Do you have journals, letters, photographs, or other information
related to the 1849 Salem to San Francisco crew of the La Grange?
Please contact me!

Salem, Massachusetts is not a location that most people would first consider exploring for a topic on westward migration.  Salem is well-known for the 1692 Witch Trials, the wealth its merchants made in the Atlantic cod trade, and later, the wealth its merchants made in the China and East Indies trade.  It is also recognized for important architecture, such as the Federal period homes built by Samuel McIntyre.  However, the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum, founded in 1821 (as the Essex Institute), maintains in its collections an astounding record of materials from those who ventured to the west during the second half of the nineteenth century. 

Even today, with much evidence to the contrary, there are a number of misconceptions about westward migration in the 1840s and 1850s.  First, it is still commonly imagined that most people traveled to the west by foot and by Conestoga wagon.  In fact, most people sailed by ship using well-established routes that led people to the Far East following the defeat of the British in the American Revolutionary War.  Secondly, it is largely people from east coast harbor towns who made their way to California, not those already living in the middle regions of the country.  Thirdly, people who joined the Gold Rush did not necessarily intend to find adventure and a new permanent home or identity (the myth of California as a place where one might “reinvent” oneself is a later phenomena).  As the men of the La Grange illustrate, most Gold Rush participants expected to seek financial gains that they would bring home to their families back east.

This study will examine the materials from the 1849 voyage of the La Grange, a bark (or barque) that sailed from Salem to San Francisco during the months of March – September 1849.  The ship was equipped with materials to convert the vessel into a steamship, which was used to then voyage up to Sacramento.  The vessel was then sold, and eventually, used as a prison ship in Sacramento.  When the prison ship was no longer useful, it was sunk in its place.  In about 1980, James Delgado, working for the National Park Service, performed an underwater archaeology survey and was able to identify the ship that was once Salem’s La Grange.

Men who joined the Salem and California Mining Expedition aboard the La Grange embodied the entrepreneurial spirit of Salem’s men in 1789, when the restrictions placed on American colonial trade by the British no longer applied to the new country.  Ambitious merchants sought out trade with the Far East, and many made great fortunes in spices, cloth, porcelain, and other specialty goods. For that generation, maritime travel to the west coast of America was just one stop in an established trade to the Far East.    As the journals of the La Grange suggest, reviving the spirit to travel far west in search of opportunity was, in part, just a new chapter for a city that gave birth to such individuals throughout many generations. 

In Salem, there were important stories about the city’s glorious past that shaped the lives and identities of those men who grew up on Boston’s North Shore.  There, courageous, adventurous entrepreneurs fought the patriotic cause during the Revolutionary War, ran illegal trade when restricted by President Jefferson’s Embargo in 1807, challenged the British during the War of 1812, and sailed far to China, Sumatra, India, Russia, and elsewhere to fashion merchant empires.  These were the great men of Salem’s “Golden Age,” but that age was over by 1849. The generation of the “‘49ers” faced difficult economic times in the shadow of a recent, glittering past.

Like their predecessors from Salem’s Great Age of Sail, the La Grange crew knew that their voyage was important, and they formed a society to relish that unique experience upon their return.  Perhaps because they did not acquire the wealth Salem’s that Salem’s leading merchants gained from merchant trades in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the La Grange crew’s golden moment from the mid-nineteenth century slowly slipped out of memory as the Argonauts passed away.  What remains, however, is a remarkable body of manuscript, artistic, and material evidence from an early flood of migration to California.  And, of course, the golden myth of California itself that remains with us today.

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