California Gold Rush

The California Gold Rush was a period in American history marked by world-wide interest following the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Central California, and later in Northern California.

History

Beginning less than two years after the proclamation of the California Republic in June 1846, and before Mexico had formally ceded California to the United States in February 1848, the Gold Rush was a mass migration into California by hundreds of thousands of people seeking their fortune. A few achieved this goal and became rich. Most, however, found only enough gold to barely pay their daily expenses. The California Gold Rush is generally considered to have ended by 1855.

Although small amounts of gold had been prospected by the Spanish and Mexicans in Southern California during the late 1700s and early 1800s, little note was taken of these discoveries. The California Gold Rush is regarded as starting at Sutter's Mill near Coloma, California on January 24, 1848; James W. Marshall, an employee of Sacramento agriculturist John Sutter, found flecks of gold in the tail race of a lumber mill Marshall was building for Sutter along the American River. Marshall quietly brought what he had found to Sutter, and the two of them privately subjected the findings to tests. Dismayed that Marshall's flecks passed all the tests for gold, Sutter wanted to suppress this knowledge because he was concerned with expanding his utopian ideal of an agricultural empire, and dreaded the effects of a mass search for gold.

But rumors soon surfaced, and were confirmed by San Francisco newspaper publisher and merchant Samuel Brannan in March 1848. The most famous quote of the California Gold Rush is attributed to Brannan; reportedly after buying up as much of the prospecting supplies in town that he could, Brannan strode through the streets of San Francisco, shouting "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!" while holding aloft a vial of gold.

On August 19, 1848 the New York Herald was the first newspaper on the East Coast of the United States to confirm that there was a gold rush in California; on December 5, 1848, President James Polk of the United States confirmed the discovery of gold in California in an address to the United States Congress. Soon, waves of immigrants from around the world, called the "Forty-Niners," invaded what would be called the "Mother Lode" or the Gold Country of California. As Sutter had predicted when he had seen Marshall's gold, he was ruined as more and more of his workers left in search of gold and squatters invaded his land and stole his crops.

The then-small settlement of San Francisco at first became a ghost town of abandoned ships and businesses whose owners had decided to join in the rush, and then, slightly later, boomed as miners returned rich or, more often, broke and looking for wages. Pioneer Ivan McAmmon was the first in the city to demand what he called "fair wage" as a shopkeeper. The population of San Francisco exploded from a mere 1,000 in 1848 to 20,000 full-time residents by 1850. Like many boom towns, the infrastructure of San Francisco and other towns near the fields were strained by the sudden influx; leftover cigar boxes and planks served as sidewalks, and crime became a problem, causing vigilantes to rise up in the absence of police.

Within a few years, there was an important, but lesser-known surge of prospectors into far Northern California, specifically into present-day Siskiyou County, California and Trinity County, California. Discovery of gold nuggets at the site of present-day Yreka, California in 1851 brought gold-seekers up the Siskiyou Trail and throughout California's northern counties. Gold-Rush-era settlements, such as Portuguese Flat, California on the Sacramento River sprang into existence and then faded. The Gold-Rush-era town of Weaverville, California on the Trinity River today retains the oldest continuously-used Taoist temple in California, a legacy of Chinese miners who came.

The Gold Rush prompted considerable development in California. Non-Native American population increased dramatically; by some accounts, some 70,000 Forty-Niners arrived in California during 1849 alone, more than tripling the non-Native American population. The vast majority of these immigrants were Americans, and pressure grew for better communications and political connections to the rest of the United States, leading to statehood for California on September 9, 1850 in the Compromise of 1850 as the 31st State.

By 1854, more than 300,000 immigrants had arrived from around the world.

Included among the legacies of the California Gold Rush are the California state motto, "Eureka" ("I have found it"), and the state nickname, "The Golden State," as well as placenames such as Rough and Ready, Placerville, Whiskeytown, Drytown, Angels Camp, Happy Camp, and Sawyer's Bar.

The San Francisco 49ers NFL football team, and the athletic teams of California State University, Long Beach, are named for the prospectors of the California Gold Rush.

The literary history of the Gold Rush is reflected in the works of Mark Twain (The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County), Bret Harte (A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready), Joaquin Miller (The Battle of Castle Crags), and many others.

Geology

Over a span of at least 400 million years, gold which had been widely dispersed in the Earth’s crust became more and more concentrated by geologic actions into what became known as the “Mother Lode” region of California and the gold-bearing regions of Northern California. Only gold which is concentrated can be economically recovered.

Some 400 million years ago, California lay at the bottom of a large sea; underwater volcanoes deposited lava and minerals (including gold) onto the sea floor. Between 400 million and 200 million years ago, geologic movement forced the sea floor and these volcanic deposits eastwards, colliding with the North American continent.

Beginning about 200 million years ago, tectonic pressure forced the sea floor beneath the American continental mass. As it sank (or “subducted”), the sea floor heated and melted into very large molten masses (“magma”). Being lighter and hotter than the ancient continental crust above it, this magma forced its way upward, cooling as it rose to become the granite rock found throughout the Sierra Nevada and other mountains in California today – most famously in the sheer rock walls and domes of Yosemite Valley.

As the hot magma cooled and solidified, minerals with similar melting temperatures tended to concentrate themselves together. As it solidified, gold became concentrated within the magma, and during this cooling process, veins of gold formed within fields of quartz because of the similar melting temperatures of both.

As the Sierra Nevada and other mountains in California were forced upwards by the actions of tectonic plates, the solidified minerals and rocks were raised to the surface, and exposed to rain, ice and snow. As the surrounding rock eroded and crumbled, the exposed gold and other materials were carried downstream by water. Because gold is much heavier than most other minerals, this process further concentrated the gold as it sank, and pockets of gold gathered in quiet gravel beds along the bottoms and sides of old rivers and streams.

The California mountains rose and shifted several times within the last fifty million years, and each time, old streambeds were moved and dried out, leaving the deposits of gold resting within the ancient gravel beds where the gold had been collecting. Newer rivers and streams then developed and some of these cut through the old channels, exposing the gold.

The Forty-Niners first focused their efforts on these deposits of gold, which had been concentrated in the old gravel beds by hundreds of millions of years of geologic action. The Forty-Niners then also crushed quartz, and extracted the gold still hidden there.

Recovering the Gold

Because the gold in the California gravel beds was so richly concentrated, the early Forty-Niners simply panned for gold in California’s rivers and streams. However, panning cannot be done on a large scale, and industrious miners and groups of miners graduated to “cradles,” “rockers,” and “long-toms” to process larger volumes of gravel. Modern estimates are that some 12 million ounces of gold were removed in the first five years of the Gold Rush (worth approximately $8.5 billion at mid-2006 prices)

In the next stage, by 1853, the first hydraulic mining was used on old gold-bearing gravel beds which were on hillsides above current streams and rivers. In hydraulic mining (which was invented in California at this time), a high pressure hose directs a powerful stream of water at gold-bearing gravel beds. The loosened gravel and gold then pass over sluices, with the gold settling to the bottom, where it is collected. By the mid-1880s, it is estimated that 11 million ounces of gold (worth approximately $7.5 billion at mid-2006 prices) had been recovered by hydraulic mining.

The final stage to recover loose gold was to prospect for gold which had washed down over millions of years into the flat river bottoms and sandbars of California’s Central Valley and other gold-bearing areas of California (such as Scott Valley in Siskiyou County). By the late 1890s, dredging technology had finally become economical, and it is estimated that more than 20 million ounces were recovered by dredging (worth approximately $14 billion at mid-2006 prices).

The Forty-Niners also attempted “hard-rock mining,” that is, extracting the gold directly from the rock which contained it (typically quartz), usually by digging and blasting to follow and remove veins of the gold-bearing quartz. Once the gold-bearing rocks were brought to the surface, the rocks were crushed, and the gold was leached out, typically by using arsenic or mercury. Eventually, hard-rock mining wound up being the single largest source of gold produced in the Mother Lode.

External links

Gold rushes | California Gold Rush | History of California

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History

Geology

Recovering the Gold

See also

External links