and to where it feels like today.

NAT GEO: We always think we're living in the era of things happening quickly, right? But things moved fast there.

Nathaniel Philbrick: I think someone from the 21st century thrown into San Francisco in 1849 would get whiplash. The place burns down, okay, you just rebuild it. Burns down again. You rebuild it. Meanwhile, people are shooting at each other on the streets. Biblical floods happen, rats are paddling across like otters. Fellini would have had a good time with this. The pace of life, the pace of change has increased, maybe your computer's getting updated, you know, that kind of thing. But for most of us that's pretty much the way it's been. We're all like, “Oh my God, can't believe it's going this way!” Well, [the gold rush] was a time when it was happening in a physical way, not just in terms of what's on the TV or the news or all of that kind of thing. And it was happening quickly. Gold strikes here, there, people running around from place to place. Talk about startling change.

So I think you're right. I think if you moved us there, I think we'd have a harder time figuring it out, keeping our brains from bleeding out of our ears than a 49er brought here. They’d say, okay, yeah, what's the big deal?