William Swain
The Swains worked a family farm near Buffalo, New York. Sabrina Swain pleaded with her husband,
William, not to go to California, but he had caught “gold fever.” She even asked his mother to help
convince him to stay behind. However, his brother George promised that if William went to California,
he (George) would stay behind and take care of the family and the farm.
William’s letter home:
November 6, 1850
San Francisco
Dear Friends,
…I have made up my mind that I have got enough of California and am coming home
as fast as I can….
We have taken cabin passage (to Panama) in a large and convenient New York packet
ship by the name of Mosconome. Her accommodations are very good and the number of
passengers going will not exceed one hundred in both cabins and in deck… the passage:
$85.
…I shall get home with only $700 or $800…but I am thankful for small favors. Also
I trust Heaven has blessed me beyond my expectations. If I arrive home with health
unimpaired, I have no regretting that I left home one this journey. Hurray for home….
I remain as ever,
Your Son, Brother, and Husband
William S.
Samuel Brannan
On February 4, 1846, 27-year-old Samuel Brannan sailed from New York City
aboard the Brooklyn. In the fall of 1847 he opened a store at John Sutter's
Fort. A few months later, rumors circulated that gold had been found nearby.
In early May, Brannan headed to the mines to see for himself. He learned
"there was more gold than all the people in California could take out in fifty
years."
Brannan did not actually dig for gold, but made his fortune by starting a
business. His store made enormous profits by selling as much as $5,000
(about $120,000 in 2005 dollars) in goods per day to miners. He made plans
to open a second store, and then a third. He had several buildings in
San
Francisco and was on his way to being the largest landowner in the
new
town of Sacramento.
During the 1850s and 1860s Brannan was known as the richest man in
California. He bought 3,000 acres in Napa Valley, hired Japanese
gardeners to tend the land and bought 800 horses. He called his new
resort Calistoga and catered to San Francisco's wealthy.
Hiram and Sarah Pierce
In the winter of 1849 Hiram and Sara Pierce were living in New York
with their seven children. Hiram was a blacksmith. He and his wife,
Sara, read reports about the discovery of gold in California. The
Pierces began the difficult conversation about whether or not Hiram
should embark on the long journey to improve the family's fortunes.
For Sara Pierce, Hiram's absence would mean she would become
the head of household and assume full responsibility for her family.
Pierce paid $25 (about $600 in 2005 dollars) for a "cradle," a device
that separates dirt from gold. At his first site, he found the diggings
worked over and poor. To make matters worse, prices were very high. Boots went for $16 and
cheese cost $2.50 a pound (about $60 in 2005). Every day more miners arrived. Pierce worked six
days a week. Yet he barely made enough money to meet expenses. When Hiram and his partners
divided their assets after a month in the diggings they each got $39.49.
By early April, Pierce was $100 in debt. He had been unable to send money home to his family.
Faced with difficult prospects, Sara rented out the blacksmith shop, called in debts owed to Hiram
and borrowed money from family members.
With nothing to lose, Pierce joined a mining company. He and a dozen men expended about $3,000
in labor digging a 700-foot canal next to the Merced River, into which they planned to divert the river
so they could mine the riverbed. They moved more than a ton of dirt and boulders by hand. As they
waited anxiously for the river's water level to drop, Pierce and a friend prospected together. Some
days they found only a few dollars. One day, they got $16. Pierce noted in his journal they were doing
better than the average miner.
When the water finally dropped, the riverbed was chock-full of immense boulders. By summer's end,
Pierce and his partners declared their mining operation a failure and their investment lost. In early
October, Pierce sold his belongings and rode out of the mountains on a mule train. He sailed from
San Francisco on October 13. Going home, he fell ill. By the time he arrived in Troy in January 1851,
he was so physically changed that friends hardly recognize him.
Hiram Pierce went back to blacksmithing, but his health and business declined during the Civil War.
His daughter Frannie wrote to her brother George, " You know he never got over his California [gold]
fever."
George C. Briggs
George C. Briggs arrived in California from Ohio in 1849, but did not spend much time
digging for gold. Instead, he grew fruit, which he sold to miners. On his 1851
watermelon crop alone he made $5,000 and turned the profits into fruit trees. In 1859
Briggs grossed more than $100,000 from his orchards along the Yuba, Feather and
Sacramento Rivers.
As Briggs' agricultural business turned a profit in the early 1850s, other miners-turnedfarmers cleared and planted the land along California's rivers to grow vegetables,
barley and dairy. Like Briggs, many turned quick profits and settled into the business.
Soon they were growing wheat and selling flour to the miners for as much as $3 a
pound.
The miners did not seem to understand that wheat was becoming the new gold. In
1880 a single farmer made $800,000 on his wheat crop. That decade, the value of the
state's agricultural production exceeded the value of its mines.
Yee Ah Tye
By 1848, when the first Chinese immigrants arrived in San Francisco, they already had an
established pattern of leaving China to work in other parts of the world. High taxes in China had
forced many peasants and farmers off their land. Several years of floods and droughts led those
who remained into economic desperation. Then came the news of Gam Saan, or Gold Mountain.
The majority of Chinese men who sailed to California dreamed of new possibilities.
Chinese miners tended to live in groups and work areas the Americans
had abandoned. Initially, Americans found the newcomers -- with their
wide hats and chopsticks -- peculiar and would visit Chinese camps for
amusement. Then, in 1852, a year of serious crop failure in southern
China, 20,026 Chinese flooded San Francisco. The previous year only
2,716 had arrived. By the end of the 1850s, Chinese immigrants made up
one-fifth of the population of the four counties that constituted the
Southern Mines.
Some Chinese men moved into other occupations, including the laundry
business, domestic service and later railroad building. Yee Ah Tye
became a partner in a store called Hop Sing in La Porte. By 1866 it was the richest Chinese store
in that town, with a value of $1,500 (about $40,000 in 2011 dollars).
When Chinese miners sent their gold home, their families quickly assumed a prominent
(important) new place in society. The women who were married to successful miners were called
"gold mountain wives." As they built new houses, they were subject to gossip and envy. Rarely did
stories about the hard work and the daily discrimination faced by Chinese in America find their
way across the Pacific.
By 1870 there were 63,000 Chinese in the United States, 77% of whom were in California. That
year, Chinese miners paid more than $5 million in state taxes (the foreign miners tax)—almost
one quarter of state's revenue. This did not stop Congress from passing the Chinese Exclusion
Act of 1882, a law designed to stop Chinese immigrating to the United States.
Vicente Perez Rosales
Vicente Perez Rosales was born in 1807 into a landowning family in Chile.
As a young man, his parents sent Perez Rosales to Paris to study, but the
family experienced financial trouble in 1830 and lost their estate. As a
newly impoverished intellectual, Perez Rosales tried his hand at small
business, digging gold in Chile, and even smuggling cattle from Argentina.
In the fall of 1848, three ships sailed into Chile carrying California gold—
one carried 130 pounds of gold dust! The sight of California's riches
captivated Chileans. Perez Rosales began to make plans to recoup
(regain) the family fortune. He was 41 years old when he sailed for
California with his three half brothers, a brother-in-law, two paid laborers
and three servants.
During the fall of 1848 and the spring of 1849, thousands of Chileans headed for California. A Chilean
who was already in the country told Perez Rosales that you could find gold in California by simply
bending down and picking it up. Optimistic, Perez Rosales and his party set off for Coloma, where he
began the hard work of digging for gold. He and his party had moderate success, taking in between
ten and 20 ounces a day.
Unfortunately, Chileans were targeted by American miners determined that non-Americans would get
no part of California's riches. The anti-Chilean sentiment swept San Francisco when a gang of whites
attacked Chilean businesses. In the mines, Americans raided Chileans' claims and drove them off.
The Chileans retaliated and several people were killed. Perez Rosales thought the Americans
cowards, but for his own protection he often posed as a Frenchman.
In April 1849 Perez Rosales left his brothers in camp and traveled down to San Francisco to pick up
mail. He found the city had grown tremendously since his arrival. New buildings and businesses
sprouted on every available patch of ground. He realized that those getting rich in California were not
the miners, but those who served the gold seekers.
Recognizing the prospects for making money in the gold rush economy, the brothers tried their hand
at trading goods, digging graves, and carrying freight. Finally, they scraped together enough capital to
open the Citizen's Restaurant in San Francisco, and hired a famous French chef. Business was
steady, but then trouble came in an all too frequent form. An arsonist set fire to a nearby building, and
the flames spread. His restaurant and much of the city were engulfed.
Perez Rosales and his brothers found a boat bound for Chile. Back home, Perez Rosales became a
writer and a politician and was eventually elected to the Chilean Senate.
Antonio Franco Coronel
Antonio Franco Coronel and his father moved from Mexico City to Los Angeles, California (which at
the time was still part of Mexico) in 1834. Antonio was just 17 years old. When war broke out
between the United States and Mexico, Coronel fought for his native country, Mexico. Not long after
Mexico and the U.S. signed a treaty, news that gold had been discovered in northern California
trickled into Los Angeles.
On March 2, 1848, Coronel left Los Angeles with about 30 people. They rode
to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. In August Coronel began to
dig. He worked beside miners of Mexican descent, Native Americans, and a
few White/Anglo Americans (who Coronel considered "foreigners"). News of
the gold was only just reaching the eastern states and the "rush" had not yet
begun.
Coronel found gold in abundance. First, he traded with an Indian—a single
blanket for nine ounces of gold. Coronel's servant, Benito Perez, sold a yearold sword for more than two pounds of gold. Perez then followed the Indians
and spied them gathering gold in a nearby ravine. Coronel and his party
moved in and took over. The first day, Coronel dug 45 ounces of gold. The next, he got 38 ounces.
On the third day, he dug 51 ounces. A man working nearby extracted 52 pounds. Another man
gathered gold with a spoon.
In February Coronel traveled to San Francisco. The port was bursting with people and he caught a
glimpse of the rush to come. "One saw a horde of people of all nationalities agitated by the fever of
gold, waiting a means of transportation to the mines, and asking people who came from there news of
their condition," wrote Coronel in his memoir.
In March the diggings were more crowded than the previous season. Coronel encountered Chileans,
Peruvians, Mexicans and an increasing number of Americans, many who had come south from
Oregon. Many Mexicans were successful miners, and before long the Americans posted notices on
trees saying that all "foreigners" had 24 hours to leave the mines, or they would be thrown out.
Coronel packed up and headed out cured of “gold fever.”
On the American River, Coronel and his workers found a rich claim. When strangers came by they
pretended there was no gold, but within a week a worker got drunk at bragged about the gold find.
One hundred armed Americans invaded the claim and announced the gold was theirs. Coronel
decided his life was worth more than gold. He rode home to Los Angeles in the spring of 1849. He
was done with the gold rush long before many miners from the East Coast had even reached
California.
Luzena Stanley Wilson
In the spring of 1849 Luzena and Mason Wilson packed their wagon and
drove west from Missouri with their two young sons. Like 25,000 other
Americans that year, the Wilson family was headed overland to California to
seek gold.
Initially Luzena Wilson thought going to California "a small task," but the
journey was not to be taken lightly. Wagons moved at a pace of about two
miles an hour and the trail was crowded with other “forty-niners.” Water and
food for the livestock was hard to find and the oxen grew bone thin. As the
Wilsons moved west, they found the trail littered with household items
discarded to lighten loads of the tired beasts. Cholera spread and the dead
were hastily buried along the trail.
The September evening before the Wilsons finally descended the Sierra foothills into Sacramento,
Luzena Wilson got a taste of how she would make her fortune in California. A man approached her as
she cooked supper and offered her five dollars for a biscuit. "I hesitated ... he repeated his offer to
purchase, and said he would give ten dollars [about $240 in 2005 dollars] for bread made by a
woman," wrote Wilson. Finally Wilson accepted the offer.
In the rapidly growing city of Sacramento, the Wilsons sold their oxen and bought an interest in a
small hotel. Luzena Wilson cooked meals and quickly learned her own value. In the six months she
lived in Sacramento, she saw only two other women. Her mere presence meant she could command
top dollar for her meals. Miners flocked to her table and paid in gold.
In 1850 women made up just three percent of the non-Native American population in California's
mining region. In total, immigrant women numbered about 800 in a sea of 30,000 men. As a married
American woman, Luzena Wilson reminded many miners of home, of their mothers, wives and
sisters. She was treated, as she put it, like a "queen." As a married woman, she even had more rights
under the California state constitution! Unlike other states back East, California state law allowed
married women the right to own property separate from their husbands. Luzena eventually opened a
successful hotel.
Women came to California from many countries—including France, Mexico, Peru, Chile and China—
to make money in the gold rush economy. Some made a living washing clothes for the miners; some
Mexican women sold tortillas and tamales on the street; a few French girls charged an ounce of gold
just to sit next to a customer; a Swiss woman working an organ grinder (playing music) made $4,000
in a few months; and other women worked in the gold rush's notorious sex trade.
Mary Ann and Lotta Crabtree
Lotta Crabtree was from New York City, the daughter of John and Mary Ann Crabtree, a bookseller
and an upholsterer. John left New York to look for gold in 1851. In 1852 Lotta and her mother tried
to join him, but when they arrived, he was not at the docks to meet them. Mary Ann and Lotta moved
in with friends already in California. When Mary Ann became friends with a group of actors, she
decided that this would be a good career for her daughter. Mary Ann enrolled her in dancing classes.
In 1853, John asked his family to join him in Grass Valley, California, where
he had plans to run a boarding house for the miners (he had not struck it rich
himself). A famous actress, Lola Montez, was living just two doors down from
their boarding house. Mary Ann became acquainted with her and soon little
Lotta, who adored Lola, became her protégé (student) and was allowed to
play in her costumes and dance to her German music box. This attention by
such a celebrated personality, confirmed in Mary Ann's mind that her Lotta
had talent and she soon sought more singing and dancing lessons for her.
Lotta began traveling to all of the mining camps performing ballads and
dancing for the miners. In 1856, the family moved back to San Francisco
where Lotta went on tour. She was frequently in demand at the city's variety
halls and amusement parks.
By 1859 she had become "Miss Lotta, the San Francisco Favorite." Mary
Ann was not only managing her daughter’s career, she was also managing
her money. She did not trust banks or paper money, and carried all of
Lotta's earnings – gold nuggets and gold coins—in a large leather bag.
When this became too heavy, it was transferred to a large steamer trunk.
(Considering all of the valuables they carried around, it is amazing they
were never robbed.)
For the next 20 years, Lotta was highly popular on the American stage.
Starting in 1870, she toured with her own company. Mary Ann continued to
manage Lotta's affairs, booking plays, locations and organizing troupes of
actors. When Mary Ann's steamer trunk became too heavy on their tours,
she would invest Lotta's earnings in local real estate and other businesses.
Levi Strauss
Levi Strauss was born in Germany in 1829. At the age of 18,
Strauss, his mother and two sisters sailed for the United States
to join his brothers Jonas and Louis, who had begun a
wholesale store in New York City called J. Strauss Brother &
Co.
The family decided to open a West Coast branch of the family
business in San Francisco, which was the commercial center of
the California Gold Rush. Levi was chosen to run the store for
the family. After becoming an American citizen, he caught a
steamship for San Francisco, arriving in early March 1853.
Strauss opened his wholesale business as Levi Strauss & Co.
and imported fine goods—clothing, bedding, combs, purses,
handkerchiefs—from his brothers in New York. He sold the
goods to the small general stores and men's mercantiles of
California and the West.
In late 1872 Jacob Davis, a Reno, Nevada tailor, started making men's work pants with metal points
of strain for greater strength. He wanted to patent the process but needed a business helper, so he
turned to Levi Strauss, from whom he purchased some of his fabric. On May 20, 1873, Strauss and
Davis received a patent for using copper rivets to strengthen the pockets of denim work pants. Levi
Strauss & Co. began manufacturing the famous Levi’s brand of jeans.
Alfred Doten
After school, Alfred Doten worked as a carpenter and fished for cod off the
Grand Banks in Massachusetts. Samuel Doten, his father, could not have
realized that in California his son would undergo a remarkable
transformation. (Far from home, Alfred Doten would discover a lifestyle that
included fighting, whiskey, and women.)
On March 18, 1849, Alfred Doten left Massachusetts. Townsfolk gathered
atop a hill to see the boat off, Doten noted in his journal. Many 49ers kept a
journal, often to record their adventures for family back home, but Doten's
was unusual because he seemed unconcerned about who might read it.
Over the next half century, he would scrawl thousands of pages that
documented his every unsavory experience.
Doten's sea journey around Cape Horn took seven months. Upon arrival in San Francisco, he wrote a
wide-eyed letter to his father, describing the free flowing liquor, the gambling, and the prevalence of
"the [gold] dust." Doten was eager to find his own gold. By November, he formed the Pilgrim Mining
Company and was mining near the town of Sonora, but without great success. Doten tried to keep the
company together, but the members voted to disband. In a matter of months, Doten had lost his
father's investment and was on his own in California.
Doten fell in with a crowd of rough miners. They worked hard by day, searching hundreds of buckets
of dirt for flecks of gold. By night, they drank. In his diary, Doten recorded his binges, noting he had a
"spree," or "bender," or that he got "infernally drunk" with the other men.
Doten opened a small store that also served as a local watering hole [bar]. "All day the store was full
of drunken Chilenos, French, etc., and the day passed off finely with plenty of jabbering and
quarreling and several fights in which some eyes were blackened and noses bled—but no one was
hurt very bad," he wrote on June 13, 1852, a Sunday. Violence, sometimes in extreme forms, became
a staple of Doten's life. After some Mexicans shot an American in a bar fight, Doten helped round up
the Mexicans and hang them from a tree.
In his journal, Doten described the "bunch in his throat" when he thought of his home, Plymouth. But
the longer he stayed in California without striking it rich, the harder it seemed to go back. Doten
followed the gold rush to Nevada and invested in various mining schemes, but never struck the big
one. Instead, his writing sustained him. He sent detailed articles about life in California to his
newspaper back home. In Nevada, he became a well-known newspaperman and owned the Gold Hill
Daily News for a few years, until he ran into financial difficulty.
In the long run, drinking took over Doten's life. He spent his last years on a barstool telling stories of
the early days of the Gold Rush.