According to writing courses, novels need an “inciting event” – the thing that happens, after which nothing will be the same for the characters. I’m not sure how far I agree with this: life seems to be a chain of events, each pushing the next thing to happen.
One book I read about how to structure a novel (I’m prone to reading these, to avoid actually writing) says the inciting incident should happen a few chapters in, having established place and character. I’m even less convinced by this advice. If there is an inciting moment in Under A Gilded Sky, it’s on page one, when Lex is brought into Ginny’s home. And in To The Wild Horizon, the incident happens just before the book starts, when Grace shoots her landlord.
For book three, my inciting incident is the moment Grace and James Randolph hear that gold has been discovered in California. From reading the Age of Gold, by H.W. Brands, it seemed that news was first reported in the California Star, a newspaper owned by Mr. Samuel Brannan, a Mormon who had a general store in Sacramento (or New Helvetia as it was then). The story goes that Brannan walked the streets of San Francisco, with a jar of gold in his hand, telling everyone about the discovery – knowing that his retail business would thrive.
The editor of the California Star bemoaned the “sordid cry of Gold! GOLD!! GOLD!!! while the field is left half planted, the house half built.” The editorial ended by apologizing that this would be the last edition of the paper, as everyone working for it had left for the gold-fields. I loved this, and went in search of the primary source, in hope of quoting it in my ‘inciting incident’.
And then I discovered a strange thing.
The California Star article was published on May 29, 1848, four months after the discovery of gold on the American River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Surely this can’t have been when the news first broke?
I dug deeper and found that the first account of the gold-find was published in a weekly newspaper, The Californian, on March 15, 1848.
I returned to the archives (the California Digital Newspaper Collection, at the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research), and was delighted to find the exact edition.
And here things got even stranger.
I expected it to be front-page news. The discovery of gold in California changed the course of history. And yet the front page is taken up mostly with adverts about goods that could be purchased from The Eagle, a ship newly-arrived from China, bringing handkerchiefs in cartons of one dozen each, embroidered crape shawls, white and striped shirts, and Manila cigars (I adore this sort of detail!).
Reading on, I found the first time a newspaper reported on the gold find:
It’s on page two, at the bottom of column four — next to news that two prisoners have escaped because the townspeople haven’t paid for a proper prison.
Further up the page we can read about fresh salmon from the Sacramento River, and a Grizzly Bear that has killed three “young Indians,” with advice to be careful not to travel on foot “in sections of the country which abound with these desperate animals.”
Why would news of the discovery of gold be tucked away at the bottom of page two?
I don’t have an answer for this. The same page tells of finds of copper ore and stone coal. Perhaps there was a general sense of “boosterism”; that California was chocked full of mineral deposits, so gold was to be expected? The notice ends with the words “Gold has been found in almost every part of the country.” My research reveals that there were other finds; one was near a catholic mission and the priests persuaded the finder to keep it quiet.
It was only after the find on the American River that people started to search in earnest – and found unprecedented amounts of the precious metal.
This was an event which changed the course of history. It led directly to the establishment of California, a state that even today has an economy larger than most countries. It led to the transcontinental railroad being built decades ahead of what might have been expected. It led to the US using gold as the basis of its currency, with the power that brought. It fueled the East Coast industrial revolution which made the US by far the richest country in the world by the early twentieth century, and the super-power it remains today. This can all be traced back to the discovery of gold in January 1848 in a place that – ironically – was not even officially a part of the US until February 1848. This was the ‘inciting moment’ in the history of modern United States.
We get our perspective on things wrong, all the time. Things we think are crucial are forgotten with the passage of time. And things we think are mundane, or trivial, or an interesting snippet of news, can turn out to have life-changing consequences. This is true for people, for newspapers, and for nations