The sesquicentennial of a tragic Odyssey
by Jack Neely
It's the sesquicentennial of the California Gold Rush. Think of Forty-niners and you'll probably picture illiterate, profane, whoring desert rats with tobacco-stained whiskers and battered hats who swarmed the saloons and dance halls of northern California by the thousands in 1849: desperadoes who had failed in eastern business and polite society. You don't necessarily think of Hugh Brown Heiskell.
But this Knoxville Presbyterian stands to become one of the best known of all the '49ers, and all because he kept a diary. Edited and introduced by West Virginia scholar Edward Steel, A Forty-niner From Tennessee (UT Press) is a fascinating travelogue across wild America. Heiskell's vivid account exudes youthful enthusiasm and confidence, wry humor and a scientific curiosity. It's a great read; but literary critics would say there's a problem with this American narrative. There's no foreshadowing of its sudden, tragic ending.
Born in Knoxville, Hugh was a local favorite, known hereabouts as "an excellent and interesting young man." His dad was Frederick Heiskell, the wealthy planter, sometime journalist, and politician. Once Tennessee's most dynamic publisher, the elder Heiskell had even published the state's first novel—a wide-roving gothic romance—as well as other literary books of poetry and intellectual essays of a sort that might have seemed unnecessary in a town with dirt streets.
Hugh was just a boy when the Heiskells moved into a brick mansion west of town. Long known as Statesview, it still stands on a ridge alongside Peters Road. It doesn't look like the sort of place that would breed '49ers.
When Frederick Heiskell went to Nashville to take his seat in the Legislature, he left Hugh in charge of the plantation. In that role, Hugh was trustworthy, but bored. He had attended the university on the Hill for a while, but apparently didn't graduate. He studied law for a while, but dropped it. "Farmers don't often dream," he once wrote. "Their sleep is too sound." Perhaps thinking of his dad's literary ventures, Hugh remarked that following a plow around all day was "anything but poetry."
In 1849, Hugh was 23, and at loose ends. "My genius certainly does not lie in driving oxen," he'd later write, "nor have I as yet been able to find in what it does lie." To a young man with dreams, Knoxville could seem a dreary place in 1849, stuck between the mountains without gold or even a railroad, connected to the outside world mainly by the few sternwheelers that chugged up and down the river.
When word came across the plains about sudden gold in California, Hugh Heiskell didn't have to think it over for long. Some friends and relatives from Monroe County were going over, and he was, too. He told his family he'd be back in a year or two.
It was 150 years ago this month that Hugh Heiskell left the town where he'd spent his entire life, probably on the steamship Cassandra. He eventually joined a wagon convoy dominated by some of his Monroe County cousins.
"We have nine, just the right sort of fellows," he wrote. Among them were his cousin Tyler Heiskell—Hugh called him "Tyle"—and a couple of his college chums from Emory & Henry. Later they hooked up with about 30 more, a motley band that included Missourians, immigrants, some slaves, even a couple of free blacks.
Compared to most transcontinental pilgrims, they had a remarkably pleasant journey. In his diary, Heiskell exults in the vistas and tastes of the wild west. "It is a most beautiful night...Lightning is playing in the east through a cloud that has gathered there, its wavering light contrasting with the steady calm light of the stars." Heiskell wrote of how they spent their evenings "singing, laughing, talking." He made fun of a pretentious Monroe Countian named Brown who pretended to know more about Lord Byron than he did. They enjoyed a lemon-flavored mineral water bottled at some Rocky Mountain springs, claiming it was "better than the best soda fount in America."
They seemed to encounter more humor than hardship. An Indian showed up in camp and gestured that he'd deliver them an antelope in exchange for a checked shirt.
Even their setbacks are darkly comic. One paragraph opens, "This morning Dr. White shot Dr. Thompson's horse." (It made Dr. Thompson angry, of course, but good Dr. White claimed the horse was "vicious.")
Another traveler named John Campbell accidentally shot his dog, mistaking it for a wolf. Disgusted, his own slaves apparently abandoned him. When Heiskell found Campbell lying unconscious alongside a dead horse, he took pity on the jilted slave owner and loaded him into a wagon. While he recovered, sitting by the fire, Campbell was hit in the ribs by an Indian sniper's arrow. He recovered, but the incident would be the one recalled in most detail by the survivors.
They made it over the treacherous Sierra Nevada; Heiskell arrived in California without even tearing his clothes, including his silk cravat. They found a mining camp in the Sacramento Valley and began to build a cabin. They'd hardly arrived before Hugh Heiskell fell ill with an unnamed disease that may have been cholera. Three weeks later, on November 16, 1849, the young Knoxvillian died.
Heiskell's Knoxville family grieved the loss of the favorite son who had mailed them pressed flowers. His mother died less than two years after getting the news.
"Tyle" Heiskell survived the disease, but suffered some homesickness. "I would rather see a Knoxville paper than find an ounce of gold," he wrote in 1850. But he found some gold anyway, and by 1856, Tyler Heiskell was elected to the California legislature. He died four decades later, a Californian.
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