Striking Gold

Yesterday was the 105th birthday of James Wilson Marshall.

Who was he? you say. And why should I care?

James Wilson Marshall

As you may or may not know, I am the senior docent at the James Wilson Marshall house, the headquarters of the Lambertville Historical Society. Nearly every Saturday between Shad Fest (the last weekend in April, or Malice Domestic weekend, for those of you who follow the mystery fiction circuit) and House Tour Sunday (October 18 this year, sometimes later) I can be found at the Marshall House between one and four in the afternoon, shooting the breeze about James Wilson Marshall, the California Gold Rush, Lambertville history, and whatever other topic the visiting tourists feel like discussing. So I'm sort of an expert on Mr. Marshall. Who was he, then? Mainly he was the man who discovered the first gold in California, back in 1848. You've heard of Sutter's mill. Marshall was building the mill for Sutter when he found the gold.

John Sutter

You probably didn't know that it was a Jersey boy who started the California gold rush. Little James came to Lambertville (then known as Coryell's Ferry) at the age of six, in 1816, when his father built the house on Bridge Street and set up to be a wheelwright and wagon maker. When he was fifteen he had a bit of unpleasantness with the old man that caused him to leave the house, vowing never to return while his father lived. When he was 24 his father died, and he came home to help his mother sell the business, since he hadn't learned it himself and there were no other sons. Then he went west, moving by stages to California, which was part of Mexico. Long story short, he fell in with Captain John Sutter, the Swiss national who became a Mexican citizen in order to buy obscene quantities of land from the Mexicans. After the war with Mexico Captain Sutter sent James Marshall and a crew into the hills to build the mill, and there he found the gold in the river. He changed the course of American history.

I've been writing historical fiction for a number of years now. People ask me sometimes why I don't write about the gold rush. Here's the thing. I've read a lot about it, I continue to read a lot about it, and I have yet to find anybody involved in those times and events that I like well enough to sit down with for the six or eight months it takes to write a book. Some of these people I actively detest. Captain John Sutter comes to mind. To begin with, he abandoned his wife and five children in Switzerland, leaving them in debt, taking enough money with him to buy a big piece of of California, and proceeded to enslave all the Indians he found on his newly-purchased land. He bought and sold little Indian children. After the gold was discovered, the rough, tough forty-niner claim jumpers ran him off his holdings. He lost everything, and it couldn't happen to a nicer fella, in my opinion.

John Charles Frémont

Marshall was a better person than John Sutter, though he drank all the time and had trouble getting along with other people. It's said that children liked him. It's said that he risked his own life defending the Indians from attacks by rampaging forty-niners. So he may have been a good guy, but I'm sorry, I can't warm up to a habitual drunkard.

Jessie Frémont

John Charles Frémont to me is the most interesting figure in the California gold rush days, intrepid explorer, impetuous military man, failed politician. Some of the deeds he did as a military man were so base that the rumor of them later disqualified him for public office. He made a huge fortune in the gold rush by virtue of owning seventy acres of gold-rich land and sharing the proceeds with the men he set to digging on it, but eventually his workers figured out that they didn't have to give him a share at all. I think I like him because his wife loved him so. He married Senator Thomas Hart Benton's daughter Jessie. She followed him to California, sailing to Panama, crossing the isthmus through fever-ridden jungles, sailing up the west coast to San Francisco to be with her man.

The stories are worth telling. I just don't want to tell them, not right now, when I'm deeply in love with other historical figures, people in other times that I'm working into a novel. Maybe I'll write about the gold rush later, when I finish the spy thriller.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

WoooOoooo…

It's Friday the Thirteenth, folks, and tonight the moon will be full. Time for ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night. In honor of this rare concatenation (next time it happens will be 2049; last time was October 13, 2000), I thought maybe I'd tell some ghost stories.

The first story is a non-ghost story. As you may know, I serve as a docent at the Marshall House here in Lambertville, the childhood home of James Marshall, who found the first gold in California and started the California Gold Rush of 1849. I could go on and on about his life and work, and I frequently do in the course of my docent gig, but the main thing that strikes me about James Marshall is how badly he got along with his father, Phillip Marshall. Both of them, as near as I can determine, were grumpy and ill-tempered, just the sort of people who might be expected to haunt a house after they've passed over.

And yet the Marshall House is free of haunts. (Possibly this makes it unique among buildings in Lambertville.) Why is this? I maintain that it's a result of having been occupied for eighty years by Sisters of Mercy, who taught in the old stone parochial school that used to be out behind the house. They prayed all the spirits away, you see. Religious structures generally tend to be free of ghosties. Here's a sign in the churchyard of St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Charleston. It says, "The only ghost at St. Phillip's is the Holy Ghost. Join us for worship Sundays 8:15 and 10:30, Wednesday 6 P.M …and learn about the Trinity including the Holy Ghost." Evidently they are troubled by tourists tramping about their old graveyard in search of apparitions.

When our tourists here in Lambertville inquire about ghosts they often get to chatting about their own ghosts. You would be surprised how many people have resident ghosts in their homes. The tales they tell me are oddly similar. Their ghosts like to hang out with the family. Sometimes they get jealous of visitors and break things, shelves full of old china and glass. Sometimes they warn people of impending disaster, trees about to fall on the children's bedrooms and the like. Those are the friendly ones. Then there are the ghosts who weep all the time, loudly, inconsolably, completely self-absorbed. You never see them, you just hear them through the wall. I had a friend who said she never lived anywhere that wasn't haunted. She used to hear weeping and screams. Makes you wonder.

This may be a feature of the craze for buying new houses. Get a house younger than ten years old and you'll have to haunt it yourself. Also you won't need to replace the roof, furnace, wiring, or plumbing, but that's another issue. I have to wonder where all these new houses are going to be built. In graveyards, maybe, when the rest of the land runs out. Then you'll see some haunts.

I like an old house. I don't see or hear ghosts, myself, and as far as I know no ghost has ever attacked my crockery. I do sense a difference, when I walk into a place, between a brand new structure empty of old vibrations and a place where other people have lived.

When you sell your old house you have to tell the buyer if it's famously haunted, like the Amityville Horror house. It's an official stigma, like people dying or murdering each other in the house. But if you have just one or two quiet, friendly little ghosts I don't believe you need to declare them. Caveat emptor, after all. Some say my attic is haunted; a woman who lived here happily for ten years says it is not. My glasses are so dirty that I can't see live people, let alone haunts, and the only thing I hear is my neighbors. So maybe yes, maybe no. Anyway it isn't for sale.

© 2014 Kate Gallison

The Marshall House

The Marshall House

What I do on weekends is serve as a docent at the Marshall House, which is the childhood home of James Wilson Marshall, the first person to discover gold in California. The house is a museum now. People stop in, tourists and locals too, between one and four on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. When they show up I say, "Welcome to the Marshall House," and spin stories about Mr. Marshall, the gold rush, the house, which was used as a convent for many years by St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church, and the valiant Mrs. Alice Narducci, who saved it from destruction when the church had no more use for it.

On days when nobody stops in I go mad with boredom.

The Parlor

"I'm glad you came by," I said to a young girl and her father on Sunday. "I was going mad with boredom." In fact I had gone so far as to boot up the Historical Society computer and play a couple of games of spider solitaire. Before that I swept the plaster crumbs out of the hall where the water is getting in through the bricks and rotting it out, and before that I read some of the Historical Society's books on local history, and before that I took a picture of the parlor.

As they were getting ready to leave the girl said, "You're English, aren't you?"

"Nope. I'm American. I was born in Philadelphia."

"But you speak as if you were English. 'Mad with boredom.'"

"Ah. That. I'm a writer," I said.

It seems to explain a lot when I tell people I'm a writer. I can get away with all kinds of things.

Kate Gallison