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The California Gold Rush

 

1849

Gold Rush! Some 100,000 adventurers stream into California in 1849 alone, lured by the vision of incredible wealth. The following year, the value of gold production in California exceeds the total federal budget of the United States. Because of this treasure, California becomes the 31st state in the Union in 1850.

“Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!”

—Samuel Brannan

It’s hard to imagine today, but before 1848 California was an inhospitable and remote place, populated mainly by Mexicans, descendants of Spaniards, and Native Americans. Among the few European settlers was the Swiss-German émigré John Augustus Sutter, who had left his wife and children in Switzerland after the bankruptcy of his company and moved to the American West. By this time he owned a large piece of land in the Sacramento Valley, a settlement he called Nueva Helvetica. Sutter built a fort at the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers, and on the southern arm of the American River, near the village of Coloma, he started to put up a sawmill. It was there, on the morning of January 24, 1848, that one of the workers, carpenter James Wilson Marshall, found a gold nugget in the riverbed. Sutter and Marshall tried to keep the find secret while they gradually bought up more land. But the news of the spectacular discovery couldn’t be concealed for long when Sutter’s employees began to pay for goods with the gold they had found.

Things soon got out of control. Samuel Brannan, a Coloma shopkeeper, filled a bottle with gold nuggets and traveled to San Francisco. There he rode through the streets, waving the bottle and shouting, “Gold, gold from the American River,” to gain attention for his business, which just happened to include prospecting equipment. The California Gold Rush was on.

In 1848 only 6,000 people came to search for gold. But the following year gold fever truly took hold. As news of the finds spread, adventurers from all over the world hurried to California. Almost 100,000 people traveled to California in search of wealth and fast fortune in the boom year of 1849. They came from Asia as well. More and more Chinese arrived at Gum San, the “mountain of gold,” as they called California.

The numbers are staggering. In 1848 California had fewer than 15,000 people. In 1852, four years after the first gold discovery, the population exploded tenfold. San Francisco grew from fewer than 1,000 inhabitants in 1848 to about 25,000 residents in 1850. By 1855 more than 300,000 adventurers were searching for gold, and there were plenty of merchants to service—and take advantage of—them.

The Gold Rush in the Movies

With No Country for Old Men, directed by the Coen brothers, and The Hateful Eight, by Quentin Tarantino, recent years have seen a comeback of the Western as a movie genre. The concept of a gold rush was a popular theme in these movies in the past. Perhaps the most prominent is The Gold Rush (1925), a classic silent movie with Charlie Chaplin in his Little Tramp persona participating in the Klondike Gold Rush. Re-released in 1942, the movie remains one of Chaplin’s most celebrated works. More recent is Gold, made in 2013 by Thomas Arslan: The plot focuses on a small group of German compatriots who head into the hostile northern interior of British Columbia in the summer of 1898, at the height of the Klondike Gold Rush, in search of the precious metal.

Prices for prospecting gear multiplied by 10. In Coloma, Sam Brannan’s business took in 150,000 USD per month. Still, the promise of great wealth kept miners panning for gold in the riverbeds. Success meant they’d earn about 20 times as much as a worker on the East Coast in one day. In many cases six months of hard work in the goldfields earned adventurers the equivalent of six years of “normal” work. Annual gold production in California rose to 77 tons in 1851.

The value of that amount of gold exceeded the total US gross domestic product at that time. Many miners, though, had a hard time holding on to their earnings. Far from civilization, merchants charged fantastic prices for their goods, while saloonkeepers profited greatly on alcohol and gambling. In truth, the actual winners of the gold rush were businessmen and merchants like Samuel Brannan. The most famous of these is probably entrepreneur Levi Strauss. Born in Germany, he set up shop in San Francisco, and when he realized prospectors needed sturdy trousers to work in, he trimmed tent fabric to meet the demand. Jeans were born.

Almost 100,000 people came to California in 1849 alone. By 1855 there would be more than 300,000 new migrants.

With its growth in wealth and population, California’s political weight also increased. In 1850 the “Golden State” was incorporated into the United States. The boom didn’t last forever, though. Around 1860 the easily accessible gold reserves had been depleted, and many cities were abandoned. The population of Columbia, founded just 10 years earlier, dropped from 20,000 people to 500. Boom towns became ghost towns.

The pattern of the California Gold Rush would be repeated in other places over the next half century. Within a decade, the population of Australia multiplied by 10 in the aftermath of the 1851 gold rush on that continent, which evolved from a British convict colony to a more or less civilized state. In 1886 gold was found on the Witwatersrand south of Pretoria in Transvaal, South Africa. In a few years, Transvaal became the largest gold producer in the world. And in 1896, gold was discovered on the Klondike River in Alaska, leading to boom towns such as Dawson City at the confluence of the Klondike and the Yukon Rivers, which grew from 500 to 30,000 inhabitants within two years.

As for California, Sutter’s settlement eventually developed into Sacramento, the capital of the state. The huge wave of 19th-century gold seekers is recalled in the name of San Francisco’s football team—the 49ers. And what about John Augustus Sutter? He died in poverty in 1880.

Key Takeaways

•The discovery of gold by Swiss-German immigrant John Augustus Sutter and James Wilson Marshall triggered a true global gold rush. More than the prospectors, however, it was the merchants who generally became rich selling equipment and services.

•The California Gold Rush of 1849 kicked off a huge wave of immigration—with 100,000 new arrivals in that year alone.

•The discovery of gold accelerated California’s development, leading to statehood in 1850.

•The pattern of gold rush booms was followed in Australia, South Africa, and the Yukon.