[...] I have no interest in writing a suburban California survival memoir, either, and I write about myself like a bad bowler anyway, always headed straight for the gutters of historical context rather than for the pins of personal revelation.

“The children of California shall be our children,” Leland Stanford told his wife, Jane, when they decided to build Palo Alto. It’s a grandiose claim, but as applied to me it’s not as inaccurate as I’d prefer. History doesn’t stay put: It works itself under your skin in fragments like shrapnel; it steals into your bloodstream like an infection. I’m a product of my environment, and I’m shot through with its symptoms. If that experience is to be useful rather than obfuscating, then it’s as a place to start, a set of intersections between biography and history.

The rush called into being a new creature: the California engineer, master of water, stone, and labor. These frontier scientists were a superior, more evolved form of the panner, still entrepreneurial (and often motivated by an equity share in the project rather than a wage) but also dependable and often college-educated. California exported these men to English-speaking colonies, from the Hawaiian Islands to British-occupied India and Palestine to South Africa and Australia to foreign-owned mines in South America and East Asia. There they replicated their Golden State experience, turning the water against the land and subordinating the nonwhite laboring populations. California’s cowboy scientists helped transform the colonies for commodity agriculture and the societies for white capitalist rule, increasing the profitability and therefore the plausibility of colonial projects. As Jessica Teisch observes in her book Engineering Nature: Water, Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise, the “California model” was so adaptable because it reformatted the relationships between capital, labor, and the environment according to a generic formula: Anglos rule; all natives are Indians; all land and water is just gold waiting to happen. Geopolitics took on the character of the gold rush, as European colonial powers engaged in competitive scrambles for colonial territory in sub-Saharan Africa and China.

When the Quicksilver Mining Company took over at New Almaden, workers quickly realized they faced a new, worse order. The American owners took a holistic orientation toward the workers, extending the mine’s control over their lives. Quicksilver instituted a company store, monopolizing commerce in “Spanishtown” and jacking up prices for new, inferior goods. The owners claimed title to everything on company land, including the homes workers built for themselves and even the firewood they were accustomed to harvesting for use and sale. Quicksilver banned independent peddlers, merchants, and water carriers, as well as Mexican-run taverns and restaurants. In their place, a company saloon served expensive rotgut. The new mine owners changed the compensation metric to one they controlled and started paying monthly instead of biweekly like the Brits had. Real wages fell, and workers ended up in perpetual debt, borrowing to pay for essentials such as food and funerals. By 1865, New Almaden’s Mexican laborers had had enough of U.S. capitalism, and at least 600 of them (along with some white coworkers) halted production and issued a set of reform demands. The Quicksilver company petitioned the genocidal state militia, which in turn petitioned the Northern California regiment of the Union Army, which, having finished defeating slavery, came to San Jose to intimidate the state’s largest Mexican-American community back into the mine. What had been a relative haven for the state’s Spanish-speaking population during the war and gold rush years became a trap. As much as anywhere this was the birthplace of the Mexican proletariat, forged in contrast and service to the new white owners of California.

At New Almaden we can see the steps in the proletarianization dance: the alienation of indigenous and peasant populations from the land, the formal establishment of white racial rule, scientific management continually optimizing for maximum profits, looming soldiers. It all adds up to a laboring class with no legal way to reproduce their lives except to sell themselves hour by hour to an employer, on the employer’s terms.ii Anglo-American settlers found themselves correspondingly enfranchised, whether squatting on land until the government recognized their claims or getting grants legitimately by joining a militia gang and murdering Indians on the state’s behalf. California’s agriculture was ranch-based, with amber waves of grain and large herds of cattle, so there was no significant yeoman tradition. Instead, California smallholders saw their titles as speculative investments that they could sell or rent to planters and other capitalists, less territory than an increasingly valuable entry in the expanding U.S. property register. After the Homestead Act, for example, mill owners encouraged their employees to register timber claims and then lease them to the company. That didn’t always work out so great for the small speculators, as I’ll explain in the following chapter, but they weren’t wrong about the land’s potential value. It soon came to outshine even the gold.

After paying out to the easterners and Europeans who helped finance the rush of ’49, the relatively small California capitalists were looking for new opportunities. They found a big one in Nevada with the Comstock Lode’s first hit, in 1859, an exploding sequence of silver bonanzas to end all silver bonanzas that helped codify the membership of the West Coast aristocracy and its important institutions. What few cattle operations were left over from the Mexican period failed frequently in the 1860s in the face of natural disasters and falling prices, which aided the squatters and their U.S. government in efforts to transfer land claims to the Anglos. Wheat boomed, along with oats to power the horses and other draft animals who dragged the farm equipment. Santa Clara Valley farmers could rely on natural aquifers, which allowed them to skip the costly irrigation systems that much of the rest of the state required. Lucky for California’s remaining planters, there was still some money on the West Coast—after all, the state’s big industry was money mining. The Bank of California opened in 1864 as the nation’s first commercial bank, successfully investing deposits in Comstock silver claims and reinvesting in California agriculture. The state now had a new capitalist class to mirror its new working class, and they doubled down on commodity crops, plowing mining money into monoculture (mostly grains, but also wine grapes) and triggering boom-and-bust cycles. By the end of the 1860s, California agriculture topped gold in terms of both employment and output value. In only 20 years the gold rush had started, finished, and transitioned the state to a new economic foundation.

The point of this story isn’t that Amadeo Giannini was a bad man because he profited from stolen land. If we’re weighing hearts, his doesn’t seem to have been so bad unless you were a complacent banker, a forgivable antagonistic tendency if ever there was one. The point isn’t even that Johann Sutter and John Frémont were bad men because they stole and enslaved, though they were and it’s worth saying so. The point is that the series of plagues visited upon California in the second half of the nineteenth century took the form of men, and we can see the character of the tendencies that shaped the state (and in turn, the world) reflected in the men seized by them.

The gold rush turned Sutter’s bell with its generic, money days into a hegemonic order, but order needs actors and Anglo California needed these men, or men like them. Gold called out to the settlers from Sutter’s bell, begging them to find the shining flakes and kill anyone who got in the way, to do it more and faster and on a bigger scale until there was more gold to be made in some other way. The state’s farms and cities and banks called out for discipline, for an ambitious outsider unbeholden to the finance elite to whip everyone into rational shape. Amadeo Pietro Giannini filled the bill, but if after watching his father bleed out in front of him he had instead dedicated his life to stitching wounds, California would have found another such outsider.

What interests me is not so much the personal qualities of the men and women in this history but how capitalism has made use of them. To think about life this way is not to surrender to predetermination; only by understanding how we’re made use of can we start to distinguish our selves from our situations. How can you know what you want or feel or think—who you are—if you don’t know which way history’s marionette strings are tugging? In the following pages you’ll meet characters who find ways to tug back, who pit themselves against the way things are and come to personify the system’s self-destructive countertendencies. People aren’t puppets, and to pull a person is to create the conditions for rebellion. Maybe we’re more like butterflies, pinned live and wriggling onto history’s collage.

The difference between the Central Pacific cabal and all the other fly-by-night railroad concerns that collapsed in the panic was not that the Sacramento shopkeepers were financially scrupulous. They were at least as overleveraged as their peers; their books were obvious bullshit; and they had taken advantage of the exact same scams that felled the Union Pacific’s directors the year before, in the Crédit Mobilier scandal. Rather, the difference was that they persuaded their bankers to persuade their bankers to play it cool. With the interested parties denying anything was amiss, the Associates were in place to snatch up failed lines at a discount. For capitalists at the end of the nineteenth century, it paid—as it has ever since—to have several corporate shells to switch between, just in case. They funneled money into the construction of their Southern Pacific line, another Associates-controlled railroad that subsumed the Central, earning the budding monopoly the nickname the Combine.

“Believe this, young man,” exclaimed Shelgrim, laying a thick powerful forefinger on the table to emphasise his words, “try to believe this—to begin with—THAT RAILROADS BUILD THEMSELVES. Where there is a demand sooner or later there will be a supply. Mr. Derrick, does he grow his wheat? The Wheat grows itself. What does he count for? Does he supply the force? What do I count for? Do I build the Railroad? You are dealing with forces, young man, when you speak of Wheat and the Railroads, not with men. There is the Wheat, the supply. It must be carried to feed the People. There is the demand. The Wheat is one force, the Railroad, another, and there is the law that governs them—supply and demand. Men have only little to do in the whole business. Complications may arise, conditions that bear hard on the individual—crush him maybe—BUT THE WHEAT WILL BE CARRIED TO FEED THE PEOPLE as inevitably as it will grow. If you want to fasten the blame of the affair at Los Muertos on any one person, you will make a mistake. Blame conditions, not men.”