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In 1848, while he was building a sawmill for Sutter’s Fort (a trading post
in California established by Swiss immigrant John Sutter), carpenter John Marshall found gold.
In December 1848, President Polk announced it in Congress.
From 1848-1852 the non-native population of California grew from
14,000 to 250,000. In 1849
alone, 80,000 would-be prospectors (the ‘forty-niners’) flooded into California.
They were followed by merchants, labourers, businessmen and bankers, bars and
prostitutes.
At first you could find ‘gold dust’ just by sifting through the sand, then by ‘panning’ in the streams,
then by erecting a sluice and rocking cradle, and finally by digging gold mines.
Between 1848 and 1855, perhaps 350 tons of gold were extracted. In 1855, the gold began to run out and, although some
prospectors stayed on in hope, the Gold Rush ended as suddenly as it had
started.
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Going Deeper
The following links will help you widen your knowledge:
BBC
Bitesize - VERY brief!
American Experience
The Gold Miner's Experience - Sources
California's Genocide
Impact of the Gold Rush
on Natve Americans: Sources - Smithsonian NMAI
 How did the discovery of gold in the West affect the lives of Americans?
YouTube
The Gold Rush and Law & Order
- Mr Cloke (excellent)
The California 1849 gold rush – facts and history
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Life of a Gold Miner
Most prospectors had spent everything getting to California,
and they expected to make a fast buck and get out quickly, so they lived rough. Mining towns were a single muddy street, and the
prospectors often lived in tents of
old blankets stretched over wooden frames. They laboured all day – "work that would have killed a horse" –
often for nothing. Saloons, shopkeepers, suppliers, doctors – all charged a fortune. A few miners got rich, some wasted a fortune on drink and gambling, but most came and
left with nothing, ruined.
Source A
The miseries of a miner might fill a chapter of woes.
Digging and delving with eager anxiety day after day, up to the waist in
water, exposed now to the rays of the burning sun, and now to cold, pitiless
rains, with liberal potations of whiskey during the day, and mad carousals
at night, flush with great buckskin bags of gold-dust, or toiling throughout
the long summer without a dollar, indebted to the butcher, baker, and
grocer, heart and brain throbbing and bounding with success, or prostrate
under accumulated disappointments, it was more than a man with even an iron
frame could endure.
When disease made him its
prey, there was no gentle hand to minister to his
wants, no soft voice to whisper words of love and comfort,
no woman's heart on which to rest his aching
head. Lying on the hard earth, or rolling in feverish
agony on the shelf-bed of his cabin, often alone and
unattended throughout the livelong day, while the
night was made hideous by the shouts and curses of
rioters, the dying miner, with thoughts of home, of
parents, wife, and sister, and curses on his folly, passed
away. That was the last of him in this world, nameless,
graveless, never heard from!
Hubert Bancroft, California Inter Pocula (1888)
Bancroft was a book-seller and historian who set up in San Francisco in
1852. The title of his book – a Latin phrase meaning 'California between drinks' – has a double meaning, referring both to the intoxicating beauty of the land, and the social damage of alcohol.
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Source B
Placerville Gold Mining Town
Did You Know
Decades after the last gold had been found, there were
still aged prospectors living in poverty in the hills seeking gold. They would not give up, and kept on until they died. It
wa realised that this was because they had given up so much chasing the
dream of a big find that they could not bear the thought of giving up and
admitting that they had wasted their lives. This is an
economic principle known as 'sunk cost fallacy'; where you have put so much
into something that it is painful to let it go. its opposite is
the 'bygones principle'.
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Impacts of the Gold Rush
Economic Impacts [AFTERLIFE]
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Additional benefits: the boom in gold mining caused ‘spin-off’ booms in: mining machinery & hydraulics; lumber mills; shipyards; leather & clothing; flour mills; and retail. Farmers produced not just food staples, but fruits and wines. California quickly became an exporter of flour.
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Finance & Banking:
San Francisco became a financial hub, as banks like Wells Fargo (1852) set
up to safeguard and transfer the gold.
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Trade: San Francisco’s port became a massive importer of lumber, flour, and salted meat from places like Chile, Peru, and Hawaii; tea, sugar, silk, and porcelain from China; and mining machinery and expertise from Australia.
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Express mail: In 1848, the US Congress extended the US Mail service to California and commissioned the building of steamships to carry it.
The Pony Express and the California Star Express were set up to provide a
rapid overland mail service.
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Road & Rail:
The Gold Rush accelerated infrastructure projects such as the Stockton-Los
Angeles Road (1853), the Sacramento Valley Railroad (1856) and the Port of
San Francisco. The need to connect California to the eastern US would
lead to the building of the first transcontinental railroad (to the Oakland
Long Wharf on San Francisco Bay) in 1863-69.
BUT:
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Labour shortages: the mania for gold mining led to a loss of specialist workers in related trades, especially in California, but also in Great Britain, China and Hawaii, as workers downed tools and went off to seek their fortune.
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Inflation: the gold eventually sold to the US Mint, who converted it into coin, more than doubling the amount of gold in circulation; this flood of new gold raised prices by 44% by 1855 – the highest rate of inflation in peacetime America before 1975.
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Financial Crisis:
as the flow of gold began to dry up, two major San Francisco banks collapsed
in 1855; this set off a ripple effect which caused a world-wide banking
panic in 1857.
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Expansion problems: the rapid growth of San Francisco led to chaos, slums, malnutrition, disease and crime.
Cholera swept through the town in 1850, and a fire destroyed three-quarters
of the town in 1851.
Political Impact
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California Statehood: The population explosion and economic
growth of California allowed its admission to the Union as a free state in
1850, disrupting the balance between free and slave states in the
US Senate.
This became a major issue in national politics and contributed to the
tensions leading up to the Civil War.
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State Influence: California's elected representatives and senators quickly became influential in federal politics, and
pressed for Western interests, such as railroads and infrastructure funding.
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Military and Federal Presence: The Gold Rush led the US government to establish military outposts, customs offices, and law courts in the region.
Law-and-Order Challenges
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Crime: gangs and outlaws (such as the
Tom Bell Gang and the Mexican-American 'Five Joaquins' Gang) took advantage of the lack of law enforcement.
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Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs: Miners could 'stake a claim' to an area of land by hammering wooden stakes into the ground, so it was easy to steal a claim by stealing the stake or the land, and disputes often led to violent confrontations; mining towns set up unofficial courts, but mostly justice was dispensed by vigilante groups, usually by a lynching. The San Francisco Committee of Vigilance was formed in 1851 after the
killing of a prominent newspaper editor.
Environmental Damage
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Destruction of Landscape: Miners diverted rivers, dug out entire hillsides, and left vast amounts of spoil. The sediment from mining operations clogged rivers, causing floods and ruining ecosystems.
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Deforestation: the prospectors cleared forests for timber, farming, and settlement, significantly altering the natural ecosystems.
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Pollution: Mining polluted streams with
mercury and other chemicals.
Racial and Cultural Impacts
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There were about 150,000 Indigenous Californians in 1848:
• Many were displaced from their lands, killed or forced into labour. Women were raped and forced into prostitution.
The Indigenous population in California dropped to 30,000 by 1870 due to
violence, disease, and starvation.
• Peter Hardeman Burnett, the first Governor of California, predicted that “a war of extermination … until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected. While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert”.
• The California genocide: 303 militia groups were formed to exterminate the Indigenous people, paying $5 a head for their scalps, subsidised by the state and federal governments.
• In 1850 the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians allowed any person to
indenture
an Indigenous child, and there were raids on Indigenous villages
to kidnap children, after which they were sold for as little $35.
• In 1851-52 the federal government signed treaties with the local tribes granting them 12,000 sq. miles of land for reservations, but
then never ratified them
• The US Army established Fort Humbolt to keep the peace between the settlers and the local Wiyot people, but in 1860 allowed 250 women and children to be massacred by local vigilante businessmen, and then let the Wiyot men who sought safety in the Fort starve to death.
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Mexican Californians found themselves suddenly under US rule after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which ended the Mexican-American War, ceding the region to the US:
• Many Mexican landowners lost their property because the US courts failed to recognise Mexican land grants, resulting in ruin for many Mexican Californians.
• The California Foreign Miners’ Tax of 1850 forced Mexican miners to pay a fee to work in the mines.
• Race-hatred and acts of violence were common.
• Latin American prospectors brought their mining techniques, including the improved ‘batea’ pan.
• Spanish-speaking communities grew up in the Central Valley around towns like Sonora.
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By 1852, around 25,000 Chinese immigrants had arrived in California to join the gold rush, fleeing poverty in China:
• They faced severe discrimination. The Foreign Miners’ Tax targeted them also, and they were frequently subjected to racial violence. In some cases, entire Chinese communities were driven out of mining towns.
• They became a vital part of California’s labour force, not only in mining but particularly in the construction of the transcontinental railroad.
• They brought with them their food, religious practices, and cultural customs. For example, the first Chinese New Year celebration in San Francisco took pace in 1853 and became an annual event.
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Ethnic Diversity in San Francisco:
• The massive influx of immigrants, including Irish, Germans, Italians, Mexicans, immigrants from Chile, Peru and many other places made San Francisco a multicultural city. This led to the growth of ethnic neighbourhoods, businesses and cultures.
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Did You Know
The state motto of California on its crest is the Greek word Eureka, meaning "I've found it!", and there is a town in California called Eureka.
Did You Know
Most of the Forty-niners were men. In 1860 there
were 23 men for every woman in California.
Source C
The discovery of gold made an important contribution to
the settling of the West.
Martin & Shephard, The American West (1998)
Source D
The Gold Rush made many white people rich, but it
destroyed the Native Americans of California.
John D Clare, Native Peoples of North America (2002)
Source E
The California Gold Rush was pretty devastating not only
for the area, but for the Native Americans and most of the miners who went
there.
Erik Blakeley, The American West (2005)
Consider:
1. Few miners wrote home; do Sources A and B help you
understand why.
2. Sources C-E record the conclusions of three
modern textbooks about the Gold Rush. After studying this
webpage, which of them do you think 'gets it most right' – justify your decision ...
(and can you write a better conclusion)?
3. Plan out what you would write if you were asked
to describe the experience during the Gold Rush years of:
• the prospectors
• the Indigenous peoples
• the Mexican Californians
• the Chinese
immigrants.
- Edexcel-style Questions
1. Explain two consequences of:
• the discovery of gold in
California
• the 1849 Gold Rush for the Native Americans
of California.
2.
Write a narrative account analysing the key events of the California Gold Rush, 1848-57.
3.
Explain the importance of the 1849 Gold Rush for the growth of California.
- OCR-style Questions
1a. Identify one impact of mining on the areas where gold was found.
1b. Name one
mining town.
1c. Give one example
of how the 1849 Gold Rush harmed the Indigenous peoples.
3. What was the impact of the 1849 Gold Rush rush on the development of the American West? Explain your answer.
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