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Base Camp
The California Sierra and Cascade Backcountry was the exclusive homeland of native Californians until the years of the Gold Rush. The first Spanish settlements, 1769-1820, were situated in Pacific coastal valleys. The Mexican ranchos, 1820s-1840s, were located in the coastal region and also in the central valley. Mountain men and then settlers began crossing the Sierras and Cascades in the early 1820-40s, but these passages were swift and no effort to explore or understand the backcountry was made beyond establishing overland passage.
When gold was discovered along the American River, just below the Sierra foothills, in 1848, the backcountry became the California promise of rich rewards for individual miners who streamed into California from around the world, following the Sierra and Cascade rivers up stream in search of a hoped-for successful mining claim and instant wealth.
The Gold Rush forever changed the California Backcountry. The Gold Rush-era backcountry saw mass, but temporary, habitation by Americans and foreign miners; it saw the destruction of the natural waterways and the starvation of the Native Americans who had relied on those waterways for fish and game; and it saw the complete change of the previous 10,000 years of human and wilderness existence.
Let us look now at the different forces at work during their gold rush, and their impact on California, and on the California Backcountry.
Video:
Goldmining at "Goler Gulch" California - Richard Dreher The Gold Rush
Alta California - Before the World Rushed In
A Unique Situation
The First Golden Summer
The Brotherhood of Miners
Gold Fever ! Dream
Meets Reality Women
in the Goldrush Reading - The Gold Rush
Bret
Harte - Gold Rush Stories
Brown at Calaveras
Outcasts at Poker Flat
The Luck of Roaring Camp
The Adventures of Mark Twain - Main Menu
Mark Twain in California
Pocket Mining
The Miner's Cat
How the Miner's Cat Came to be
Jumping Frogs - How the Story Came to Be
Jumping Frogs - the 'real' story
The Life of Samuel Clemens
Joaquin Miller - buckskin bard
Joaquin Murietta poem
Twain's California Pioneer Men
Mark Twain Story Contest
Mark Twain Quiz 1 Mark Twain Quiz 2