California Gold Rush
James Marshall found gold in a millrace on the American River in January 1848, and some 300,000 people arrived in California over the next seven years. The timing was remarkable. Mexico ceded California to the United States nine days after the discovery, in a treaty negotiated in ignorance of it. The news travelled slowly at first and was disbelieved until President Polk confirmed it to Congress in December, holding up a case of California gold, after which the world moved. The forty-niners came overland on the California Trail, by ship round Cape Horn in five to eight months, or across the Isthmus of Panama with a risk of yellow fever. They came from Mexico, Chile, Peru, China, Australia, Ireland and France, and the Chinese arrivals in particular met organised violence and a foreign miners' tax written for them. San Francisco went from about 800 people to 25,000 in two years, with ships abandoned in the harbour because the crews had gone to the diggings. Most miners made little. The reliable money was in supplying them, which is where Levi Strauss, Wells Fargo and Studebaker begin. Hydraulic mining from the mid-1850s washed whole hillsides into the rivers and silted farmland until it was banned in 1884. For California's Indigenous peoples it was catastrophic: the population fell from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000 in twenty years through disease, starvation and state-funded militia campaigns. California became a state in 1850, which reopened the question of slavery. The Compromise of 1850 admitted it as a free state and bought ten more years before the Civil War. Some 750,000 kilograms of gold were taken out.
- Year: 1848 CE
- Category: Social
