• The spark that ignited the gold rush occurred in May 1848
when Sam Brannan, a storekeeper in Sutter's Creek, found
a flake of gold.
• Ms. Wimmer used a lye soap solution overnight to verify
that the 1/3 ounce nugget Marshall had found was true
gold.
• The New York Herald printed news of the discovery in
August 1848 and the rush for gold began.
• 30,000 people assembled at launch points along the plains
in the spring of 1849
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• Many agricultural workers left in search of gold.
• Squatters invaded land, shot ranchers’ cattle and stole crops.
• There was nearly mass hysteria as thousands of immigrants from
around the world invaded the “Gold Country of California”.
There were two main routes:
1. A six-month sea voyage from New York around the tip of South
America to San Diego or San Francisco. Rampant seasickness, buginfested food, boredom, and high expense made this route
unattractive for many would-be prospectors.
2. The second route brought travelers over the Oregon-California
Trail in covered wagons—over rugged terrain and hostile territory.
Because of the discovery of gold, many
Americans from the eastern states left to
make fortunes in California.
• Digging for gold from early dawn until dusk was backbreaking
work.
• Gold diggers were called Forty-Niners.
• Some people died on the journey there and some turned around.
From a journal about the passage to California
• On May 11, 1849 Shufelt sailed out of New York harbor headed for
the Isthmus of Panama (at the time a part of Columbia). Although
he experienced a few days of sea sickness, he describes the voyage
as enjoyable. We pick up his story as he makes his way across the
isthmus to the Pacific Ocean hoping to find passage on a ship
bound for San Francisco.
"We took passage on a small schooner,
crossed the bay with a gentle breeze &
soon were winding our way up the
crooked river.”
• James Wilson Marshall saw something golden shining in the
tailrace at Sutter's Mill.
• This touched off the greatest writing and artistic frenzy in our
nation's history.
• The very first issue of the Panama Star, an American newspaper
printed in Panama, records the importance of that narrow piece of
land linking the United States and its new mineral-rich territory.
• Even with the crudest of mining tools, the earliest miners did well.
• All one had to do was to dig down into a placer, and wash the pay
dirt.
• The California Gold Rush is generally considered to have ended in
1858, when the New Mexican Gold Rush began.
• The large number of "'49ers” caused California's population to
increase dramatically. In San Francisco, for example, the
population grew from 1,000 in 1848 to over 20,000 by 1850.
Many employers hired more Chinese
workers when laborers left for California
• The Foreign Miners Tax was part of a campaign by native-born
white Americans to restrict the entry of Chinese laborers.
• In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act, halted Chinese immigration for
ten years and prohibited Chinese people from becoming US
citizens.
Many of the prospectors were fortune-seekers from
China, Germany, Chile, Mexico, Ireland, Turkey, and
France who travelled to California for the Gold Rush.
Despite the ethnic tensions it engendered, the Gold
rush forever changed the demographic face of
California by making it one of the most ethnically
diverse states in the Union by the middle of the 19th
century. And this is California today.