In ‘This Week in History,’ a young California adventurer seeks fortune during the Yukon gold rush but finds something more valuable.
By the time John Griffith Chaney was born in San Francisco in 1876, the California Gold Rush had been over for two decades. When gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1848—merely days before the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ceded 55 percent of Mexico’s lands to America—Americans rushed west for the opportunity to strike it rich. Those who showed up in 1849 were called “forty-niners”(hence the football team’s name), and there were a lot of them.
In 1848, there were about 1,000 people living in the small town of San Francisco. By the following year, there were approximately 25,000. By the time of Chaney’s birth, it was the country’s 10th largest city with more than 150,000 inhabitants. San Francisco had been built on a golden possibility.
‘Prince of the Oyster Pirates’
For Chaney, however, that possibility had been long sifted away. He was the illegitimate son of a wandering astrologer William Henry Chaney and a local music teacher and spiritualist, Flora Wellman. The young Chaney grew up in poverty and little formal education. He did, however, develop a love of reading, especially after moving to Oakland and discovering the Oakland Free Library. As a youth, he worked long hours in a cannery for 10 cents an hour. In a city built upon immediate and nearly unfathomable wealth, Chaney quickly noticed, as a teenager, the canyon-sized disparity between the rich and poor. He chose a less than legal method to make his money.
