The California Gold Rush

The California Gold Rush

The California Gold Rush was the biggest and the richest of them all,

but it was no different from any of those that followed in providing

the majority of its participants with much rushing and little gold.

When forty-niners reminisced through beards grown longer and whiter,

the strikes of the past became richer and the nuggets bigger, but the

mournful truth is that most gold hunters would have done better

financially staying at home and been considerably more comfortable.

Let there be no misunderstanding, though the gold across the Sierra

Nevada was rich beyond belief, and many miners made strikes that

deserve the adjective "fabulous." It was just that there was not

enough gold in the streams to make everyone rich. Hubert Howe

Bancroft, historian of the West, estimated that during the peak years

of 1849 and 1850 the gold taken out averaged about $600 per miner.

Averages are usually misleading: this one, on examination, can mean

only that for every miner who struck it rich, there must have been a

platoon who hardly got to see what gold looked like.

It all began, as every schoolchild is taught, at the sawmill of John

Sutter one January day in 1848. A Swiss immigrant, Sutter at the time

ruled, benevolently and graciously, over an estate of 49,000 acres,

which he had received from the Mexican government and had built into

what, amounted to a self-sustaining kingdom. It lay in the valley of

the Sacramento, still almost empty of settlers, and his settlement,

called Sutter's Fort, was situated where Sacramento now stands.

In the summer of 1847 he sent a carpenter named James Marshall, in

charge of a crew...

... middle of paper ...

...The Talisman Press.

5)Rohrbough, Malcolm J. (1997). Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush

and the American Nation. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California:

University of CaliforniaPress.

6)Murbach, J. (1998). Gold Rush History. [Homepage of the Museum of

the City of San Francisco]. [Online]. Available:

http://www.malakoff.com/tcgrhfr.htm [1998].

7)Wiegand, S. (1998). Sacramento was the gateway to the gold.

8)Chambers, C. (1984). California Gold Rush. New York: Troll

Communications.

9)McMorrow, C. (1996). Gold Fever! New York: Random House.

10)Roop, P. & Roop C. (2002). California Gold Rush. New York:

Scholastic Inc.

11)Holliday, J.S. (1981). The World Rushed in. The California Gold

Rush Experience. New York: Simon and Schuster.

12)Ketchum, L (1996). The Gold Rush. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.