Which Way to the Wild West? by Steve Sheinkin Page A

polluted with human waste. This led to the spread of cholera, an infection of the intestines that causes severe diarrhea and vomiting. Death was often miserable and quick, as a traveler named William Swain noted in his diary:

    May 18: One of our company, Mr. Ives, is sick with cholera.
    May 19: Mr. Ives is dead.

    If you had about six hundred dollars to spare (which most people didn’t) you could travel by sea all the way around the southern tip South America and then north to California. This was safer than the overland trails, though you had to deal with storms, seasickness, rotting food, and barrels of drinking water that got so smelly, passengers had to add molasses and vinegar before they could bear to swallow it. For many, though, the real problem with this route was that it was 15,000 miles and took six months or more—too long to wait when you’ve got gold fever.
    The quickest route (if everything went well) was to sail to Panama, cross the seventy-five-mile-wide strip of land by canoe and on foot, and then get in another ship bound for California. Shipping company advertisements made this sound like a pleasant little shortcut. The ads failed to mention that travelers would be tripping through tropical forests and dodging disease-carrying mosquitoes.
    Nor did the ads mention that when you finally stumbled into Panama City, there would probably be no ship there to pick you up. Jenny Megquier and her husband were among thousands of travelers who got stuck on Panama’s Pacific coast. Every time a boat sailed
up, desperate crowds raced forward to try to get on. Megquier kept a positive attitude while waiting, though she did find some of the local bugs mildly annoying. “Another insect which is rather troublesome, gets into your feet and lays its eggs,” she wrote. The doctor and I have them in our toes—did not find it out until they had deposited their eggs in large quantities; the natives dug them out and put on the ashes of tobacco.”

    Jenny Megquier eventually made it to California alive. So did William Swain and about 10,000 other hopeful people in 1848.
    Now the Adventure Begins
    G etting there was just the start of the adventure. A young traveler named Leonard Kip realized this when his ship sailed into San Francisco’s harbor. Kip woke to the sounds of the ship’s captain barking curses. He found an officer and asked what was going on.

    Kip: What’s the matter?
    Officer: You will have to row yourselves ashore, as all the men have left.
    Kip: Indeed!
    Officer: Went off last night, on the sly, laughing at us on shore now—next week, in the mines.

    This was happening a lot. As soon as ships arrived in San Francisco, entire crews raced to shore and headed inland to join the gold rush. Kip looked around and saw the result: hundreds of ships gently rocking in the harbor. They were flying flags from all over the world. They were all empty.
    Kip got the feeling he was entering a very strange new world.

Welcome to the Wild West
    One day in September 1848 an African American miner was walking along the San Francisco waterfront. He heard someone calling to him—it was a wealthy white traveler who wanted someone to carry his bags. This guy may have been used to bossing around slaves back east. But things were different out west. The black man pulled a bag from his pocket, showed off more than one hundred dollars in gold, and said: “Do you think I’ll lug trunks when I can get that much in one day?”

    â€œWhat a Puzzling Place!”
    â€œT his is the best place for black folks on the globe,” one black miner wrote to his wife in Missouri. “All a man has to do is to work, and he will make money.” This was enough to draw African Americans to California from all over the United States. Some were escaping from slavery; some were free men hoping to find enough gold to buy the freedom of family members still enslaved in the South.
    â€œWhat a