The Gold Rush Letters of E. Allen Grosh and Hosea B. Grosh

Introduction

a 1 b ab introduction “Ho! for the Mountains!” With those exuberant words, the Grosh brothers expressed their innocent dream of a great quest that would take them far from home. Theirs was a nineteenth-century incarnation of a tale as old as humanity : the pursuit of gold in a distant land. As Philadelphia faded from view in the wake of their ship, imagination transformed into reality. For them what was an intimate, personal odyssey would eventually become something they could not anticipate: their letters, which span nearly eight years, captured a changing America and gave voice to tidal forces that would revolutionize a continent. Ethan Allen and Hosea Ballou Grosh were twenty-four and twenty-two years old, respectively, when the earthshaking news of gold in California reached them in Pennsylvania. The young men were not to be contained. Their lives had been small, and they had yet to travel in any significant way. “The sea!” Allen exclaimed in March 1849. “Oh it is a glorious sight! . . . How much have we lost by not seeing it before.” It was only the first of many eye-openers as the sons of the East journeyed to the West. With their trans-Mexico trek, they added a new chapter to the adventure, and although illness tested the limits of their endurance, the horizon continued to expand. Finally arriving in California, they could revel in the phrase that they had “seen the elephant,” as people said at the time; that is, they experienced for themselves the great western migration spurred by the Gold Rush during the nineteenth century. A sense of excitement pervades the early letters, as might be expected. Youth, adventure, and the prospect of wealth fueled an exhilarating optimism that resonated among those who traveled to this new world. Nevertheless, while the wistful images of this chapter in the nation’s past are iconic, reality was more complex, and many failed to thrive. Like countless others, the brothers never realized their dream of wealth. Life can be and often is harsh, and Allen and Hosea serve to remind those who would view the past through a romantic lens that a phenomenon like the Gold Rush included many stories. Too often tragedy and disappointment were dominant themes. 2 a gold rush letters of the grosh brothers whether relaying the thrill of travel and the hope of riches or dealing with the disappointment of persistent bad luck, the brothers were in a position to describe the full gamut of the western experience in the 1850s. Fortunately, Allen and Hosea were educated, and they were devoted to their extended family, which remained in Pennsylvania. They possessed, consequently , the right inspiration and resources to describe their life on the West Coast. Once in California, the brothers wrote extensively about their new home. Besides covering details of their trip, their eighty-two letters include a wealth of observations about mining, politics, the economy, and smaller topics such as how long it took for correspondence to reach them from Pennsylvania . They contracted many ailments and tried numerous remedies, they were attacked by Native Americans, and they considered and pursued various ways to become wealthy. As a result of all this, the Grosh letters record diverse observations not only about important historical events, but also about North American society and culture in the 1850s. Although their primary preoccupation was mining, their letters address a wide variety of topics that could capture the attention of young American men at the time. In 1853 Allen and Hosea traversed the Sierra Nevada and found that silver—not just the gold that attracted early prospectors—enriched the western Great Basin.1 First mentioned in a letter in 1855, that discovery earned the brothers a permanent place in the lore of the mining West, keeping their story alive for the next century and a half. The identification of silver helped inspire the preservation of the Grosh letters, but as it turns out, again, the value of the correspondence is more in the form of general observations than in the recordation of specific claims. As a result of three trips into this area, their letters provide some of the earliest firsthand accounts of Gold Canyon and what would become known as the Comstock Mining District. With their deaths, the tragic conclusion of their last sojourn into the Great Basin completes a story that at times reads more like literature than correspondence. however the grosh story is framed, Allen and Hosea were, first of all...