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The California Gold Rush
Brotherhood of the First Miners

J.S. Holliday, former Director of the Oakland Museum and an Assistant Director of the esteemed Bancroft Library, describes this time as " a season of innocence". His recommended book, Rush for Riches, notes :

"Never before had there been such a society as that in California during the summer and fall of 1848. For that brief time some 5,000 men (with a few hundred women and children), virtually all from the coastal villages and valley ranches, were scattered along the rivers, streams, and dry gulches from Trinity to Tuolumne, a vast area over 200 miles in length and 40-50 miles in width. They labored each day at the same tiring work, in similar, unfamiliar surroundings, pursuing the same tantalizing dream, living the same transient, camping-out life."

"During those soon-to-be-romanticized months, nearly everyone experienced moments of success, turning up at least three or four ounces every few days. Each morning nurtured fresh expectations of uncovering a rich pocket - just as happened over the ridge yesterday, and around the bend last week. And score of merchants, freighters, mule packers, and other entrepreneurs made their swift thousands, content to remain on the outer fringes of the miner's society."

"For a few months, before news of the great treasure hunt reached Hawaii, Oregon, Mexico, and the world beyond, Californians enjoyed their season of innocence. With hopes fulfilled today or surely tomorrow, everyone felt a sense of equality. Old measures of status, like clothes and manners - even wealth - no longer mattered. Prosperity for all was at hand."

"Miners casually left their gold in cans, bottles, and leather pouches, in their tents or beside their rockers, without concern for theft. The sense of neighborliness, of sharing the same unique experience, inspired an openhanded, plenty-for-everybody social order, ruled only by the code of fair conduct, and no government in sight."

By the late fall of '48, ships from Peru, Oregon and the Sandwich Islands had brought the first non-Californians to San Francisco, and from there found them rushing towards the Sierras and into the gold fields. Southern Californians also came up from Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and San Diego to mine in the southern Sierra foothills and valleys. At this time there was plenty of land, no shortage of mining claims, the hills were not yet crowded, and racial divisions were not yet a major concern.

The Spanish-speaking miners "kept together by language, showed and uncommon cooperative spirit, working in groups, sharing supplies. And as if to make up for having failed to discover the Sierra's vast treasure, their effort produced gold in an abundance that soon became legendary. For instance, Antonio Franco Coronel with some thirty Californios, Sonorans, and Indian servants from Los Angeles set to work in August 1848 in the southern diggings. At the end of the first day Coronel reported he had "recovered about forty-five ounces of coarse gold," the next day thirty-eight ounces, the next fifty-one. On an adjoining claim his friend Valdes dug down three feet and uncovered a boulder that thousands of years earlier had blocked the flow of a river. From this pocket he took enough gold to fill a large piece of cloth. Thinking he had enough, Valdes passed his claim to another whose labor produced in eight days fifty-two POUNDS of gold. Next a Sonoran worked in the hole, digging with a spoon, piling the coarse gold onto a wooden bowl until by evening he had to strain to lift it out. Weary, he turned the treasure trove over to another companion who continued the cramped digging until he, too, had accumulated his fortune. Reports of this strike, repeated as if typical of gold seeking, spread throughout the mining region and eventually to the States and overseas - an example of California's generosity." (Antonio Coronel who reported this later became the Mayor of Los Angeles and treasurer of California. It is retold in Rush for Riches, written by J.S. Holliday)

This was a unique, brief, golden time, where envy, greed, and fear had not yet arrived in the gold camps. The delight at this unexpected bounty was a joy shared equally by almost all who arrived in their quest for mineral wealth. It was a time that has never left the California imagination. Cooperation, kind-heartedness, and plenty ... the basis for the promised land all had come to find.