Gold Rush

Sources

Sutter’s Mill. On 24 January 1848 the American James Marshall discovered gold at John Sutter’s mill in northern California. This strike set off one of the most dramatic economic events of the nineteenth century. When word got out concerning the gold’s location, people soon began scurrying into the hills seeking even more of the precious yellow metal—and many found it, at least at first. Word of the placer (or surface) gold spread throughout the world. In 1849 alone, about eighty thousand people came to California; by 1854 three hundred thousand had arrived. Vast amounts of gold came out of California. Historians have estimated that miners extracted $10 million of gold in 1849, $41 million more of gold the following year, and another $81 million of gold in 1852. The amount declined thereafter, but miners still mined $45 million of gold from California in 1857.

Forty-Niners. The miners were mostly young males. Forty-Niners (as these miners were called) came from the American East, Chile, China, France, Mexico, and elsewhere. Newspapers throughout the United States—in big cities and small towns—proclaimed the newfound riches. Different visions of what could be accomplished in California appeared among the various groups, but many Americans felt that the gold strike represented an equality of opportunity, an optimistic idea that had long been the hallmark of their culture. Easterners came by ship around South America or by way of Panama. Other Americans crossed the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, Great Basin Desert, and Sierra Nevada Mountains to reach the land of gold.

Early Success. The early days of the Gold Rush provided the greatest opportunity for the miners. Placer gold was fairly abundant. In fact, gold dust soon emerged as the currency of California. A shovel, pan, and maybe a pick were the common tools of the early miner. Many men labored with partners. Forty-Niners believed that if they worked hard, they could get rich. Few actually struck it big in the gold fields, but 1849 and 1850 were years of success for a significant number of miners.

Increasing Costs of Mining. Yet however much gold came out of California’s hills, life was never easy for the Forty-Niners. When the placer gold gave out around 1851, conditions became even more difficult, but people kept coming. Nevertheless, mining gold in northern California became increasingly expensive. The possession of capital became a necessity because new mining techniques demanded larger operations. With the scarcity of easy gold, quartz mining (digging underground in search of ore) developed; this system, too, required more capital and organization. Flocks of miners arrived, and more companies with greater resources formed. Claims, which could be sold, became costlier. By 1853 hydraulic mining appeared. In this expensive process, workers redirected water into hillsides to break up the soil and more easily extract the gold. Hydraulic mining permanently scarred the landscape of northern California. These commercial innovations led to a change in the use of water that was crucial to the large-scale operations. Water became a precious commodity, adding further to the cost of the newer, more industrial, gold mining.

The New York Herald reports on the Gold Rush

The California Gold Rush excited the imaginations of many thousands of Americans. Newspapers in the East commented on the gold craze that swept the country. They also printed letters from Forty-Miners who wrote back describing the potential riches in California.

New York Herald, 9 December 1848: “The Eldorodo of the old Spaniards is discovered at last…. In every direction vessels are being prepared to carry out passengers and merchandise to California…. The mania for emigrating to California is spreading in every direction and almost puts down and suppresses the dread of cholera…. This mania or madness is only at its commencement.”

New York Herald, 7 April 1849: “Hurrah! Here we are at last! The Land of Promise—El Dorado of the West! Our own bright, beautiful, bountiful California lies before us—her lap full of riches…. Any strong, able bodied man who is willing to labor five or six hours a day in the broiling sun, can make from $10 to $20 per day for three or four months in the year.”

Source: Peter Browning, ed. and comp., To the Golden Share: America Goes to California—1849 (LaFayette, Cal: Great West Books, 1995), pp. 45, 249.

The California Economy. Even before the arrival of these large-scale operations, prices for food and clothing in California were extremely high. Though an early miner could make more than ten times as much money mining gold than working in the East, the inflated economy and the shortage of goods diminished the Forty-Niners’ purchasing power. Sarah Royce, who went to northern California in 1849 with her husband and small daughter, found that an onion cost one dollar in the boom town of Sacramento. In fact, some migrants came to California not so much to mine gold but to mine the miners. They brought goods and services that fetched high prices in a booming economy based on gold dust. Since the scramble for gold brought conflict, it comes as no surprise that lawyers prospered. As Royce noted, some Americans came with, or developed, highly questionable schemes in order to get rich through the miners. These budding and impatient entrepreneurs tried their hand at such ventures as cattle or land speculation, but most failed. Yet some new migrants, including frustrated miners, went into other lines of work and invested in businesses that succeeded. The Royces, for example,

gave up mining and settled down and established a farm near Grass Valley, California.

The Ascendancy of the Anglos. The rush of Americans into California proved beneficial primarily for the native English-speaking people. Attacks by Anglos and the erosion of native subsistence economies in the face of the new mining regime drastically reduced the Indian population. By using law and force of arms, Americans drove Mexicans from the mines. Many Chinese men who had emigrated hoping to become rich found themselves driven out of the gold fields by racist Americans. Violence and discrimination were particularly pronounced after the placer gold diminished. White Americans believed California to be theirs alone even though the United States had only recently acquired it from Mexico.

The Golden State. The Gold Rush created the state of California. California had been part of the Spanish Empire since the late 1700s, but Mexico ceded it to the United States in 1848. It reached statehood in 1850—only two years after gold had been discovered at Sutter’s Mill. Entire cities materialized throughout the state. San Francisco surfaced as the great city of the nineteenth-century Far West. In 1848 the city had only eight hundred inhabitants; two years later, twenty thousand people lived there. By 1860 it held fifty thousand residents. In short, the precious yellow metal created not only big dreams, big disappointments, and a few big fortunes, but it also gave birth to the nation’s richest and most populous state.

Sources

Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);

Sarah Royce, A Frontier Lady: Recollections of the Gold Rush and Early California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932).

Gold Rushes. The nineteenth century was the great era of North American gold rushes.Beginning in North Carolina in 1799, gold rushes were initially a southern phenomenon, centered along the eastern piedmont of the Appalachians. A rush in the Cherokee Nation contributed to the forced removal of Cherokees in the 1830s.

The western rushes began in 1848 with a gold discovery in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, just as the United States acquired California from Mexico, and they shared characteristics with those in the South. They dispossessed native peoples, focused on placers (surface gold deposits), and attracted disproportionately male and stunningly diverse populations. California's was the most male of the rushes, though native women were present in the diggings, and Miwok women, for example, took up mining in order to supplement older subsistence strategies. The rush drew gold seekers from around the world, especially from Mexico, Chile, the United States, China, and several European nations. California also set a pattern for future rushes whereby Anglo Americans, sometimes aided by the state, fought to control the placers. As Anglo women began to arrive, they, too, inaugurated a pattern common in later rushes by campaigning against such public amusements as dance halls and brothels, which often employed Mexican, Chilean, French, and Chinese women.

These patterns were repeated during gold rushes in Nevada and Colorado in the late 1850s; Montana, Idaho, and Arizona in the 1860s; and Dakota Territory in the 1870s. By the 1880s, the emphasis in western mining was shifting to the underground, hard‐rock mining of gold, silver, and copper, which required heavy capital investment, industrial processes, and large numbers of wage workers. Not until the 1890s, however, did hard‐rock miners outnumber placer miners in the West. And the 1890s saw new placer rushes following a series of discoveries in Alaska Territory and Canada's Yukon Territory.

The western rushes coincided with industrialization and class formation in the United States and with an era of North Atlantic global economic dominance. For many in industrializing nations and in countries ruled by colonial powers, the rushes seemed to provide opportunities outside of the economic and geopolitical bounds that circumscribed their lives. That so many people from so many different places descended on the placers and contended with one another over access to gold, and that Anglo‐American men often succeeded in limiting access for so many others, demonstrates that gold rushes were no sideshow; they were part of the main event of nineteenth‐century history. Even Anglo men, however, try as they might to impose themselves as the rightful claimants of North American gold, could not extract from the hills the promise they sought—at most, a fortune; at least, an escape from a lifetime of wage labor. For most participants, gold rushes never lived up to the hopes they inspired.
See also Capitalism; Cherokee Cases; Gilded Age; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Mexican War.

Bibliography

Rodman Wilson Paul and and Elliott West , Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848-1880, 1974; rev. ed., 2001.
Rodman Wilson Paul and and Elliott West , Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848–1880, 1974; rev. ed., forthcoming.
David Williams , The Georgia Gold Rush: Twenty‐niners, Cherokees, and Gold Fever, 1993.
Peter J. Blodgett , Land of Golden Dreams, 1999.

Susan Lee Johnson

gold rush influx of prospectors, merchants, adventurers, and others to newly discovered gold fields. One of the most famous of these stampedes in pursuit of riches was the California gold rush. The discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill early in 1848 brought more than 40,000 prospectors to California within two years. Although few of them struck it rich, their presence was an important stimulus to economic growth. Agriculture, commerce, transportation, and industry grew rapidly to meet the needs of the settlers; mining, too, soon became big business as corporations replaced the individual prospector. Vigilante justice and ad hoc political structures quickly gave way to the complex organization of state government. Other large gold rushes took place in Australia (1851-53); Witwatersrand , South Africa (1884); and the Klondike , Canada (1897-98). The excitement of the California gold-rush days has been captured in the works of Bret Harte and Jack London .

Bibliography: See O. Lewis, Sea Routes to the Gold Fields (1949); E. Wells and H. Peterson, The '49ers (1949); P. Barton, The Klondike Fever (1958); R. W. Paul, ed., The California Gold Discovery (1966); D. B. Chidsey, The California Gold Rush (1968); H. W. Brands, The Age of Gold (2002); D. L. Walker, Eldorado: The California Gold Rush (2003).

gold rushes Sudden influxes of people to newly discovered gold fields. The most famous gold rush was to California, where in 1848 gold was found by a Swiss settler, J. A. Sutter. As news spread, adventurers from all over the world made for California. Hard-drinkers and gamblers, the ‘forty-niners’ created an archetypal saloon society, where more fortunes were made from speculation in land and goods than from gold. The second great rush was to Australia, where gold was first found near Bathurst in New South Wales in 1851 and later in Victoria at Bendigo and Ballarat, the richest alluvial gold field ever known. A ten-year boom brought diggers back across the Pacific from the declining California field, as well as from Britain, where Cornish tin-mining was declining. The population of Victoria rose from 97,000 to 540,000 in the years 1851–60. Later rushes were to New Zealand (1860), to North Australia, Alaska, Siberia, and South Africa (1880s), and to Klondike in Canada and Kalgoorlie in West Australia (1890s). The most important was probably to Witwatersrand, South Africa, in 1886, where the influx of loose-living miners (UITLANDERS or outlanders) precipitated political tensions, which led to the Second BOER WAR.

gold rush Rapid influx of population in response to reports of the discovery of gold. The largest gold rush brought c.100,000 prospectors to California (1849–50). Some of the miners, known as Forty-Niners, went on to Australia (1851–53). There were also gold rushes to Witwatersrand, South Africa (1886), Klondike in the Yukon, Canada (1896), and Alaska (1898).

gold rush • n. a rapid movement of people to a newly discovered goldfield. The first major gold rush, to California in 1848–49, was followed by others in the U.S., Australia (1851–53), South Africa (1884), and Canada (Klondike, 1897–98).

Gold Rush, see Forty‐niners.