Jim Bradshaw: They traveled from Franklin to the 'new El Dorado'

The famous California gold rush in 1849 was caused by dreams of vast fortunes made by just wandering around and picking up nuggets — something like picking up pecans in the fall. Gold fever led thousands of people to the supposed “new El Dorado,” and the malady struck dozens of people from south Louisiana.

The Planter’s Banner, published in Franklin recorded on March 15, 1849, “Quite a number of the citizens of this parish started for California on Tuesday last. … They are a hardy, energetic set of fellows, and will be sure to see the diggings in due time.”

One of them was Robert Wilson, who wrote to the Franklin newspaper several weeks later from Chagres, in what is now Panama, to describe his fellow passengers and the first half of their voyage.

It took 23 days for the schooner W. H. Hazard to sail from New Orleans to Chagres, carrying passengers who, Wilson wrote, “appear to be inspired with a love for adventure, and a noble resolve to take advantage of the favorable opportunity afforded them.”

His fellow fortune hunters, he said, “are all, with very few exceptions, men of respectability, intelligence, and enterprise.” He said the list included “thirteen merchants and traders, nine carpenters, six clerks, five doctors, five farmers, five bakers, three coopers, three bricklayers, two engineers, two steamboat captains, two editors, one cabinet maker, one tinner, one apothecary, one miller, one confectioner, one lawyer, and one tailor,” among others. A group of men from Illinois had pooled their resources, formed a corporation, and agreed to share whatever riches they found.

Shipmates from south Louisiana included Robert S. Wooding, James L. Prouty, John K. Smith, James F. Nash, Dr. Gideon Woodward, John Wilson, Alfred Douglass, and Lewis Davis.

William Rabe sold his drug store and everything else he owned in Franklin and sailed a few months later. He wrote to the newspaper from San Francisco, and apparently had the good sense to open a business supplying the gold hunters, rather than prospecting himself.

He said his business was “a fair average” of others in a town that was “growing with a rapidity unparalleled in the history of the world. … To take in $200 a day is to us a small matter, $500 a day is pretty good, and $1,000 a day is a fine business.

“Our regular expenses are $2,000 per month … [and] there is some left when the cash is balanced, to lay up for old age.”

Not everyone fared so well. Simeon Patout, scion of the wealthy sugar family, traveled on a ship so crowded that “each passenger was allowed only fourteen inches wide by six feet long, and one had to crawl on all fours to reach his bed for there was less than four feet [in height] between decks.”

When he got to San Francisco, he wrote in a letter home, he found that it was very expensive to get to the gold fields and that he was running short of money. He said he had hopes of going to work in a store, but it was still under construction and he would have to wait to see if he would be hired.

It seems that he wasn’t. According to a family account, he had a recurrence of an illness, possibly yellow fever, he’d first experienced aboard his crammed ship, and that was so prevalent among passengers crossing Central American that it became known as Panama Fever.

According to that account, he recovered, at least partially, from the illness and tried to get back to Louisiana in the early fall of 1849, this time traveling overland. The family traced him as far as Amarillo, Texas, but no farther.

He was never heard from again.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.