Survivalists, Preppers, and the Forty-Niners

Apple Hill, California, was an annual field trip for our family when our children were young.  We usually went on Nevada Day, a state holiday in Nevada, when all the California kids are in school, and the Nevada kids are off (even if you homeschool, your children know when the other kids are off and think they need the day off too).

In the course of venturing from stand to stand to store, we also hit a little museum every couple of years.  We had already been to the Donner Party Museum in Truckee, just a couple of hours away.  Contrary to popular belief, the Donner Party and their companions weren't headed to California in pursuit of gold, but rather for a more healthful and milder climate, just as many other Americans were doing at the time.  Some of those flocking to California were going to continue their trade in farming and raising crops and brought nursery stock with them.

At the museum, we learned about the first orchards and then the coming of the Forty-Niners, those who came to seek their fortune in the precious yellow flakes and nuggets in the mountains and streams.  The orchardists, however, didn't get distracted by the excitement of the goldfields; they kept doing what they set out to do.


Anyway, the Gold Rush begins, demand for fresh food skyrockets, and enterprising individuals profit.  Eggs, regular chicken eggs, were selling for fifty cents to a dollar each in San Francisco.  How could the orchardists' make their money?  Demand for fresh fruit was high, but a good harvest wasn't necessarily assured.  Remember, the orchardists haven't been there all that long; they were still learning about their new climate and challenges, and in Apple Hill in particular, each location has its own microclimate.  With the farmers knowing the vagaries of the weather could devastate an entire orchard with a late frost, and the miners knowing that fresh fruit was tough to come by, a new kind of product came on the market.

Instead of selling fruit, the growers turned to selling the blossoms.  Each was so precious.  The miners bought the individual flowers, wrote their name on a paper bag, and tied that paper bag around the blossom after it was pollinated.  Whether fruit was produced was irrelevant.  The orchardists adapted to the situation and fared well regardless of the harvest.  Only the successful miners bought the fresh fruit.

The fruit growers didn't necessarily know they were preparing for the Gold Rush.  They had just seen an opportunity in an area where land was cheap and the climate was ideal.  They made the trek or crossed the ocean with their precious little fruit trees and started their orchards and their new lives.  The Forty-Niners relocated, or bugged out (the Civil War was still a decade away, but the rhetoric even then was reaching a fever pitch), by choice, to what at that time was a rugged, remote area with very little in the way of supplies.  What supplies were available were overpriced, sometimes drastically.

However, among all those budding miners rushing make their fortunes in the goldfields, there were also a few enterprising individuals who recognized mining the miners' pockets would prove more lucrative and secure. They identified a basic human need, one they could fulfill, and fulfill well.  And get paid for.

Those women could cook.

Immediately upon arriving in the goldfields, the husband went off to mine.  And when he returned in the evening, he found his wife feeding dinner to twenty men.  That was the start of the Wilson family in the hotel and restaurant business.  When fires came through, they started over and repeated the success.  And their story isn't all that unique.

So what do the Forty-Niners have to do with survivalists and preppers?  The vast majority of the Forty-Niners were men.  They were survivalists.  They were obsessed with a very narrow goal--striking the Mother Lode, making their fortune.  They bought into the hype printed in the newspapers at home, papers written with the goal of selling papers.  It didn't matter if what was printed was true or accurate.  They made their rough plans based on things they read in the newspaper or talked about at the general store.  Everyone else was doing the same, so it had to be the right thing, right?

Even in their newly chosen field of endeavor, they didn't research well.  They didn't know where to stake a claim for the best panning or mining.  Or they were so obsessed with finding nuggets that they threw away the gold dust that would have built a bank account just as well.  Because they were going to be able to make it based on sheer determination and their inherent knowledge.

Unfortunately, like most men of the time, they weren't well-equipped with basic life skills.  That had always been women's work.  They couldn't cook.  They had no understanding (or concern for) basic hygiene.  They couldn't or wouldn't take the time to do their laundry, so they didn't do it.  And they had a massive mortality rate.  Twenty percent were dead within six months.

Like the Forty-Niners, many survivalists plan on going it alone.  Whereas the Forty-Niners left their families physically behind over two-thousand miles away, today we have a disposable society where cut and paste applies just as much to family relationships as it does to moving text in word processing programs.  Families are never begun or can be casually left behind.  Their narrow focus on the gold-digging meant they didn't consider preparing other facets of life well.

A minimal number of the early white settlers of the gold country could be considered preppers.  They thrived.  They brought their wives and children.  They built hotels and restaurants.  They were able to do this because they had their family, their small community.  They had skills and developed those skills well and used them every day.  Those ladies at the foundation of the successful hotels that sprang up in gold country?  They didn't begin by offering French cuisine and fine Italian dining.  They started by providing simple home-cooked meals and fruit pies.  And they had learned how to make them as young girls and perfected their craft over the years.  Without a cookbook or a regular kitchen.  They knew their products so well that they could adapt to different conditions, including the changes in humidity and altitude that most certainly affected their baking.  A lot of armchair survivalists, and most Americans, can't cook without a microwave.  Oh, I forgot.  The survivalists will be happy living on berries and pine needles.

The lessons are there.  Sadly, as history shows us time and again, only a few will learn.

Links to related posts:
Food Storage and Learning from History
The Minnesota Starvation Experiment
Balkan War Observations and Preparing for CW2 Here
More Food Storage and Learning from History
No Meat, No Ammo, No Problem

For further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luzena_Wilson
http://www.californiahistory.com/authors3.html#anchor1582214

24 october 2019