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You are here: Experts > Homework Help > Women's History > General History > The California Gold Rush
Expert: Catie
Date: 5/6/2008
Subject: The California Gold Rush
Question
Dear Catie,
My name is Taylor Simon and I’m an 8th grader at Alderwood Middle School in Lynnwood, Washington.
I am doing a research project on the California Gold rush and my essential question is:
How did the California Gold Rush change the face of the West?
I was wondering if you could take a few minutes to help me answer a few questions.
1. Was it worth it to leave all your land from around the country to possibly find gold?
2. What do you think was the greatest impact of the California Gold Rush on the families of California?
3. What would you like all young people to know about this subject?
Thank you very much for your time. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Taylor Simon
Answer
Hello Taylor,
You have chosen a very interesting project for you to research.
The California Gold Rush was a very important time in the history of the United States. Many things changed with the great migration to the west. So let's see if I can help you with your project.
The California Gold Rush is very famous. Thousands of people moved to California after gold was found by James Marshall at Sutter's Mill on January 24, 1848. Although it took a year for the news to reach the east coast, by 1849 thousands of 'forty-niners' were mining for gold.
The California Gold Rush brought over 200,000 new people to California in just a few years. Most miners went home broke. The real money was made by freighters and merchants who brought and marketed supplies. Levi Straus 'struck it rich' by making and selling durable pants.
1. Was it worth it to leave all your land from around the country to possibly find gold?
From the beginning, the Gold Rush was different. Unlike other westward movements in American history, the gold seekers came not to settle, but to take. This was not a commitment, it was an adventure. In fact, they called themselves Argonauts, after the mythical Greek heroes who sailed in the Argo with Jason in search of the Golden Fleece, although we call them 49ers.
Most were, and remained, obscure strangers in a strange land, hoping to get lucky and go home with enough to make their lives better.
"Jane," 49er Melvin Paden wrote home to his wife, "I left you and the boys for no other reason than this: To come here and procure a little property by the sweat of my brow so that we could have a place of our own, that I might not be a dog for other people any longer."
This was the sentiment of most young men at the time. They were tired of working and not having anything to show for it.
Wherever they came from, it was often a wrenching decision to go. Men often left behind their wives and children with little more than promises and hopes.
"Dear wife," wrote Joshua Sullivan of Michigan, "my heart bleeds within me to think of starting on the west plains to be gone so long from you, but I will do the best I can." Just getting to California was fraught with difficulty. A 15,000-mile ship journey around the tip of South America could take five months. More than 500 ships did it in 1849 alone. Cutting across the Isthmus of Panama might take "only" three months, if one was willing to risk cholera and malaria. By land, the 2,200-mile journey from trail heads in Missouri or Iowa might also take three or four months, with a lot of luck.
Accidents, disease, malnutrition and violence habits led to an exceedingly high mortality rate. One estimate was that one in every five miners who came to California in 1849 were dead within six months, a rate so high that insurance companies refused to write new policies for people coming to the gold fields.
"It is an everyday occurrence," wrote a Nevada City miner in 1851, "to see a coffin carried on the shoulders of two men, who are the only mourners and only witnesses to the burial of some stranger whose name they do not know."
"A residence here at present," wrote one despairing miner in 1852, "is a pilgrimage in a strange land, banishment from good society, a living death."
Of hundreds of thousands that came hoping to find riches, only a very few succeeded and accomplished their goal of becoming rich in the gold fields, although many, many more found riches in supplying the miners with the necessary items of everyday living.
Was it worth it to leave everything they had to go into an unknown land and seek their fortunes? Some might say 'yes' others would say 'no'.
2. What do you think was the greatest impact of the California Gold Rush on the families of California?
In late 1849, the flags on ships in San Francisco Bay included those of England, France, Spain, Portugal, Hawaii, Hamburg, Bremen, Belgium, Sweden, Chile, Peru, Russia, Mexico, Norway and Tahiti. There were Chinese and Irish, Italians and Australians. In the 1850 census, a quarter of those counted in California were from foreign lands. No place on Earth was as racially and ethnically diverse, a California trait that has continued ever since.
We are thousands of miles from home," a newly arrived miner named L.M. Wollott wrote home, "and comfort ourselves by thinking that a knowledge of the indulgence in vice will never reach there. Here there are no parents' eyes to guide, no wife to warn, no sister to entreat ... in short, all the animal and vicious passions are let loose and free to indulge without any legal or social restraint."
And so they indulged. Alcoholism was a raging storm. Gambling, for many, became as much a religion as a pastime. Suicide rates soared, as did violence of other kinds. And "Judge Lynch" was the presiding law officer. In just one July week in 1850 in Sonora, two Massachusetts men had their throats slit; a Chilean was shot to death in a gunfight, and a Frenchman stabbed a Mexican to death. Marysville reported 17 murders in one week, and at the height of the Gold Rush, San Francisco averaged 30 new houses -- and two murders -- a day.
As the easy gold disappeared, xenophobia and racism grew. In San Francisco, Frenchmen were hunted down and killed because of a rumor one of them had started a fire that burned down much of the city. In Sonora, whites burned down the town as part of an effort to get rid of the Mexican and Chilean miners who had settled it. The Legislature passed a $20-per-month foreign miners tax in an effort to drive out non-Americans.
"The California Gold Rush made America a more restless nation -- changed the people's sense of their future, their expectations and their values," wrote historian J.S. Holliday. "Suddenly there was a place to go where everyone could expect to make money quickly; where life could be freer; where one could escape the restraints and conventions and the plodding sameness of life in the Eastern states."
The majority of '49ers were men who had left the wife and children at home. They left for several years sometimes sending for them and sometimes not. It was an era that our nation had never seen or experienced before with regards to the family. More and more women had to support the family while the men were away. Religion was one of the things that continued to help families. No one, no matter what country they came from wanted to throw away their family and yet when gold fever entered into the picture it often became an addiction which was uncontrollable.
3. What would you like all young people to know about this subject?
It was a new and hard lesson for a nation that had always equated the level of success with the amount of effort put into achieving it. Finding gold, America learned, depended far more on luck than good intentions. In the end, many of the 49ers came to a sobering conclusion: Hard work did not mean success.
As a matter of social history, the legacy of the Gold Rush was obvious: Thousands upon thousands who otherwise would never have thought of migrating to America's remote Pacific territory poured into California, which in 1848, when gold was first discovered, had a non-Indian population of barely 18,000.
The Englishman Borthwick claimed that the Gold Rush gave Americans their first opportunity to develop a territory as a colony in the English manner, as opposed to a frontier. The Gold Rush, he pointed out, brought to California not just wild people, but the cultivated populations of the Atlantic states. California blended frontier and civilization, laying foundations for a regional culture that from its inception combined qualities of the East, the South and the Far West.
The legacies of the Gold Rush were good, bad and ambiguous. California, sought for treasure, became a home, or, as the California-born (Grass Valley) Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce later put it, a frontier became a province. Values of care and preservation, however, did not overwhelm the habits of exploitation. The mountains of the Mother Lode were left gashed and scarred like a deserted battlefield. Californians sought easy strikes elsewhere. Most noticeably in the areas of hydraulic mining, logging, the destruction of wildlife, and the depletion of the soil, Americans continued to rifle California all through the 19th century.
Infinitely more tragic, the Gold Rush even further decimated the Indian population, whom the miners frequently cleared from their path like so many vermin. Indians not murdered were frequently enslaved, especially children and adolescents. Only one horrible word, genocide, can be employed accurately to describe the effects of the Gold Rush on Indians in the mining regions. Likewise were the Old Californians (Latinos in current parlance) pushed further to the wall, although they did manage, especially in Southern California, to hold on for another generation.
Yet for all this record of human and environmental abuse, California remained charged with human hope, linked imaginatively with the most compelling of American myths, the pursuit of happiness. California would never lose symbolic connection with an intensified pursuit of human happiness. As a hope in defiance of facts, as a longing that could ennoble and encourage but which could also turn and devour itself, the symbolic value of California endured -- a legacy of the Gold Rush.
The legacies of the Gold Rush were good, bad and ambiguous. California, sought for treasure, became a home, or, as the California-born (Grass Valley) Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce later put it, a frontier became a province. Values of care and preservation, however, did not overwhelm the habits of exploitation. The mountains of the Mother Lode were left gashed and scarred like a deserted battlefield. Californians sought easy strikes elsewhere. Most noticeably in the areas of hydraulic mining, logging, the destruction of wildlife, and the depletion of the soil, Americans continued to rifle California all through the 19th century.
Infinitely more tragic, the Gold Rush even further decimated the Indian population, whom the miners frequently cleared from their path like so many vermin. Indians not murdered were frequently enslaved, especially children and adolescents. Only one horrible word, genocide, can be employed accurately to describe the effects of the Gold Rush on Indians in the mining regions. Likewise were the Old Californians (Latinos in current parlance) pushed further to the wall, although they did manage, especially in Southern California, to hold on for another generation.
Yet for all this record of human and environmental abuse, California remained charged with human hope, linked imaginatively with the most compelling of American myths, the pursuit of happiness. California would never lose symbolic connection with an intensified pursuit of human happiness. As a hope in defiance of facts, as a longing that could ennoble and encourage but which could also turn and devour itself, the symbolic value of California endured -- a legacy of the Gold Rush.
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