Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [64]
And so, until swift new California Clippers began winging gold hunters around the tip of South America, Yerba Buena Cove (the city’s major anchorage) filled up with the hulks of unwanted ships. As early as 1851, a majority of the nearly eight hundred ships in the cove were derelicts. The abandoned ships were so thick, in fact, that when the city really began pushing at the boundaries, stretching out over the bay on increasingly elaborate platforms, nobody bothered to move the abandoned boats—they just poured in sand until the hulls were effectively sitting on dry land. Later someone might build a superstructure on the deck and call it a hotel, or throw in an oven and open a restaurant. Ships became jails, theaters, homes.10 Today the five blocks of infill between the bay and the old San Francisco shoreline still hold the remains of dozens of Gold Rush-era ships; sometimes a transit tunnel or the foundation of a new office building will run smack into one, and the world gets to look again at the Rome or the Lydia or the William Gray.
Still, beyond the city the old shoreline more or less held. Though farmers had begun diking the upper freshwater marshes, wetlands still spread for hundreds of square miles. The immediate problem was not yet infill, but silt that was beginning to smother the oyster holding pens—silt sent down to the bay by the very prospectors who thought that a plate of fried bay oysters with bacon and eggs was the height of luxury.
Much of the Gold Rush consisted of guys figuring out increasingly efficient (and increasingly destructive) ways of washing gold out of riverside gravel and dirt. Though the typical image of a ’49er is that of a rugged individualist kneeling beside a stream with a wide pan, that’s really accurate only for the first months of the rush. Squatting on the stream banks soon gave the prospectors ruggedly thrown-out backs and individually blasted knees; most detested their pans, and ditched them as soon as they could. By the time Twain came to California, they were using cast-iron nozzles to blast away entire hillsides—undercutting bluffs by as much as three hundred feet, then sluicing out the collapsed gravel and sand. When it came to tearing up the landscape, the move from washbasins to hydraulic mining was like switching from trained ants to giant, angry boars. And the unromantic truth is that there were a lot more of the boars, for a lot longer.
But the hills, of course, did not simply vanish. They washed downstream. All in all, the prospectors blasted out some 1.5 billion cubic yards of sand and gravel and soil. To put it in perspective, the largest Egyptian pyramid is about 2.5 million cubic yards; if you made a pyramid out of all the washed-out Gold Rush dirt, it would be a mile on every side and another mile to the top, utterly dwarfing the ones at Giza.
Much of this enormous pile of sludge was full of mercury, which prospectors used to separate gold from earth (mercury could be made into an amalgam with the specks of gold, then separated out at leisure). Today the mercury might charitably be termed a problem. Back then, although the phrase “mad as a hatter” had been coined to describe people losing their minds from the mercury used to make hats, prospectors used the metal blithely and without much fear of consequence (Twain himself got sick during his short week in the quartz mill, possibly from exposure to the “quantity of quicksilver” kept on hand).
But at the time people worried less about mercury than about the hyperspeed erosion destroying