The California Gold Rush

The Stampede that Changed the World

Mark A. Eifler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415731836
• eBook ISBN: 9781317910213
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

In January of 1848, James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter's Mill in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. For a year afterward, news of this discovery spread outward from California and started a mass migration to the gold fields. Thousands of people from the East Coast aspiring to start new lives in California financed their journey West on the assumption that they would be able to find wealth. Some were successful, many were not, but they all permanently changed the face of the American West.

In this text, Mark Eifler examines the experiences of the miners, demonstrates how the gold rush affected the United States, and traces the development of California and the American West in the second half of the nineteenth century. This migration dramatically shifted transportation systems in the US, led to a more powerful federal role in the West, and brought about mining regulation that lasted well into the twentieth century. Primary sources from the era and web materials help readers comprehend what it was like for these nineteenth-century Americans who gambled everything on the pursuit of gold.

CHAPTER 1
“Gold on the American River!”

On January 1, 1848, California was a Mexican province under American military control, with small settlements stretched along the coast from San Diego to San Francisco. Precariously perched on the western edge of the North American continent and surrounded by a native population of roughly 150,000, easily ten times larger than the non-native population scattered settlements near the coast,¹ California was isolated from the rest of the continent by mountains, deserts, and plains, and from the rest of the world by a huge ocean whose winds and currents made it difficult to reach by sea. In 1848, California was difficult to get to and little known or understood by the rest of the world.

The transformation of California within the next three years would be one of the most dramatic and dynamic events of the first half of the nineteenth century.² If the Mexican War (1846–1848) was an expression of America’s sense of Manifest Destiny, the California gold rush was in effect destiny’s reward. The resulting gold rush would almost over-night transform California from an isolated backcountry to a major center of American power in the Pacific and beyond. Between 1848 and 1854, over 250,000 people migrated to California, and mined roughly $345 million worth of gold.³ The rush would reshape the transportation and communication systems of the world, and dramatically change the national economy. It would bring people from many different nations around the world together, while at the same time pushing the United States ever closer to a cataclysmic civil war. The experience would create a new version of the American dream, based on both reckless exploitation and almost unbelievable optimism.

James Marshall’s discovery of gold at Sutter’s saw mill has often been seen as the trigger of the California gold rush. Once Marshall discovered the gold, goes the thinking, the gold rush was a natural, even unstoppable, consequence. After all, who would not go to California as quickly as possible and simply scoop up the abundance of gold waiting to be found?

However, the story of the gold rush’s origins is more complicated. The discovery of gold was not so much the story of a single discovery, but of a series of discoveries. Nor was discovery alone enough. Before a rush could begin, news of these discoveries had to be gathered, verified, and carried to a larger community. That community in turn would need to provide support for a mining community to function: food, security, and transportation and communication facilities.

In January 1848, during the last weeks of the Mexican War, California had very little organization by which it could investigate, report, regulate or support anything like a mining boom. The local Mexican author ities were clearly no longer in power, but American authority was stymied by California’s distance and isolation, as well as by divisions within Congress between northern and southern interests regarding California’s future. When the war officially ended in February, even the military authorities in California no longer had any official power to organize the territory.

It is easy to overlook the weaknesses of the communications, transportation, and political systems of California in 1848, and to imagine that the news spread swiftly and “naturally,” and that Americans simply brought with them or created more formalized organization in 1849—to do this is to miss much of the real significance of the gold rush itself, both then and later. To understand the nature of that transformation, we need to look at how California in 1848 reacted to the discoveries of gold, and how the news actually spread to the rest of the world.

ON THE EDGE: CALIFORNIA IN 1848

Early in January, 1848, a winter storm barreling in from over the Pacific Ocean unleashed torrential rain on the mountains and valleys of northern California.⁴ For the great majority of the people living in the area—the Native peoples who had called California home for thousands of years, and the Hispanic communities which had begun settling the region less than a hundred years before—the storm was simply part of the normal cycle of seasons in California. There was no reason to believe this storm would bring anything new to the region, but winter storms could be destructive, causing flooding and landslides, and in that sense the storm may have seemed a portent of things to come. For California was currently facing the aftermath of another storm: the Mexican War.

The war had begun in 1846, over a dispute between Mexico and the United States over the southern boundary of Texas. Mexico claimed that the boundary was the Nueces River, while the United States claimed it was the Rio Grande. The dispute, however, was merely the pretext for seizing the Southwest and California from Mexico. California had been the real prize. Though distant from American settlements in the Missouri River Valley, California was of vital concern to the United States for its location facing the Pacific Ocean. Since the 1780s, Americans had ventured into the Pacific, dispatching merchants to China, hunting sea otters along the northwest coast of America, sending missionaries to Hawaii, and building a whaling industry that in the 1840s was booming and still growing. The acquisition of California would not only give the United States a vital land base on the Pacific, but would allow the young nation to continue building trail connections between the eastern States and the Pacific. Andrew Jackson had tried to purchase San Francisco Bay for $5 million in 1835, only to be rebuffed by the Mexican government. An American naval officer, Thomas ap Catesby Jones, had prematurely “conquered” California in 1842, only to retreat ignominiously when he discovered that the US and Mexico were not actually at war. When the war came in 1846, two land expeditions, under John Charles Fremont and Stephen Watts Kearney, and the Pacific Squadron under Robert Stockton all descended on California to quickly secure the main prize of the war. In January 1847, the last battles in California were over, but the war with Mexico continued for another year. By January 1848, the war’s ending was being negotiated and California was beginning to anticipate a new life within the United States.⁵ Thus, as the January storm swept ashore in 1848, California was beginning to brace for a new storm of American settlers who would surely be arriving in the coming years.

Or perhaps not. Life in California did not develop quickly. Though initially “discovered” by the Spanish in 1542, 300 years later European intrusion into California had been relatively slight. California remained one of the most isolated places in the world in 1848, largely due to geography. Spanish explorers setting off north from the coast of New Spain found the currents and winds prevailing along the California coast pushing against them, making sailing to California difficult. Captains soon discovered that they had to sail hundreds of miles west and north before catching favorable conditions, an exercise that could take many weeks. Once they managed to get to the California coast, they found it to be a formidable shore. Most of the California coastline is rocky, with mountains dropping straight into the sea. There were few natural harbors. San Francisco Bay was the most famous, of course, but the entrance to it was often shrouded by fog, and was easy to miss. Monterey Bay had a barely usable port at that time, open to the sea and Pacific storms. San Diego would initially be the major port for Spanish California, but it was located too far south to be of much service to the settlements hundreds of miles to the north. The overland route north into California was long, and obstructed with deserts, mountains, and powerful native tribes. Traveling north into California was dangerous and difficult, and, in many years, Native uprisings closed the trail, making overland travel to California all but impossible.

THE GOLDEN GATE

The name of the entrance to San Francisco Bay, the “Golden Gate,” was given by John C. Fremont in 1846, two years before the gold rush. He named it this because of its potential as a gateway to the commercial riches of Asian trade. In other words, Fremont expected gold to come into California through the bay, not go out into the world from it!

Because of these conditions, Spain had waited over 200 years to begin even attempting to establish a colony in California. When it did so, in the 1760s, it was settled as a kind of buffer zone, intended more to keep American, British, and Russian explorers, merchants, and settlers in the Pacific out of northern Mexico rather than developing the area intensely as an important part of New Spain. California was initially colonized by Spanish missionaries, who established a series of missions, approximately a day’s ride from each other, in a chain leading from San Diego to San Francisco Bay. This left the Spanish settlements strung out along the coast, dependent on each other and the ports of San Diego, Monterey, and San Francisco, and to a more limited extent a few other places along the coast such as near Los Angeles, where there was a break in the mountainous coastline. Since the region attracted few settlers, the Spanish officials and missionaries attempted to coerce the Native peoples of the coastal regions to live in the missions, and convert to Catholicism and Spanish customs and lifestyles. This policy had long been used on the Spanish frontier, essentially creating Spanish laborers from the local native population, and eventually mixing Spanish and Native peoples into a population that was loyal to Spain.

This practice had a somewhat limited success in California, however. First, because of the introduction of infectious disease, coastal Native peoples died in huge numbers, making it difficult to sustain the local population. Second, because the Spanish were limited to the strip of settlements along the coast, Native peoples who resisted the Spanish could escape into the interior regions, beyond Spanish control. As news of the Spanish spread throughout the region, the tribes of the Central Valley and Sierra Nevada foothills and mountains organized effective resistance to the spread of white settlement inland.

Mexico’s independence from Spain led to the closing of the missions in 1833, and the Hispanic population of California converted many of the mission communities into ranchos, again using local natives as essentially enslaved laborers. The new Mexican nation, however, was torn by debate and turmoil, and California—an undeveloped buffer region far to the north and difficult to reach—was generally left to its own devices. Over the next two decades, the Hispanic population of California, bereft of support from Mexico, developed a strongly independent culture. Referring to themselves as Californios instead of Mexicans, they built their ranches and opened trade with passing ships from Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. Rich in beef, tallow, and hides, California became a common stop for American ships in the Pacific, especially as the hides sold for a profit in New England. To American visitors such as Richard Henry Dana, California seemed to be an underdeveloped backwater, just waiting for Yankee industry to transform it.⁶

Yet California’s isolation still could not be easily overcome. The sea route remained long and difficult, and the overland route remained dangerous and exposed. In the 1820s, American fur trappers such as Jedidiah Smith began entering California from a new direction—from the east—crossing deserts and sometimes the mountains in search for animal pelts, and additional horses to carry them back to merchants at the Rocky Mountain rendezvous. Warned to stay out of the Hispanic settlements of the coast, these traders explored the interior valleys and mountains for hunting grounds and suitable passes to enter and leave California from a new direction. They found the trip rewarding: California’s interior Native peoples were soon stealing horses from the Hispanic settlements of the coast and trading them to the American fur trappers, sometimes for guns in order to resist further expansion of the coastal settlements. However, the trappers found few easy ways into or out of California from the east. The Sierra Nevada Mountains were a formidable obstacle along most of its 400 mile range, and the deserts to the south, such as Death Valley, made it difficult to bypass the mountains. A few passes were found, and in the 1840s a few hardy souls had attempted to branch off from the Oregon Trail and tried to breach the Sierra wall. A few hundred had succeeded by 1848. Only two years before the Donner party had been trapped in the mountains in winter, where nearly half the party had died. News of the tragedy illustrated the dangerous nature of the trail to California.

Thus, as the January 1848 storm sweeping in from the Pacific lashed California, and its residents waited to see if there would be floods and landslides, they waited to see too if the coming American takeover would result in a flood of new immigrants or merely a trickle. Could the American conquest overcome the obstacles of geography?

SUTTER’S AND MARSHALL’S MILL

The storm that blew in from the Pacific in January 1848 may have appeared a symbol of the changes that were coming to California. To John Sutter, who lived far inland from the Hispanic settlements that generally hugged the coast of California, the storm was potentially a very real disaster. Sutter had moved to California nearly ten years earlier, and had set up an isolated trading post that he hoped would be the seed for a personal empire in the center of the great Central Valley of inland California, beyond the reach of the Mexican authorities settled along the coast. The war between the United States and Mexico, still officially unresolved at the beginning of 1848, had brought the American conquest of California, but had nearly destroyed Sutter’s fragile empire. In an effort to restart his operation, Sutter had employed James Marshall to oversee the construction of a grist mill near his outpost, and a lumber mill in the remote foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Overseeing a crew of American workers—a small band of Mormons who had participated in the Mexican War and had been discharged in California—Marshall and Sutter selected a site for the sawmill about forty-five miles up the American River from Sutter’s Fort. Work on the mill was slow going, however, and the Mormon workmen had promised to leave in the spring, to rejoin the Mormon community at Salt Lake. During the January storm, Sutter and Marshall worried that the sudden rise in river water had washed away the half-finished mill. After gathering more supplies and equipment for the mill, Marshall set out on January 14 to return to the mill site and see what could be salvaged.

Arriving at the site, Marshall was relieved to discover that the partially completed dam meant to channel the water to the mill had withstood the high waters, although the flooding had been powerful enough to cut deeply into the channel the men had been digging to the mill site. Seeing this gave Marshall an idea. The upper channel leading to the mill was now dug; it was only the lower reaches, the tailrace, which remained unfinished. Why not let the rushing water carve out its own path once it passed the mill? Marshall decided to close the gate at the head of the channel each morning, so that the men could work during the day. Then each night he opened the gate, letting the water tear through the lower channel, hoping it would dig out most of the gravel of the tailrace on its own. With luck, the river itself would do most of the heavy digging for the workmen at the construction site.

After only a few days of this experiment ( January 24 is the usual date given, but the diaries of the men leave some question as to the exact date), Marshall was inspecting the tailrace in the morning to ensure that his scheme was working, or to see where, with a little directed digging, the men could help the river to follow a new course more efficiently. While examining the lower channel he discovered a small yellow pebble. Marshall showed it to the workers, saying he had discovered gold. The workers were skeptical, though a few simple tests on the rock—dropping it in lye, hammering it to test its malleability—all seemed to confirm that it was indeed gold.

The discovery was a surprise to the men, but it hardly seemed to be a major find. The crew had been digging and washing dirt through the riverbanks for weeks already, but no other gold had been found. A few workers began looking more closely at the gravel in the following days, and a fe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Introduction
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• Introduction
• 1 “Gold on the American River!”
• 2 Deciding to Go
• 3 The Stampede of 1849
• 4 Rushed Foundations
• 5 Reckonings
• 6 California Changes the Nation
• 7 Fools’ Gold
• Documents
• Suggested Readings
• Bibliography
• Index