Gold! The California Gold Rush

Ready to dig into some Gold Country history? Well, if you plan on traveling with us you better soak in a little information, otherwise you're going to be unprepared for the rough and rowdy era of the California Gold Rush!

California is known for its rolling hills, giant oak trees and populated cities. It’s also known for Hollywood, the place that makes all the movies. Let me be the first to tell you that these movies hardly ever depict what real life is like. I should know, I’ve met all those people they make those movies off of!

Of course I’m sure you’ve all read stories about the famous California Gold Rush. Who hasn’t? Someone discovered gold, everyone came to get it and now there’s no more gold, just a football team called the 49ers.

If you’ve done Californian history, you might recall that gold was first discovered at John Sutter’s sawmill in 1848. Do you remember who discovered it?

Not Sutter. One of his workers, James Marshall.

When James told his boss that he’d discovered gold in the river next to the sawmill, Sutter made all of his employees swear not to tell anyone. He knew that if word got out he’d have people all over his property, and of course he’d like to get some of the gold first. Who wouldn’t? Sutter owned the mill, therefore the land and the gold on the land was his, too.

Do you think you could keep a secret that big? Well, someone at the mill must have been bursting at the seams, for within a few months a shrewd merchant by the name of Samuel Brunnan headed to San Francisco to spread the word about the gold. Samuel owned a store near Sutter’s fort, and figured that if he told everyone about the gold he’d make a huge profit selling mining tools. He was right, as soon as the word “gold” caught everyone’s attention, San Francisco became a ghost town and Samuel Brunnan had a thriving business. Sure beats selling lemonade to make money!

Men flocked to California in hopes of striking it rich.

By the end of the summer of 1948, the news had spread up and down the Western coast, across the border to Mexico and even to the Sandwich islands, which is now present day Hawaii. I hadn’t even realized there were Hawaiian miners until Marin and I went to visit the gold mines. Who knew?

The news also made it to the Mississippi Valley and most of the eastern states. Newspapers were chucked full of accounts of men who claimed to get rich overnight, just by “picking the gold right out of California’s wondrous earth.”

Even so, the Eastern folks didn’t head out West yet, they wanted to make sure that this was the real deal.

So when President James K. Polk confirmed to Congress in December that there was indeed gold in California, the journey began. People from all walks of life sold their belongings to pay their way to the West. There were three ways to the goldfields. You could take a boat to Panama, cross Panama and then board another boat to San Francisco. Or you could take a boat around South America’s Cape Horn, the southernmost part of the continent. Finally, the cheapest way was to walk or ride to California from wherever you lived.

Each way had its dangers.

The demand for passage to California was so great that old boats or undersized boats were being used to take people around Cape Horn. Hundreds of these vessels were not made for such a journey, and in the stormy waters of Cape Horn, sunk.

If you were to take the trail to California, you’d find that in the Spring weather made a lot of the trails almost impassible. They also created the perfect place for muddy and contaminated drinking water, and thousands of the travelers were killed by bouts of cholera.

Even so, despite the setbacks and perils, by the time 1952 rolled around over 200,000 travelers had made it to California, “the Golden State.”

In the early days of the Gold Rush, some miners were pulling between $300 and $400 dollars worth of gold right out of the ground and dry riverbeds. In 1849 about $10 million worth of gold had been mined out of the Californian soil. As competition increased though, fewer claims brought in so much money.

Three miners try their hand at panning for gold.

So began panning, where miners started to sift through the soil in the running creeks and rivers to find gold there. It worked okay, but it didn’t yield as much gold as the earlier days had.

Because of the amount of money some of the miners were pulling in, shopkeepers and farmers took advantage of the gold strike. Boots cost $20 a pair, eggs $.50 each (they don’t even cost that much now!) and potatoes were $1.00 a pound. Marin and I only pay $.50 a pound for farm fresh potatoes, and even store potatoes only cost us $.45 a pound. The prices were outrageous, even in our costly world today we wouldn’t pay that much for some of those items. And this was back in the day when a dozen eggs cost about a dime!

By the end of 1849 the gold was already beginning to pan out. Miners started to move wherever there were rumors of a big strike, often setting up little tent and shack communities known as mining camps. They gave these camps funny names like Whiskey Bar, Poker Flat, or Flapjack Canyon. Women and children were hardly present in these towns, they were men communities. 

A drawing depicting what the mining camps looked like

You can imagine there was a lot of lawlessness in these camps. Sheriff’s were appointed quickly to restore order. Punishments were harsh and swift, oftentimes the outcome not too pleasant. Even so, claim jumping, where a man steals gold or says that someone else’s claim is actually his, happened a lot.

By 1851 big mining companies began to replace the small time miners. These huge operations would blast right through the mountain to get to the gold, and sometimes these tunnels would collapse on the miners. It was scary and tough work, you never knew when a mine shaft would come down on top of you.

The Gold Rush didn’t last long, but some of the communities the miners had built did. They became towns and cities that are still in existence today, though they’re very much changed. For instance, small communities like San Francisco and Sacramento became large towns in a couple of years. Can you imagine these places as towns? In our time now, they’re huge cities! But they were tiny at one time, until the miners moved in.

Though the number of people who struck it rich are tiny compared to the thousands who made hardly anything on the Gold Rush, we can still credit the gold fever for giving us the populated state of California today.

Here’s a little-known fact for you!

 Did you know that people joined the rush from as far off as Europe and Australia? Many Chinese also flocked to San Francisco to join in the gold rush. California became a huge melting pot with people from all nationalities and backgrounds working side by side to strike it rich. Many Californians today are the descendents of these hard working immigrants. 

Today in history: A steamboat by the name of the SS California, one of the first boats created specifically to carry mail, launched on this day, May 1st, for the first time in two months from San Fransisco. It was bound for Panama city. 
Why did the SS California remain at bay for two months? Because the Captain's crew jumped ship to go find gold! It took Captain Cleveland Forbes that long to find a new crew to sail with him to Panama city, because everyone wanted to strike it rich.

Join us next week, when Marin and I give you some books to read about the California gold rush. Don’t think for a minute they’re going to be boring, these stories hold adventure, danger and even mystery as the characters experience life in California first hand!

Oh and yes, we know its not May 1st in the USA, but we're in 1770s Russia right now, so we decided to give it to you today, since its May 1st here. ;)