California Gold Rush
The discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in January 1848 — only days before Mexico ceded California to the United States — set off one of history's great migrations. Within a few years some 300,000 'forty-niners' poured into California from across the United States, Latin America, Europe, Australia and China, swelling San Francisco from a village into a boomtown and carrying California to statehood by 1850. The rush generated enormous wealth, drove the building of roads, ports and ultimately the transcontinental railroad, and pulled the centre of American ambition decisively toward the Pacific. Its costs fell unevenly and heavily: indigenous Californians were dispossessed and killed on a catastrophic scale, Chinese and Latin American miners faced violence and discriminatory taxes, and hydraulic mining scarred the land. The sudden admission of California as a free state also sharpened the sectional crisis over the expansion of slavery that would erupt a decade later.
- Year: 1848 CE
- Category: Social
