The placer gold that had been washed down the mountains into streams and rivers was quickly exhausted, and what remained was buried deep below ground. Although some were able to find gold by panning for it or shoveling soil from river bottoms into sieve-like contraptions called rockers, most did not. Once in California, hopeful miners gathered in camps with names like Drunkard’s Bar, Angel’s Camp, Gouge Eye, and Whiskeytown, but the so-called “Forty-Niners” (because they arrived in 1849) did not find wealth so easy to come by as they had first imagined. In addition to the men with picks and shovels trying to reach the ship from the dock, airships and rocket are shown flying overhead. This Currier & Ives lithograph from 1849 imagines the extreme lengths that people might go to in order to be part of the California Gold Rush. Chinese immigrants came across the Pacific as well, adding to the polyglot population in the California Gold Rush boomtowns.įigure 2. Others journeyed from as far away as Hawaii and Europe. As California-bound vessels stopped in South American ports to take on food and fresh water, hundreds of Peruvian and Chilean immigrants streamed aboard. Settlers in Oregon and Utah rushed south and west to the American River Americans living on the East Coast sailed around the southern tip of South America or to Panama’s Atlantic coast, where they crossed the Isthmus of Panama to the Pacific and booked ship’s passage north to San Francisco. Easterners who could not afford to sail to California crossed the continent on foot, on horseback, or in wagons. The fantasy of instant wealth caused a massive influx of people to California. In 1849, thousands of people from around the world began to follow and the California Gold Rush had begun. By the end of the year, thousands of California’s residents had gone north to the goldfields with visions of wealth in their heads. When the news reached San Francisco, most of its inhabitants abandoned the town and headed for the American River. Word quickly spread, and within a few weeks, all of Sutter’s employees had left to search for gold. On January 24, 1848, a man named James Marshall discovered gold in the millrace (an artificial channel that carries water to power the mill wheel) of the sawmill he had built with his partner John Sutter on California’s American River. Word about the discovery of gold in California in 1848 quickly spread and thousands soon made their way to the West Coast in search of quick riches.Īfter the Mexican-American War, the United States had no way of knowing that part of the land just ceded by Mexico would become far more valuable than anyone could have imagined.
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