On January 24th
in 1848, gold is discovered in the Sacramento Valley. It was the beginning of
the California Gold Rush!
The first person
to find gold wasn’t out to get rich. James W. Marshall was a carpenter who had
been working with a local ranch owner to build a sawmill. When Marshall showed
up at work on the morning of January 24, he saw something glittering in a water
channel that he’d been creating under the mill wheel. It looked like gold.
Gold mining in
California (Currier & Ives)
What a way to
start your day?!
Marshall tested
the gold and found it “could be beaten into a different shape but not broken.” He
rushed to tell some of the other men. At first, no one seemed to realize what
they’d stumbled on. The gold was surely a fluke? The men went back to work on
the mill. They would look for more gold, but only on “odd spells and Sundays.”
It was a full
four days before Marshall finally traveled to tell the ranch owner, John
Sutter, about his discovery. By then, he was beginning to get excited. He and
Sutter tried to keep the discovery secret, but it was too late.
Gold fever was
on—and it heated up even more when President James Polk mentioned the matter in
his Annual Message to Congress. “The abundance of gold in that territory are of
such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not
corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service,” he
told the nation.
Gold seekers
flooded into California territory! The mass movement of people was
unprecedented. In just one year, the population of California mushroomed from
14,000 people to 100,000. By 1852, that number had more than doubled to
250,000.
One San Francisco
newspaper lamented “the sordid cry of Gold! Gold! Gold! while the field is left
half-planted, the house half-built, and everything neglected but the
manufacture of picks and shovels.”
That same paper
soon closed its doors. It had lost too many of its employees to the Gold Rush.
One unexpected
problem confronted gold seekers in those days: It wasn’t easy to get to
California. Traveling overland was difficult and risky. Some people opted to
travel by boat, but this required travel all the way around the tip of South
America because the Panama Canal wasn’t built yet. Fortunately, a
transcontinental railroad was soon built across the Isthmus of Panama, and some
people were able to get to California that way.
In the meantime,
the scene in California wasn’t great: Morals were loose. Gambling, drinking,
and violence were rampant. Moreover, despite the furor over the opportunity,
most people didn’t get rich simply because they’d traveled to California.
“Many, very many,
that come here meet with bad success & thousands will leave their bones
here,” one gold-seeker would say. “Others will lose their health, contract
diseases that they will carry to their graves with them. Some will have to beg
their way home, & probably one half that come here will never make enough
to carry them back.”
Fortunately, the
California Gold Rush wasn’t characterized only by immorality, gambling,
drinking, and fighting. Many of those who traveled to California also exhibited
patience, perseverance, and determination in their efforts to succeed.
Perhaps the philosopher
Josiah Royce said it best: The California Gold Rush, he wrote, exhibited “both
the true nobility and the true weakness of our national character.”
Hmm. I wonder if
we could say the same thing about a few other events in our history. What do
you think?
Primary Sources:
- A letter from a gold miner
(Placerville, California; March, 1850) (reprinted HERE)
- California Department of
Parks and Recreation: Gold Rush OverviewDistant Horizon: Documents from the
Nineteenth-Century American West (Gary Noy, ed. 1999)
- H. W. Brands, The Age of Gold: The
California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (2002)
- J. S. Holliday, Rush for Riches: Gold Fever
and the Making of California (1999)
- James K. Polk, Fourth Annual Message (Dec. 5, 1848)
- Josiah Royce, California, from the conquest in 1846 to the second
vigilance committee in San Francisco: A study of American character
(1886)
- Karen Clay and Randall
Jones, Migrating to Riches? Evidence from the California Gold Rush
(Journal of Economic History; December 2008) (reprinted HERE)
History posts are
copyright © 2013-2021 by Tara Ross.
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