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The California Gold Rush
A Unique Situation

The California Gold Rush took place in a unique setting - it was a mining bonanza with characteristics never before experienced in the entire world. There has never been any other rush for precious metals or jewels that has been the same as what California offered the world in the mid 1800s.

Let's look at what was so unique about the setting of the California Gold Rush. It will help us understand how the Gold Rush affected so many people, from so many countries, from such diverse walks of life, during the twenty-year period of 1848-1868.

1. FREE LAND - first, the mountain, foothill, and river lands where gold was found were not held by private land owners. It was open wilderness and to claim it you simply had to be there and work it. This meant even the poorest miner could stake out a claim as a big as he or she could work. In other mineral and gem rushes around the world, the land was owned by a private party or the government and had to be rented at considerable cost before mining could even begin, and this limited the types of people who could afford to mine for wealth. In California, if you could get there, you could mine freely.

2. NO CONTEST - by the discovery of gold, the native inhabitants of the lands in the region had previously been devastated by epidemics of measles and malaria, cutting their populations to less than half of what they had been in 1800. The frightened and demoralized tribes chose to hide from the miners, not confront them in most cases, and represented no threat to usurping the lands for mining. In other rushes, it was often the case that there were landholders willing to fight to the death - sometimes with considerable military strength - for the rights to their land and resources, and miners could not easily gain access to the land for mining claims. In California, the mining claims were on comparatively unclaimed lands.

3. NO GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION - the US Government had just taken ownership of California when gold was discovered and their small military presence was not capable of patrolling, surveying, mapping, or taxing the gold-filled backcountry and foothill streams. The decision was made to let the land remain free for the taking by resident Californians, and this set the tone for the twenty years of the gold rush when foreigners from around the world rushed in.

4. FELLOW LABORERS - the men and women who each came to mine the gold all became hard working laborers. There were rarely any mining bosses with large crews of poorly paid workers. Generally, each miner mined their own claim. Raunchy sailors mined alongside refined attorneys, humble farm workers mined alongside the sons of aristocrats, and ranch hands worked claims with as much potential as those held by their previous employers. Everyone was a miner, all in the same situation together. No one had better comforts than another, and they all faced the same chance and risk. This was equal opportunity for equal work, with the luck of finding a workable claim.

5. NO TOOLS REQUIRED - of course tools were the best way to mine the claims, but the nature of the gold deposits was that they were so close to the surface - or floating in the rivers - that miners actually could use a pan, a hat, a spoon, or a blanket to reap thousands of dollars in a weeks time, sometimes in a day. In other mineral strikes, expensive, heavy, complex machinery had to be hauled in, and only rich prospectors could afford to finance such an operation. In those strikes, the poor were only allowed to work for hourly wages, and had no hopes of sharing in the wealth of the mine. In California, with everyman able to carry over his shoulder the tools required, and able to hike right into his own claim, it was an equalizing opportunity never heard of before. Plentiful - and easy to reach - the California Gold Rush required little up-front capital (money) to jump in and begin mining. It was a poor man's bonanza.

6. THE WORLD KNEW - the advent of cheap newspapers that could spread news around the world in a matter of a few days allowed the world to advertise the California Gold Rush with in days of President Polk's December 5th, 1948 announcement that California was indeed not just a rumored land of promise, it was a land with a gold rush in progress open to any man or woman around the world. The result was a roaring rush of prospectors out to seek their fortune. And the advances in sea going transportation meant that there were plenty of sailing ships waiting to carry the miners to the port of San Francisco as fast as they could pile on board. In fact the ports related to California's Pacific trade patterns were the first to send their miners - from Oregon, Hawaii, Mexico, and Peru.

7. STATEHOOD - California was admitted to the United States as a full-fledged state in 1850 with out ever going through the usual lengthy period of being a Territory. One reason for this rapid admission into the Union was that leading Californios got together with a select group of American and foreign businessmen and quickly wrote their own California constitution. This unique cooperative effort also settled the debate in Washington as to whether California would be a slave state or a free state. Such a slavery debate would usually have held-up statehood decisions while congress argued over the slavery issue, trying to keep the nation equally divided between slave and free states. Instead, the California delegation stated that they could not practically be a slave state as they were not a developed agricultural area, and that the growing gold rush was of such a nature technologically that slaves were not needed to mine the claims. The slavery issued settled for them, Congress then brought California rapidly to statehood while they turned their attention back to the broader slavery issue on their own coast.

8. WASHINGTON - from the time California requested statehood, to the late 1860s, there was great turmoil in Washington that distracted the government from better managing what was taking place out in the 'West' - the country was debating the inevitability of a major Civil War. The gold pouring into the East Coast from Yankee miners who returned to Boston and New York with hundreds of thousands of dollars in new wealth was helping the North prepare to stop the South's effort to secede from the nation. They needed the gold to fight the war, and encouraged even more miners to keep working their claims, even in the years where the gold bonanza had already begun to dwindle. Rather than clamp down on mining by taxation, they allowed free reign for the miners, in the hopes of financing the war preparations through new monies.

And so we see that the combination of free land, easy-to-access surface deposits, a classless mining society, sudden statehood, little government intervention, and the impending Civil war all combined to create a uniquely open, free, and prosperous opportunity for any miner who dared to make the trip to California, grab a shovel, and head for the promising foothills and backcountry. But not all struck it rich. And some riches were not made by finding gold alone …..

Let us next look at the very special time of the first year after gold was discovered, a time when cooperation, trust, and generosity were known through out the backcountry, miner-to-miner. It didn't last long, but it was the golden time of the Gold Rush.

And it also, unfortunately, lead to further mass extermination of the native population, a tragic part of California's history we need to recognize as one of the results of the Gold Rush.