When Cuba Was On The Goldrush Trail

The very rare ‘Californian Album’, a jewel of colonial lithography, was published in the Havana workshops of Louis Marquier

The illustration, ’A good carriage ride’, shows gold prospectors on board the emblematic Cuban buggy. / Zoila Lapique

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 1 February 2025 – On the 24th of January 1848 General John Sutter – christened Johann August in his native Switzerland and don Juan Sutter in his adoptive Mexico – found some gold nuggets in the river running through his land. He tried to keep the find a secret. Two months later a newspaper published a headline, which we would imagine to be in huge black letters, like those which John Wayne used to read in the Westerns: “Gold Mine Found!”

The news was, in actual fact, presented in just one paragraph, and in a modest font. Three or four rather frenzied sentences which promised seams of gold “in almost every part of the country” and “great chances for scientific capitalists”. And so began gold fever in California, a magnet for all types of treasure hunters and bandits. Very soon the very President of the United States had to admit that on the other side of the continent – there are more than 4,000 km between New York and San Francisco – there were people who were about to get very rich indeed.

For gold seekers, who arrived in California with a pick, a spade, buckets and divining rods, it was the journey of their lives. John, or Johann, or Juan Sutter was eventually ruined by the flood of migrants who arrived on his land (and on the rest of the American east coast) over the following decades, without asking permission. (One of these migrants was, for certain, a German hairdresser named Frederick Trump, who ran away to the United States in 1885 to escape military service. Cured of fever in remote Alaska, he dedicated himself to hotels and real estate… and a president for a grandson… Finally wealthy, he returned to his native village in Bavaria. And was deported).

For gold seekers, who arrived in California with a pick, a spade, buckets and divining rods, it was the journey of their lives.

One usually arrived in California by boat, via Panama and the Pacific. Other adventurers arrived in Mexico, reaching Sutter’s property overland. In 1850, in Cuba’s golden age, Havana was an obligatory stopover.

The treasure seekers arrived on the island en masse, just as many on their way home as on their way out. It’s undeniable that some of them, more seduced by the mulata women, the tabacco and the climate (coming, as they did, from colder countries, just like Herr Trump) forgot all about their original mission. They crowded into the port and the city squares, the taverns and the walkways, each one having the appearance of a long-bearded beggar, and it’s not hard to imagine their stuttering attempts to beg for a drink, some food or a smoke.

Witness to that invasion were two artists – Ferrán and Baturone (who for me resemble Hernández and Fernández, from Tintin), ubiquitous, with their sketchbooks in hand – who dedicated themselves to record, in a published book, these “types” and their customs, in twelve printed plates. It’s the extremely rare publication, the ’California Album’, an absolute jewel of Cuban lithography, born in the Havana workshops of the French printer Louis Marquier.

The ’California Album’ was sold in instalments, some of them exquisitely coloured and others in black and white. Ferrán and Baturone were not only skilled at creating their drawings, but they were also ingenious at titling them. The titles were translated into English, perhaps to make them marketable to the gold prospectors as a souvenir of their stay in Havana.

The ’California Album’ was sold in instalments, some of them exquisitely coloured and others in black and white

‘A Fortune Made’ – of which there is no version in colour – is the title of one picture which shows a typical prospector, posing formally, standing upright like a biblical patriarch, with a sombrero, a three-quarter length jacket and a beard reaching down to his chest. In another, the same character, along with two colleagues who are clearly hungover, now swigs from a bottle of moonshine, all three now posing in more ’comfortable’ positions. They drink, more and more, as though they didn’t have to leave soon for a new destination – a destination which would be in a place of temperance.

Wearing a neckscarf, and with his shirt open, the traveller goes into the street looking for conquest. He looks like a vagabond, but he has money. He’s in good spirits – like a ’patron of the arts’ -and he doesn’t hesitate to sit himself down in Havana’s Alameda de Paula to peel an orange with a knife, surrounded by habanera women who entertain him with tambourines and a barrel organ. He meets up with other prospectors, all of them just as drunk as he is, and they hire a seven-seater buggy and pay for a good ride.

Gold prospectors are – as the rascally Ferrán and Baturone observe – in favour of letting things just drift along: they are calm, pleasure-seeking, always drunk and never changing. If José Antonio Saco had not already written, in 1830, a report on vagrancy in Cuba, then one would have said that it was these guys who were the first to establish such a thing.

But not everything is rosy for those who have found a little gold. It’s with some discomfort that we observe a pair of friends almost levitating through the effects of cheap and rough alcohol. Two others, perhaps through having lost a bet, or having lost their last gold nuggets, wildly gesticulate their predicament. And there, next to a cannon, his gaze lost somewhere out in the bay, a melancholic prospector with a broken shoe attempts to soothe the corns on his feet.

It would seem that habaneros were not oblivious to these Californian gold nuggets, and it’s likely that these were the root cause of numerous disagreements

It would seem that habaneros were not oblivious to these Californian gold nuggets, and it’s likely that these were the root cause of numerous disagreements. In the engraving, ’Realization’, three prospectors are quarrelling with a jeweller, or a valuer. To settle the dispute, the islander lifts up a pair of weighing scales.

My favourite image from the ’California Album’ continues – naturally – to be: ’What Great Tabacco!’ You can smell it and you can taste it. One miner’s delight with his cigar caddy, and another’s delight in a whole box of them – with its official seal – seems to sum up their fantastical lives: smoke, dreams, frenzy … and ash.

California Dreamin’. / Xavier Carbonell

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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