The California Gold Rush

The California Gold Rush

Before the 1840’s, California was a mysterious, frontier land no one knew much about.

With many small towns in the middle of nowhere, few people showed interest in such a place until the winter of 1848. When tons of gold was discovered, it brought on one of the biggest migrations the United States had ever seen. The Gold Rush started as a small discovery on the banks of the American river and quickly escalated to be a huge impact on America’s economy. It changed the country forever.

The year was 1848. James Marshall and his work crew were camped along the bank of the American River at Coloma, California near Sacramento. The area was located in the Sacramento Valley at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains (History Staff). Marshall was head of a crew constructing a sawmill for a Sacramento agriculturist by the name of John Sutter. On January twenty-fourth, Marshall stumbled across some small pieces of gold near the fork of the American and Sacramento Rivers. He did not expect it. A nearby worker for Marshall, James Brown, notices Marshall exclaim and hurries over to see. He arrives to find Marshall holding his hat containing ten to twelve nuggets of gold. The two men are exhilarated. They are, at the time, unaware of it, but they have just triggered the biggest western migration America has ever seen (“Gold Discovered in California”).

Marshall reports the findings immediately to his boss, John Sutter, and the two men agree to keep the news a secret. If news gets out, they could have hundreds or thousands of non-natives in their state within weeks. Marshall and Sutter keep quiet. Before this particular incident, other false claims of gold findings had been reported from California. This one is real and wi...

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...s today. But it also resulted in many ethnic tensions in the new towns where the law was scarcely kept (“California Gold Rush”). San Francisco is a good example of the widespread impact the Gold Rush had. It prospered greatly by growing in economy and people. The city became the center of the whole rush. Many towns formed during the Gold Rush still exist in present day California. By the end of the Gold Rush in 1858, an estimated total of 500,000 had moved to California (“The California Gold Rush”).

The many thousands of people that moved to California in search of riches formed a brand new society. The Gold Rush provided these people a quick way to get rich provided they work hard. The movement affected these thousands of people as well as the United States and the World. It will always be remembered as one of the most prominent events of the nineteenth century.