The Gold Rush
Presentation: The Klondike Gold Rush?????
Deadwood the next day with a quiz (Connect this film making three connections
with characters, the social dynamics, the environment, actions, the setting, etc.
and yesterday’s lecture).
The California Gold Rush is part of a larger history of western migration. Gold
added a new element to this Westward journey, and a new and highly masculine,
international character to the West. When gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill
near Sacramento, California, in 1848, a new kind of emigration began. In January
1848, even before the official end of the Mexican-American war, the focus of the
nation’s attention turned from the war to California’s gold mines. Single men,
arriving at the towns of the Missouri River with their possessions packed on
mules, followed the siren call of the gold strikes. This was a sudden, mass
migration. Only a small portion of these people took the overland trail. Most
came by ship around Cape Horn, South America. Or, they sailed to Panama,
crossed by land, and took another ship to the Sierra Mountains in Central
California.
Mining Eras
There are several different eras of mining in the 19th century. The first occurred
from 1848 until 1858 in California. This involved a mining technique that people
call surface mining. The miners in California dug sand and gravel from the creek
beds and wash them out with water. They collected whatever gold remains. This
mining required the least skilled, technology, or startup capital. It was also the
least efficient and the least productive way to extract gold or silver. During the
1860s prospectors spread surface mining throughout the west. Thousands of
miners set up mining camps, stretching from Oregon in the north almost to the
Mexican border in the South. They lived in tents, caves, or shacks. The gold
seekers dug into the stream banks and hillsides with a frenzy.
The early miners were called ‘49s after the year when most arrived, 1849. Some
of the 49ers were married men who left their families behind in order to travel on
their own. 5000 immigrants and their families had crossed the trail before 1848.
30,000 came in 1849, and 55,000 came in 1850. That gives you a sense of how
powerful the pool for gold was this discovery of gold through the entire nation
and the world into a state of high excitement. Nothing by today’s standards can
1
compare. The people who came up with no experience and just their enthusiasm,
would not be happy with what they found. If somebody was inexperienced at
pioneering and at mining, they suffered a great deal. People were lonely and wet,
cold and sick, and found that the image their expected did not match their reality.
These Gold Rush migrants were more heterogeneous than the overland trail
migrants. The Overland Trail, as a result, became an international highway.
Miners came from all over the globe. They hailed from Australia, Mexico, Ireland,
Chile, Peru, China, and other areas of the world that had recently experienced
gold rushes of their own. Slaves were brought in by their masters who were
searching for gold. Women from within the U.S. and from other countries like
China and Mexico were forced into prostitution and brought to the Gold Rush
camps.
The miners settled in mining camps. Camps were little more than tent sites near
the wet ground where rivers had been diverted so that their gravel beds could be
washed and sifted. The camps were full of excitement. Any time a rumor passed
through the camp that a new strike further down the river produced gold, that
rumor was enough to send the men packing off to a better location. The best
years of the gold rush were between 1849 in 1852. That was when a small
number of miners, using crude and primitive methods, sometimes no more than a
pan, a pick, and a shovel, could bring out sizable amounts of gold.
When picks and shovels failed to move earth fast enough, miners turned to a new
technology called hydraulic mining. This is the second phase of mining. Hydraulic
mining involves cutting down entire hillsides with powerful streams of water.
However the miners pursued the gold, they came and went in a rapid succession
that left towns and cities scattered throughout the West. As soon as they heard
that gold could be found in another area, they abandon their mining camp and
picked up and moved. This has led to a lot of ghost towns out West that people
can take tours of today. This new phase took place during the 1860s and 1870s.
Corporations, with their superior resources, moved in to exploit the more
valuable and difficult to find vein gold. Gold and other minerals were often buried
in rock, and those minerals had to be separated from the rest of the ore with rock
crushers and other expensive equipment. This left little opportunity for an
individual minor who was hoping to strike it rich. As a result, disappointed
California miners drifted throughout the Mountain West looking for new
2
opportunities. During the 1870s and 1880s, most of the mining activity took place
on the famous Comstock Lode near Virginia City, Nevada. In those years, new
discoveries and investments in Colorado, Nevada, Montana, South Dakota, and
Arizona kept the nation fascinated and the miners moving throughout the West.
When we talk about the mining camps and the environmental damage, you will
see that harsh reality of western life. Mining prospectors moved to all areas of the
West in search for gold and silver, but they would also find copper, coal, turquoise
and other minerals. Mining camps could be found in Idaho, Wyoming, the
Dakotas, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, Montana, and California. The mining camps
are probably the single most interesting element of Western History if you are
interested in learning about scandal, violence, sex, murder, saloon life. Some of
you may have seen the show Deadwood on HBO a few years back. Deadwood was
a real mining camp in South Dakota that the show was based on.
Mining camps were often very isolated by both distance and terrain from other
towns. They frequently consisted only of flimsy shanty buildings, saloons, crude
stores, dance halls, and brothels, all hastily built. These mining towns reflected
the speculative, exploitative, and transitory character of mining. If you travel
throughout the West you will find a lot of Ghost Towns that used to be old mining
towns back in the day. The camps had an unusual social and economic structure.
The Gold Rush inspired the development of “instant cities” anywhere the mines
were located. San Francisco is the classic example of an “instant city.” Instant
cities developed all across the west as temporary migrants moved into a region
with the desire to get rich quickly and move back to their home society to reap
the benefits of wealth. These men wanted to return to a society whose norms
they were more familiar with. This was a city that was created by an event rather
than a city that was created through a gradual process of migration. California’s
population exploded as a whole. At the start of 1849 there were only 14,000
people living in California. At the end of that year, there were more than 100,000
people living there. By 1852, California’s population reached 220,000. 80% of the
new arrivals were American-born, with the rest coming from Mexico, South
America, Europe, and Asia. Most were single men in their 20s and 30s who came
to California not to settle but to strike it rich and return home.
3
What about saloons? The gender imbalance in the mining camps also made
saloons prevalent as local businesses, thriving local businesses. An 1879 census of
Leadville, Colorado, reported 10 dry goods stores, 4 banks, and 4 churches, but
120 saloons, 19 beer halls, and 118 gambling houses. Saloons were social centers
in towns where most miners lived in crowded and dirty tents and rooming
houses. Mark Twain wrote about this in Roughing It in 1872, his account of
Virginia City, Nevada: “The cheapest and easiest way to become an influential
man and be looked up to by the community at large was to stand behind a bar,
wear a cluster-diamond pin, and sell whiskey.”
Their population was overwhelmingly male. In 1860, for example, about 2,300
men and only 30 women lived in the Nevada mining camps of Virginia City and
Gold Hill. There were simply less economic opportunities for women on the
mining frontier than men, but some women did work as miners. Most women
worked in the more conventional domestic jobs: some opened boarding houses
or hotels. Some worked as seamstresses and cooks or took in washing for the
miners. The very few married women often earned more than their husbands if
they rented out rooms to miners. It has been reported by historians that miners
would pay 10 dollars for a biscuit made by a woman.
This was a predominantly bachelor environment. The dilemma that many of the
white, middle class miners faced was that they were coming from places on the
east coast that had very strict ideas about bodily control, sexuality, temperance,
and gambling. These men would write letters back home complaining about the
absence of white, middle class women. Some of these miners were not used to
being around women of other ethnicities. This led to some schemes from
entrepreneurs. Eliza Farnham was an elite New Yorker who planned to send
women she defined as “respectable” ladies to California in 1849 in order to clean
up the morality of the area. There was a lot of excitement about this campaign,
but it ultimately failed. Only 3 women arrived. The miners, meanwhile, still
longed for home. They had abandoned loved ones but wanted the comforts of
home. So, women played an important role in the gold rush. They symbolized
what was missing. They symbolized a form of order, nurturing, and affection that
was absent from the miner’s life.
4
What other jobs were there for women in the mining camps? By far the largest
source of paid employment for women was prostitution. This element to mining
life is important for us to study because it shows the consequences of the
dramatic gender imbalance in mining camps and just how limited economic
opportunities for women were in the mines. Prostitution in mining camps was
NOT lucrative and, like today, many young women had run away from their
homes, or came from broken families. Some Chinese women were sold into
prostitution. In the 1870s one California newspaper described a scene resembling
antebellum slave auctions with Chinese women stripped and paraded on a
platform where prospective buyers would inspect them and bid on them. Public
authorities, the police, the sheriffs in mining camps showed little concern for the
abuse and even murder of prostitutes, although they fined and taxed “sporting
women,” as they were called, in order to raise money in the camps. There is one
estimate that 50,000 women engaged in prostitution West of the Mississippi River
during the last half of the 19th century, from 1850 to 1900.
Some of the women who came into the mining camps had powerful ambitions of
their own. There were fortunes to be had. Mining camp women worked in
primitive conditions. Most were either prostitutes or they were women who kept
hotels and cooked for 20 or 50 men. These women were paid for washing and
sewing. These women were just as determined as the miners were to earn
money. Women could charge the Borders $25 a week. Women could also charged
$16 a week for cooking just for one man. Women could also become bankers by
handling the gold dust for the men. They would often fill milk pans high of gold
dust and keep them under their mattresses in exchange for charging a high
interest rate to the miners. The miners were so desperate for banking services
that they would willingly pay an interest rate of 10% to these women.
What women longed for was privacy in the mining towns. This is a quote from
Narcissa Whitman describing the perspective of her mother, a missionary wife
who opened a lodging house for 10 or more men in the 1850s. She said, “I often
think how disagreeable it used to be for her to do her cooking in the presence of
men sitting about the room. This I have to bear ever since I have been here… At
times it seems as though I cannot endure it any longer… The cooking and eating
room is always filled with five or more men. They are so filthy they require great
deal of cleaning wherever they go, and this wears out a woman very fast… I hardly
know how to describe her feelings at the prospect of a clean comfortable closet
5
to pray in alone.” So, he was not merely the physical work which the women
found difficult, it was that there was no closet for solitude, no corner to preserve
any modesty or privacy.
Here are the experiences of another woman who made her living this way in San
Francisco in 1850. Her name was Mary Jane Megquier: I should like to give you an
account of my work if I could do it justice. We have a store in the size of the one
we had in wind drop, in the morning the boy gets up and makes a fire by 7 o’clock
when I get up and make the coffee, that I make the biscuit, then I fry the
potatoes, then broil 3 pounds of steak, and as much liver, while the woman is
sweeping and setting the table, at eight the bell rings and they are eating until
nine. I do not sit until they are nearly all done. I try to keep the food warm and in
shape as we put it on in small quantities, after breakfast I bake six levels of bread
than for pies, or putting, then we have lamb, for which we have nine dollars a
quarter, beef, and poor, baked turnips, beets, potatoes, radishes, salad, and that
everlasting soup, every day, for tea we have hash, cold meat bread and butter
sauce and some kind of cake I have cooked every mouthful that has been eaten
except in one day and a half that we were on a steamboat excursion. I make six
beds every day and do the washing and ironing you must think I’m very busy and
when I dance all night I am obligated to trot all day and had I not the Constitution
of six horses I should have been dead long ago but I’m going to give up in the fall
whether or not as I am sick and tired of work.”
In many camps half the population was foreign born, and another ¼ were first
generation Americans. These different ethnic communities often maintained
connections to the places they came from. In Virginia City, for example, Germans,
Mexicans, Chinese, French, Cornish, and Welsh each had their own churches,
bands, and celebrated their own national holidays. The west offered benefits to
these European immigrants. European immigrants who moved West to work in
the mines experienced less hostility in the West than they did in the cities in the
East coast where the Irish, German, and Polish immigrants faced a lot of nativist
hostility.
However, for non-white immigrants like the Chinese and Mexicans in the West,
there was a lot of ethnic hostility. White people frequently drove Mexican and
Chinese miners from their claims or refused to let them work in the higher paid
occupations in the mining camps.
6
Some of the women and men who worked in the mining camps had come over as
slaves. Sometimes an entire families of slaves had come with their masters,
secretly hoping to find a way to freedom in the territories. Oregon was far less
hospitable to blacks than many had hoped. The territorial Legislature had passed
laws banning the admission to black settlers, even though exceptions were made
if a black family wrote a petition to the government. When Oregon was admitted
to the union in 1857, the small number of blacks who had made their way to
Oregon lived and easily until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. California,
on the other hand, outlawed slavery within its boundaries in 1850. The reason
might surprise you.
Why do you think California and the people who lived in California or so opposed
to slavery? Miners were afraid of slave labor. They were afraid that miners would
bring their slaves, leading more profitable than the majority of the miners who
had been single, working-class men. The mind soon became places where a
mixture of races and nationalities worked side-by-side in the search for wealth.
This did not mean that things were necessarily peaceful in California, it simply
meant that mining camps had a very international profile to the. The common
denominator for all of these people was that they were all looking to get rich.
Everybody wanted to find gold the matter where in the world they were from and
to matter what color their skin was or what language they spoke. Even before the
discovery of gold, California had been settled by men and women of Mexican,
Indian, and African dissents. 18% of the population, according to Spanish Census
of 1790, were other than Anglo-American origin. By 1854, San Francisco already
had three black churches and 10 years later, while the Civil War was still going on,
the city had three black newspapers and an additional three more black churches.
That’s representative of the size and the opportunities that African-Americans
could find in San Francisco, a gold rush town. It is important to look at the
strength of this community in relation to the limitations that California law placed
on people of color: California’s first state Constitution did not allow Indians,
blacks, or Asians to testify against white people in the state courts.
The original lure of the West created many unrealistic expectations. The men in
California who had earned $15-$20 a day in 1848 had to be satisfied with wages
near $2-$3 a day only four years later. Rather than thriving as individual mining
7
prospectors, most became day laborers working for the newly organized mining
companies. This rapid decline in status, and the disappointment that thousands
faced once they moved West combined to make many miners violent to the
people around them who were a different race and ethnicity. Beginning in
California, there was a pattern of frequent public antagonism towards free blacks,
Indians, Mexicans, and Chinese that soon spread throughout the mining camps
throughout the West.
California led the way in the amount and intensity of this hostility. When the
United States acquired that region as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in
1848, the treaty guaranteed the property rights of all Mexicans living in that new
territory. They were allowed to stay Catholic, speak Spanish, and keep their land.
Only about 7500 Mexicans live in California at the time, and it appeared as though
there would be peaceful relations. However the hatred that some Americans felt
towards Mexico because of the war, and the discovery of gold in California made
that positive relationship practically impossible. News of which gold deposits
attracted Mexicans and Chile ends and people from other areas of Latin America
to the mining regions, and American miners resented having to share the wealth.
Discrimination towards the Chinese in the West
The bitterness was particularly strong in the Sonora mines in central California. In
Sonora the presence of hundreds of Mexican miners aroused so much anxiety
among the European and American born miners that in 1850 and group pushed
for a foreign miners’ tax. The Foreign Miners License Tax was put in place by the
California state legislature in 1850 in order to discourage Latin Americans from
mining in the region. As a result of this discriminatory law, all foreign-born
miners had to pay a $20 monthly licensing fee just to mine gold. This was aimed
at both the newly arrived Mexican miners and Mexicans who had been born in
California. This tax succeeded in driving most of them from the gold fields. Once
they left and stop the mining, the taxes lowered to $20 a year. This was directed
first at Latin American immigrants, repealed, but was eventually brought back in
1852 and redesigned to discriminate against Chinese miners rather than Mexican
miners. The way it worked was that non-Californians were taxed $20 per month.
This was a huge burden for miners. Most miners came to California with nothing
and were working in a very precarious, “boom or bust” industry.
8
The Chinese had originally migrated to the California gold fields in 1848, what was
called Gold Mountain, and then spread to the new mining areas of the Rocky
mountains. About 250,000 reached California between 1849 in the early 1880s.
Most have come over as indentured or bonded servants, having had their passage
paid for in return for a promise to work for a specified period of time. Most
Chinese were pushed into operating laundries and restaurants, and holding
menial jobs like hauling water and chopping wood if they worked directly in the
mining industry. In 1870, more than 25% of Idaho’s population was Chinese, and
10% of Montana’s population was Chinese in 1870. As economic difficulties were
send in mining towns, the Chinese began to experience tremendous prejudice.
Racism and the fear of economic competition sparked tremendous hostility
and violence against the Chinese in almost every mining camp. For example, in
Colorado, town leaders drove almost all of the Chinese out of Leadville, Colorado
by 1879 and white citizens of Denver burned down Denver’s Chinatown in 1880.
The worst anti-Chinese violence occurred in Rock Springs, WY in 1885 when white
miners killed 28 unresisting Chinese miners and drove away all 700 residents from
a local Chinatown. Although the members of the violent movement were well
known, no one was arrested or charged with any of the 28 murders—the police
and the courts of the town of Rock Springs refused to press charges. This is
significant for us to learn about because the community sanctioned violence
against racial minorities was one of the worst features of the mining camps. This
community sanctioned violence, the mob attacks and the refusal of law
enforcement to protect minorities, were the grim reality of life in the West that
contrasted the romantic images of the West as a space of opportunity for all.
What was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882? Resentment against the
Chinese was not confined to what are called “old stock” Americans. New
immigrants from Europe often instigated violence with the Chinese out West. The
worst legal attack against Chinese immigrants came with the Chinese Exclusion
Act of 1882. Throughout California, job-hungry whites gave their support to a
group called the Workingman’s Party of California to help pass the Chinese
Exclusion Act, approved by Congress in 1882. The big push to pass this law came
from workers (Irish American workers of the Workingmen’s Party, founded by an
Irish immigrant) angry that the railroad and mining companies of California paid
the Chinese for cheaper labor instead of hiring white workers. This measure
forbade any additional Chinese laborers entrance into the country. It allowed
9
some Chinese merchants and students to immigrate. This group of merchants and
students consisted overwhelmingly of MEN. The Chinese Exclusion Act would be
renewed in 1902. The result of the Chinese Exclusion Act is that the mostly
bachelor Chinese communities in the US declined by nearly half between 1890
and 1920. Many men died or returned to China. The gender ratio in Chinese
communities throughout the US remained unbalanced at about 14 men for every
1 woman.
Congress did not repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act until the middle of World War 2
in 1943. 1943 was the first time migrants from China became eligible for
citizenship. Congress did this because in the War in the Pacific against the
government of Japan, the US formed an alliance with Japan’s biggest and most
powerful neighbor, China. Repealing the Chinese Exclusion Act was a way of
showing China that the US government would improve the way it treated the
Chinese in the United States.
10