January 2011

“Many young men who have come out full of high anticipation have paid the penalty of their lives…You wrote that Sylvanus had been somewhat afflicted with the Gold Fever. Tell him should he or had he come out he might (like some others) when arriving in S.F. been so sick as to take a Pistol and shoot himself. I have heard several cases of that kind.…”

— A discouraged gold seeker to his mother, February, 1851 .

“Jane i left you and them boys for no other reason than this to come here to procure a littl property by the swet of my brow so that we could have a place of our own that i mite not be a dog for other people any longer…i think that this is a far better country to lay up money than it is at home, if a man will…tend to his business and keep out of licker shops and gambling houses, that is the way the money goes with many of them in this country, thare are murders commited about every day on the acount of licker and gambling but i have not bought a glass of licker since i left home.…i never knew what it was to leave home till i left a wife and children.…i know you feel lonsom when night apears but let us think that it is for the best so to be and do the best we can for two years or so and i hope Jane that we shell be reworded for so doing and meet in a faniely sircal once more, that is my prayer…”

— A miner’s letter to his wife, March, 1852 .

“I do not like to be apacking a thousand dollars about in my coat pockets for it has toar my pockets and puld the Coat to peaces.”

— From a miner’s letter to his wife .

In slightly fuller form, this remarkable article was presented earlier this year as the Founder’s Day Address at the Huntington Library in California; it appeared in the Library’s Quarterly, but deserves, we believe, wider notice. A. L. Rowse, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and authority on Elizabethan England, has written the history of Sir Winston’s family in two volumes— The Early Churchills and The Churchills (Harper, 1956 and 1958). Dr. Rowse is now working at the Huntington Library on a biography of Shakespeare and an edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

The gold-rush letters and diaries in the margins of this article come from the extraordinary collection of California manuscripts, many hitherto unknown, assembled by Edward Eberstadt & Sons of New York and now owned by the Yale Library.

The California Gold Rush was the biggest and the richest of them all, but it was no different from any of those that followed in providing the majority of its participants with much rushing and little gold. When forty-niners reminisced through beards grown longer and whiter, the strikes of the past became richer and the nuggets bigger, but the mournful truth is that most gold hunters would have done better financially staying at home —anil been considerably more comfortable.

In the closing years of his life, around the turn of this century, a Philadelphia banker named George Albert Lewis compiled a truly remarkable series of family albums. He and his wife Anne (their pictures appear on pages 76 and 80), in setting out to record for their grandchildren the story of their forebears and the homes they had inhabited, were merely obeying an urge common to many elderly people. But Albert Lewis brought special skills and imagination to the task. First, he was unusually observant. Second, he was a gifted water-colorist. His delicate, endlessly delightful paintings, scattered throughout the albums amid all the daguerreotypes and old clippings, provide the viewer with a fascinating insight into the life and ways of nineteenth-century urban American society. On these pages A MERICAN H ERITAGE presents paintings and illustrations from two of the books—one written (in longhand) by Albert, the other by his wife, but both illustrated by him. The title page of one of them appears above.

“People are arriving and departing daily and hourly. I have no doubt 400 people have already arrived from Oregon. They usually camp for a day or so near us, look about, swear at the high prices and disappear in the grand vortex.…It is impossible to get at anything like truth, but that the amount of gold in these mountains exceeds any previous calculation I have no doubt.…”

— Letter from Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman, near Sutter’s Fort, October, 1848 .

THE MORMONS—PART II

On April 6, 1830, six poor but enthusiastic young men organized the Church of Christ, later named the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The ceremony, or organization, was held at the farm of Peter Whitmer in the town of Fayette, Seneca County, New York. The members immediately began the distribution through sale of the newly published Book of Mormon, which Joseph Smith, their leader, claimed to have Jound and translated.

As World War II drew to a close, the great industrial empire that was the Ford Motor Company seemed to be reeling madly downhill. At the root of its troubles was Henry Ford himself, whose grip upon the levers of power was failing. Who would succeed him? Therein lies a tale worthy of Machiavelli. Involved, to begin with, was the no-holds-barred rivalry of two subordinates, Charles Sorensen—the company’s long-time production head, and Harry Bennett—the tough little man with underworld connections who was the plant security chief and the master’s closest confidant. Rumors circulated about a mysterious codicil to Henry Ford’s will. There was Ford’s strange antipathy to his only son, Edsel, and the desperate battle of Edsel’s son, Henry Ford II, to win control. What follows has been adapted from the third and final volume of the authors’ monumental history of Ford and his company, to be published early next year by Charles Scribner’s Sons.