Science

History

Art &
Literature

GIS &
Mapping

Library

ChatRoom
Search
TrailHead
Base Camp
       



The California Gold Rush
Gold Fever!

When President Polk of the United States openly proclaimed to Congress on December 5, 1948 that the California Gold Rush was a real, valid opportunity, word rapidly spread around the world. 1849 became the year the world rushed in.

President Polk wrote "The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service who have visited the mineral districts and derived the facts which they detail from personal observation … The effects produced by the discovery of these rich mineral deposits and the success which has attended the labours of those who have resorted to them have produced a surprising change in the state of affairs of California."

Individual prospectors around the world scraped together their savings and borrowed from friends who became their 'backers'. Cooperatives of miners formed to rent or purchase sailing ships and to send equipment to California with teams of miners. In England and France, in Italy and Latin America, in Hawaii and China, the call was heard and with-in weeks men were piling onto any available sailing ship to reach the distant California shores. Others piled onto wagons in the eastern states and made their way across the plains and Rocky Mountains. Some sailed to Central America and crossed at Panama by boat and mule, and then waited impatiently for a ship to take them up the coast to San Francisco.

The trip around the Horn from the east coast to the west coast took at least 5 months and meant living in horrible, smelly, cramped quarters with complete strangers and with minimal food supplies. Using the shortcut across Panama meant less time at sea, but subjected the traveler to dangerous diseases like cholera and malaria or dysentery, and an uncertain wait for passage on the Pacific side. The dream of golden wealth certainly must have been a powerful, inspiring dream, given the absolutely wretched traveling conditions the would-be miners endured.

This massive immigration of 1849 saw thousands of boats arrive in San Francisco Bay - and some of these ships could find no crew to man them for a return sail home, so eager was every man to reach the gold fields. But not everyone made their fortune in the gold fields. Some lost their lives, others returned to San Francisco to seek work or to open a business, and still others earned just enough to head back home soured on the California dream.

In November of 1949, the California Constitution was adopted in Monterey, and this marked the first formal step towards gaining statehood. But this political accomplishment was far from the fever running in the gold fields. 6,000 hopeful miners came to California from Mexico, many overland by foot. At least 17,000 came by ship from England, France and Australia. And the overland trails saw 42,000 Americans make their way towards California, with 25,000 more choosing the oversea route. 5,000 South Americans came from Chile and Peru. All this in 1849. By April of 1850, the harbormaster at San Francisco estimated 60,000 people had landed there in the previous twelve months, turning the 1848 California population of approximately 12,000 on its head. All combined, by the early months of 1850, California must have seen over 150,000 new arrivals following the call of the Gold Rush.

Life in the Mining Country

The gold that was free-for-all in '48 now found itself sought after with a fevered madness that made the 1849 gold fields a more dangerous frontier, one where theft and betrayal were to unfortunately become commonplace. California was not yet a State, and neither was it officially a territory. These new arrivals did not come with the traditional American homesteader's intentions to stake a claim on land and develop a life and a living on it. Instead, they came to stake a claim where they could quickly TAKE a living from it and leave it littered with the debris of their mining activities.

The California Backcountry would in a few short years be scraped open, shorn of many of its forests, and have its rivers diverted, damned, and soiled.

The miners lived in ramshackle wooden shack or tents with just enough roof to hopefully keep the rain off. There was no plumbing, no bathrooms, and few doctors. The food they could buy was brought in from the central valley, and priced so high that gold dust was required to buy eggs. There were few women or children in this difficult setting. Everyone aimed to get-rich-quick, or at least soon, and head back to where they came from as a new-found success. But fatal illness overtook many miners living in unsafe conditions, and alchohal excess did in many others.

By the 1850s, murder became commonplace in the mining camps and towns. The lawlessness was difficult to stop as there were not enough sheriffs or judges to address the problems these gold-crazy men brought to the once quiet Sierras and Cascade mountains. And to make matters worse, there was no longer enough gold for all .. it became increasingly hard to find as the surface placers were rapidly being depleted. At this time a different style of mining entered California - hard rock mining that was much more expensive to undertake, required heavier, costlier equipment, and looked for veins of gold much harder to predict, deep into the mountains.

This competitive change in the climate of the Gold Rush was due to the overwhelming volume of people who arrived, due to the change in the available types of gold, and due to the diversity of types of people who arrived. The sudden mass influx of foreigners saw a local California-Yankee resentment start to grow against the Chinese, Mexican, and South American miners. This resentment carried on the tension between the old Spanish-speaking Californios of the original ranchos who now lived primarily in the southern region, and the New England Yankees who were settling in California with their pragmatic entrepreneurial spirit of commerce.

Although California's Golden Gate was open to all arrivals, the opportunities for prosperity were no longer equally open to all. With statehood earned in 1850, California was soon to form its own legislature and began enacting laws to govern the progress of the Gold Rush, and the future of the people who had come to her open shores from all over the world. As the cost to extract the gold grew beyond the poor miner's capabilities, the cities then began to draw the disappointed miners back into the urban centers, Sacramento became the state capital, and San Francisco, which had become a world port nearly overnight, became the largest city in California. As racial divisions also began to influence the future of the state, the Yankee businessmen came to rule the northern 2/3s of the state.