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A California miner pans for gold in the early 1850s next to a wooden sluice, built to make the process of sorting gold from river gravel easier.

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These leather bags, which may have been made by Burnett, were used to hold gold dust.

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GORDON DANIELS

a letter that McCarthy showed us...steve has details

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Thomas Chapman of Longmeadow, who served as a physician and city council member in Sacramento, a jumping-off point for the California gold fields. Chapman later opened a medical practice in Longmeadow.

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A portrait of Elijah Fuller of Deerfield, who went to California in 1849 but found little gold. Massachusetts)

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Prospectors in an unidentified area of the Sierra Nevada, circa 1850s. An estimated 300,000 people flooded into California between 1849 and the early 1860s after gold was discovered there in 1848.

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It was an epic chapter in our country's history - a time when Americans began heading west in droves, part of a great migration that would redraw the nation's boundaries and help usher in enormous changes in U.S. society, from the Civil War to the dramatic expansion of railroads.

The discovery of gold in California in the 1840s has long been a symbol of both the good and the bad in American history. It sparked the development of cities such as San Francisco and Sacramento as well as California's formidable agricultural empire. But over the next 15 years, as some 300,000 people poured into what became America's 31st state, the 1849 Gold Rush - and the greed it inspired - also led to the persecution of American Indian tribes and the seizure of their lands, as well as considerable environmental damage to the hills and rivers of gold country.

In this story of national implications, New England and the Connecticut River Valley had their parts to play as well. Now a group of regional historians has told the story of how 19th-century Valley residents became "forty-niners," swept up in the great move West.

"California Dreamin': The Pioneer Valley and the Gold Rush" is a project of the Pioneer Valley History Network (PVHN), a coalition of historians, archivists and museum curators from Hampshire, Hampden and Franklin counties that formed a few years ago. Their goal? Find ways to share resources and provide a more complete account of local history. And that effort to "cross borders," as one lead researcher puts it, has been essential for uncovering the portraits of Valley residents who went West in the heady days of mid-19th-century America.

"This is a pretty amazing chapter of U.S. history, and there are so many great stories of people here who were part of it," says Cliff McCarthy, an archivist for the Pioneer Valley Historical Museum in Springfield and for Belchertown's Stone House Museum. "Some went for adventure, some went to get rich," adds McCarthy, who also chairs the PVHN's steering committee. "In the end, we get a better sense of what happened to these folks because [local historians] shared resources on this project."

There was Enoch Hale Burt of Westhampton, for example, who panned for gold, then began his return home with an unknown amount of earnings - only to die in 1857 when a boat that was carrying over 16 tons of California gold sank. Or Elijah Fuller of Deerfield, whose letters home described the dark side of the mining scene: sickness, squalor and destitute fortune seekers who spent what little they earned on drink, "draining all thoughts of the morrow."

For the "California Dreamin' " project, McCarthy and a few other researchers have cataloged dozens of historical items - letters, diaries, mining paraphernalia, drawings and photographs - from museums and collections here in the Valley obtained over the years from the families of residents who journeyed to the California gold fields. The information has been compiled in a 114-page booklet, copies of which have been given to regional historic sites and museums. The document can also be viewed at the PVHN Web site at www.pioneervalleyhistorynetwork.org.

The historians also hope to post a "virtual exhibit" on their Web site by October. Above all, says PVHN steering committee co-chair Barbara Pelissier, the project, which concentrates on the period between 1849 and 1857, offers a close-up look at how "real people" played a part in history. "What we're trying to show is that [the Gold Rush] isn't just some abstract thing that happened to the nation ... ," Pelissier says. "It happened to people who lived here, too."

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In early 1848, California was a large but sleepy part of Mexico, about to become a U.S. territory as part of the settlement of the Mexican-American War; it had a population of perhaps 32,000 Anglos and Mexicans and 150,000 Indians. Then came the discovery of gold near a sawmill that pioneer John Sutter was building along the American River, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada northeast of present-day Sacramento. Word slowly spread, reaching the East Coast by the summer; before the end of the year, tens of thousands of Americans and foreigners were en route to California.

The influx of people was staggering. San Francisco, which had a population of about 500 in 1848, swelled to 25,000 by 1850 and became the most important port on the Pacific Coast. Sacramento, which became California's capital after statehood was granted in 1850, went from a tiny settlement to a bustling though squalid hub of over 10,000 in just a few years, feeding hordes of miners into the gold fields.

Massachusetts, Cliff McCarthy notes, may well have sent more people there - almost 4,800 - than any other state. Close to 400 from the Valley have been documented so far. He believes there are many others from this region who were part of the Gold Rush and whose stories have yet to be uncovered.

That kind of dramatic change has always fascinated McCarthy, a longtime amateur historian who several years ago left a career as a mediation counselor to concentrate on history. As he writes in the introduction to the "California Dreamin' " report, the Gold Rush had a sweeping impact on the nation's immigration policies, the debate over slavery, the development of railroads, and even the country's self-image. It also established the pattern of settlement - swift and chaotic - that would follow when gold was discovered in other parts of the West such as Colorado and Montana.

"Within a few short years, America was bi-coastal, and our western boundary was no longer a vague, unknown frontier but a defined place inhabited by lots of people," including New Englanders, McCarthy writes. "It became the nation's 'manifest destiny' - even its duty - to fill the places in between with American ¿civilization.' "

After the PVHN formed a few years ago (see accompanying sidebar), members began searching for an initial project to work on, and McCarthy proposed the Gold Rush story to the group's steering committee, which liked the idea. McCarthy then won a small Mass Humanities grantto fund the research.

A natural starting point for the project came from items in the Stone House Museum's own collection: a pair of slender leather bags - likely made from deerskin - used for holding gold dust, as well as a small demonstration model of a gold washer, a sort of wooden cradle used to separate gold flakes from river silt. Both had belonged to Enoch Burnett, a Belchertown native who went to California but made his living primarily by selling equipment to other miners. He returned to Belchertown in 1851, working as a carpenter and serving in several roles in town government over the years.

"I was really interested in finding out who else from this area had made the journey out there," says McCarthy. "I was pretty confident we'd find some interesting stories - and I did. Each [person] has become like a family member to me."

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A lot of what McCarthy and other PVHN researchers discovered surprised them. "We all have this image of what the Gold Rush is about, but there are actually a lot of misconceptions," he says. "I thought it was mostly people from the lower end of the socio-economic scale who went out there, but that wasn't the case, at least from around here ... travelers [from the Valley] were often from the families of movers and shakers, and they tended to be very literate and educated. They left behind tons of letters, journals, memoirs.

"They were not people without a future," he adds. "Many came back - more than I had assumed - and a lot of them took up positions of stature in their communities ... it's possible the adventure made them more successful."

Just getting to California in the mid-1800s was an adventure. The overland route, from the edge of western U.S. settlement, crossed some 1,800 miles of still largely uncharted prairie, desert and mountain, where drought, storms, disease and battles with Indians could exact a fearsome toll. Early gold seekers also went by ship around treacherous Cape Horn at South America's southern tip, a journey that could take up to nine months, or they sailed to the eastern coast of Panama, slogged through jungle to the Pacific Coast, then waited for weeks - sometimes months - for another ship to take them up to California.

Elijah Fuller, one of the Deerfield residents who made the journey, described in one 1849 letter to his family how in crossing the Panama isthmus he had "been sick with the diareah and inflammation of the bowels some two weeks and was obliged to stop on the road," though he used the term "road" loosely: "From Cruces to Panama is 2.2 miles which took us from 8 a.m. to 7½ p.m. I will not undertake to describe the road for it is impossible to picture anything bad enough."

Once in California, where he arrived months later than he'd expected, Fuller, then in his early 20s, wrote home to his family over the next couple of years, his letters outlining the kinds of disappointments many gold seekers experienced: his failure to find "good diggins"; the violence, gambling and "intemperance" that reigned in mining camps; his thoughts of leaving "this cursed country" to return to farming life in the East. Fuller would come back to Deerfield in 1851.

Mining country also meted out rough justice. Josiah Richman of Buckland, who went to the gold fields in his early 20s and later settled in Shelburne Falls, wrote a memoir of his Western adventures in which he recalled that the penalty for stealing under $300 was "whipping and cutting off one ear and making it lawful for anyone to shoot [thieves] at sight if found within five miles of that camp." For stealing more than $300, Richman wrote, thieves "were only hung."

Some Valley prospectors found success in California in avenues such as farming, McCarthy notes, though others came back East with enough money to buy property or open a business. Primus Mason, a black laborer from Monson, bought real estate in Springfield, which later became the basis for the city's McKnight neighborhood. Mason's investments left him a wealthy man and philanthropist, McCarthy says, and the Mason Square section of Springfield is named for him.

Then there was Nathan Goodell of Belchertown, who formed a small mining company in 1849 at the age of 35 and headed to California by way of Panama. He became a prosperous carpenter and prominent architect in Sacramento, outlasting a fire, a number of floods and a cholera epidemic that devastated the boom town in its early years.

Goodell also witnessed the changes in technology introduced to wring more gold from the earth. The early days of crude mining were followed by the building of elaborate sluices, then the rerouting of whole sections of streams and rivers to get at their beds. Later, miners used hydraulic machines to blast apart hillsides with high-pressure streams of water, and deep mine shafts were dug and blasted into the ground - the last looking "like so many ground swallow holes, only on a larger scale," Goodell wrote.

"Before long, you needed significant capital for gold mining," says McCarthy. "The small-scale placer miners - that image we have of a solitary guy panning for gold along a river - were driven out, and companies took over."

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Putting the Gold Rush project together also helped solidify the connections among local historical societies and museums, McCarthy says. For instance, one person profiled is Thomas Chapman of Longmeadow, who spent several months in Sacramento during the Gold Rush serving as a physician and city council member before returning to Longmeadow, where he opened a medical practice. As it turned out, there was information about Chapman in museums in both Longmeadow and Springfield, but neither site was aware of the other's holdings, McCarthy says.

"This is a great example of crossing borders ... we put [the different collections] together and a more complete story emerged. We got a portrait of the doctor and his tin candle lantern from Longmeadow, and we got stereographic images from Springfield as well as letters from the Sacramento City Council."

McCarthy, who did the lion's share of the research, spent some of his time reading local newspapers from the era such as the Gazette. Many were full of accounts of people heading West. "They'd have stories almost every day of someone going out there in 1849, people selling their homes and worldly goods, or that so-and-so was putting together a company to go West.

"There were also ads for all kinds of gimmicks like 'scientific gold finders,' " McCarthy says with a laugh. "Inevitably people who actually bought that stuff chucked it ... a lot of them also took out insurance on their lives for fear they'd be killed, so there'd be something for their families. [Going West] was the great unknown, but they were willing to risk it."

PVHN researchers got help from the Public History Program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Three of its students took notes on many of the letters McCarthy discovered in area museums and historical sites. "Their help was essential to us," he says.

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Inevitably, researchers encountered some tragic stories - none more tragic, perhaps, than the sinking of the steamship S.S. Central America, which went down in September 1857 during a hurricane off the coast of the Carolinas. Of close to 600 passengers, many of them returning miners, 400 went to a watery grave. Also lost was perhaps 16 tons of California gold, then valued at about $1.6 million. The loss of that gold helped precipitate one of the 19th century's severe depressions, the Panic of 1857.

In an interesting footnote, between $100 million and $150 million (in today's dollars) of the gold was recovered in the 1980s by a ship and crew that pioneered deep-water recovery techniques, a story detailed in the book "Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea." Numerous insurance companies that had paid out damages in the 19th century for the lost gold claimed the discovered treasure, but after a lengthy court battle, the leader of the recovery expedition, Tommy Thompson of Ohio, and his company were awarded most of the gold in 1996.

One of the passengers on the Central America, which was sailing from Panama to New York City, was Enoch Hale Burt of Westhampton - he was distantly related to Nathan Hale, the noted Revolutionary War figure - who was returning to the family farm after three years in the gold fields. In a letter he'd written a year or so earlier, he had sounded a homesick note, imagining what his family was doing on a typical evening: "I can see you all in your respective places ... Augusta has just finished washing the dishes. Mother has taken her seat in the big rocking chair and is busily engaged in knitting ... William sits in the corner pondering in his mind what shall be his future course in life ..."

"The way he wrote that letter is so sweet - you just fall in love with the guy," says Barbara Pelissier, the head of the Westhampton Historical Society. "And to think he was to go down on that ship, it's a terrible ending."

Indeed, McCarthy says accounts of the sinking describe "an almost biblical scene," with miners despairing that their lust for gold has brought about God's wrath in the form of the hurricane. "They're unbuttoning their money vests, trying to throw them overboard, throwing their gold dust around, crying ¿This is going to take us to the bottom!' There's the irony of having to give up the main thing that had motivated them for so many years."

The Gold Rush project notes one final letter in the Enoch Burt saga, from an old Amherst College classmate of Burt's brother Francis, A.L. Clark. Clark, who was in New York after the sinking, had been asked to find information on Burt. Clark made some inquiries at the office of the shipping line and sent back a disheartening letter to his friend: "I ... hasten to let you know the result which is nothing encouraging, but rather to confirm your fears for the worst ... they suppose your brother was lost, they know nothing to make them think contrary."

For Pelissier, that kind of firsthand source, though sad, is what makes history come alive. "People will say they're not interested in history," she says. "But once they hear of a local connection they can relate to, they can get a better sense of the big picture that we're all part of."

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.