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Base Camp

Dream Meets Reality

The rush for gold in California continued for the next twenty years, but the reality of the mining experience differed from the promises being published in newspapers around the world. With the dangers of crime so great in the mountain mining camps, and the gold increasingly difficult to find in the 1850s-70s, many would-be-miners turned their efforts towards wage-work in Sacramento, Stockton, or San Francisco. They chose to avoid the danger and greed of the foothills, but rarely found themselves any better off than they had been at home .. and many found the disappointment heartbreaking.

Alonzo Delano wrote bitterly of this time - "I think when the sufferings of the migrants both on the plains and after their arrival is known at home, our people will begin to see California stripped of her gaudy robes, her paint and her adornments, which have been so liberally heaped upon her by thoughtless letter-writers and culpable editors, and they will be content to stay at home and reap their own grain, and enjoy the comforts which they really possess, rather than come here to starve .…"

This contrast between the romanticized image of what California offered, and the hard reality experienced by the majority of miners, is important to understand. When writers, like Bret Harte or even Mark Twain (whose work is available through the Camp), wrote their Gold Rush stories in the 1860s and 1870s, they perpetuated the image of California as a land of golden and poignant promise and full of humorous happenstances. But it is important to understand that after the golden year of 1848, the Gold Rush became a painful disappointment for many thousands of miners. Gold was still being mined and fortunes made in the 1850s, but by the 1860s, the volume has slowed. The colorful stories of the Gold Rush era that are excellent reading actually show a much safer, kinder environment than the miners really faced in many places. And it was these stories and newspaper reports of gold discoveries that kept the miners coming for several decades.

Joaquin Murietta and the Foreign Miners Tax

The legendary bandit Joaquin Murietta, a Spanish-speaking miner who was working the gold fields during the early 1850s, is an example of the desperate circumstances the unsuccessful miners found themselves in. Not only was the sudden increase in the number of miners a problem, the law makers also began to discriminate against foreign miners in order to give the Yankee American miners and advantage in claiming the gold. In 1850, the Foreign Miners Tax was passed that made it nearly impossible for foreigners to keep their claims. It required them to travel to the City to renew their claims, but to do this they would nave to leave their claim unattended and it was sure to be stolen. If they did not travel to renew their rights to the claim, then they would be arrested. This law was used to limit the number of Chinese and Latin miners working the mountain and valley claims, and ended the classless mining society. The white European foreigners were not as severely persecuted as were the browner skinned immigrants.

Murietta was supposed one such miner who lost his claim due to this racial division, and he took to robbing the landowners and travelers with a small group of banditos. In fact, it is thought there were over a half dozen men calling themselves Joaquin and committing theft and robberies in the foothills and valleys of California in the early 1850s. To learn more about the fate of Joaquin Murietta, and the legend that surrounds him, please see the Camp's Robin Hood of the West section. Murietta was in part the inspiration for the legendary figure Zorro, a champion of early California life.

Native American Experience

By the 1840s, the California Backcountry native population had been cut in half by epidemics of measles and other European diseases. When the Gold Rush hit, some Indians found themselves working in the gold fields under American or foreign miners, and others retreated further and further into the hills to escape the crazed white people scouring their homelands for gold.

As more and more miners came into the hills, these invaders began to look upon the native population as standing in their way of taking full possession of the backcountry and its promised riches. Mass extermination efforts were launched to wipe out entire tribes. And to escape the Indians moved still deeper into the mountains. But wherever they went, they could not completely escape the effect of the white man's Gold Fever.

To best understand this period of tremendous loss and grief among the native population, the book Ishi, Last of His Tribe by Theodora Kroeber is recommended reading, and the Camp provides a condensation of the story online. Another source that reflects the Native American experience comes from the write Joaquin Miller, well known for his ballad to Joaquin Murietta. Miller was a colorful emigrant to California who lived a rugged life, often enjoying retreats into the backcountry. He had a good relationship with the native peoples, and was given a remote valley near Mt. Shasta by the Indian chief, Blackbeard. From his autobiography, we learn of the gold rushes impact on the lives of his native friends.

Miller had gone up to his Mt Shasta cabin in the winter. "On the eighth day my door darkened, and I sprang up from my work, rifle in hand. Two Indians, brave, handsome fellows, one my best and dearest friend in the world, stood before me. And sad tales they told me that night as I feasted them around my great fireplace. The tribe was starving over on the McCloud! The gold-diggers had so muddied and soiled the waters the season before that the annual run of salmon had failed. The Indians for the first time in centuries had no stores of dried salmon, and they were starving to death by the hundreds. And what was still more alarming, for it meant the ultimate destruction of all Indians concerned, I was told that the natives of Pit River Valley had resolved to massacre all the settlers there." Miller then helped the Indians locate a herd of elk that they are able to hunt to provide food to save the starving native peoples of his friend's tribe.

California was, previous to European arrival, the most densely populated region of Native American life in North America. The reason there are few Indian reservations in California today is that the European contact which brought enforced labor, loss of cultural practices, and disease through the Missions first cut their population from 300,000 down to and estimated 100,000. And then the Gold Rush lead to outright massacres of entire villages in the backcountry and foothills. Essentially, the population was brought under control by the most brutal means, and the 1860s saw the native population down to a few thousand inhabitants. By the turn of the century, there simply was no major native population.

John Sutter's Losses

At one time the absolute ruler of what amounted to a private kingdom along the Sacramento River, John Sutter saw his immense wealth and power overrun in the world's rush to pick California clean of gold. Sutter was born John Augustus Suter in Baden, Germany, though his parents had originally come from Switzerland, a lineage of which he was especially proud. In 1834, faced with impossible debt, he decided to try his fortunes in America and, leaving his family in a brother's care, set sail for New York. There he decided that the West offered him the best opportunity for success, and he moved to Missouri, where for three years he operated as a trader on the Santa Fe Trail. By 1838, Sutter had determined that Mexican California held the promise of fulfilling his ambitious dreams, and he set off along the Oregon Trail, arriving at Fort Vancouver, near present-day Portland, Oregon, in hopes of finding a ship that would take him to San Francisco Bay. His journey involved detours to the Hawaiian Islands and to a Russian colony at Sitka, Alaska, but Sutter made the most of his wanderings by trading advantageously along the way. When he finally arrived in California in 1839, Sutter met first with the provincial governor in Monterey and secured permission to establish a settlement east of San Francisco (then called Yerba Buena) along the Sacramento River, in an area then occupied only by Indians. Sutter was granted nearly fifty thousand acres and authorized "to represent in the Establishment of New Helvetia [Sutter's Swiss-inspired name for his colony] all the laws of the country, to function as political authority and dispenser of justice, in order to prevent the robberies commited by adventurers from the United States, to stop the invasion of savage Indians and the hunting and trapping by companies from the Columbia." In other words, Sutter was to serve the California authorities as a bulwark against the assorted threats pressing in on them from American-controlled territories to the north and east. Ironically, as headquarters for his domain, Sutter chose a site on what he named the American River, at its junction with the Sacramento River and near the site of present-day Sacramento. Here, with the help of laborers he had brought with him from Hawaii, he built Sutter's Fort, a massive adobe structure with walls eighteen feet high and three feet thick. Two years later, in 1841, Sutter expanded his settlement when the Russians abandoned Fort Ross, their outpost north of San Francisco, and offered to sell it to him for thirty thousand dollars. Paying with a note he never honored, Sutter practically dismantled the fort and moved its equipment, livestock and buildings to the Sacramento Valley. Within just a few years, Sutter had achieved the grand-scale success he long dreamed of: acres of grain, a ten-acre orchard, a herd of thirteen thousand cattle, even two acres of Castile roses. His son came to share in his prosperity in 1844, and the rest of his family soon followed. At the same time, during these years Sutter's Fort became a regular stop for the increasing number of Americans venturing into California, several of whom Sutter employed. Besides providing him with a profitable source of trade, this steady flow of immigrants provided Sutter with a network of relationships that offered some political protection when the United States seized control of California in 1846, at the outbreak of the Mexican War. Barely a week before the war's end, however, there occurred a chance event that would destroy all John Sutter's achievements and yet at the same time link his name forever to one of the highpoints of American history. On the morning of January 24, 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall, who was building a sawmill for Sutter upstream on the American River near Coloma, looked into the mill's tailrace to check that it was clear of silt and debris and saw at the water's bottom nuggets of gold. Marshall took his discovery to Sutter, who consulted an encyclopedia to confirm it and then tried to pledge all his employees to secrecy. But within a few months, word had reached San Francisco and the gold rush was on. Suddenly all of Sutter's workmen abandoned him to seek their fortune in the gold fields. Squatters swarmed over his land, destroying crops and butchering his herds. "There is a saying that men will steal everything but a milestone and a millstone," Sutter later recalled; "They stole my millstones." By 1852, New Helvetia had been devastated and Sutter was bankrupt. He spent the rest of his life seeking compensation for his losses from the state and federal governments, and died disappointed on a trip to Washington, D.C. in 1880. Sutter material from New Perspectives on the West, PBS