1949 Gold Rush In 1948 the Gold Rush truly started, it was the beginning of a time of great optimism in California but it had its difficulties and challenges too. It was a time the common man had power in numbers and even people of non-American birth had the ability to make a difference. It was a time when Native Americans and the environment were shoved out of the way of industry. It was a time when even the poorest of the poor had the ability to and sometimes did strike it rich. Because of this gold rush the territory of California became a state and even through hardships California ended up better than it started. California was all around the fastest territory in the Union to become a state. The population of California was 6,500 Californios, which are people who are from spain or mexico, 700 other people that are mostly American, and roughly 150,000 Native Americans before gold was discovered. It was the 24th of January in 1848 and James Wilson Marshall was building a sawmill on the American River in California, while doing this though he noticed a flake of gold in the river. He later said "It made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold." ("Gold Rush of 1849" 3). The gold discovery wrought immense changes upon the land and its people. After three months three-fourths of the men in the nearby city of San Francisco had cleared out and gone looking for gold (Caloma California 1).California, with its diverse population, achieved statehood in 1850, decades earlier than it would have been without the gold. By the end of 1949 the population was approximated at 100,000 non-natives and by 1852 it had grow to a massive 250,000 people (Califorinia Department of Parks 1). The state’s vibrant strength can be traced back to the hearty fortitude of those exuberant optimists of 1849. The independent, adventurous spirit that is such an important part of California’s economy today is a lasting reverberation of the great gold rush of 1849 (Caloma California 1). Life in the Californian mining towns was tough to say the least. The amount of different types of people in the newly-founded mining towns was extreme (U.S. History 2). Stories of the gold spread like wildfire and soon anyone that could make it to California by boat were there. The East Coast though did not know if the rumors were true but they later found out from the president himself that they were and people started coming over in mass numbers ("Gold Rush of 1849" 2). The people in these towns soon ranged from wealthy white claim owners to the poor mine working class which was normally people of Mexican descent, African Americans and even poor white men. Chinese people also made up a massive amount of the working population. These towns were much different than the movies depict them though, they were the homes of tired men who worked hard all day and slept all night. Yes, there was normally a bar or two but those were only heavily used on the weekends when the miners would get off work, get drunk and sometimes hire a prostitute if they could afford it. Laws in the mining towns basically became nonexistent, mostly due to the lack of money to pay sheriffs. Sometimes groups of men would get together to catch a criminal if he was being especially disruptive. This same problem also went into the basic public service system. It was not uncommon that whole towns would burn to the ground strictly because there would not be any sort of fire brigade or even a volunteer fire department system (U.S. History 4). For women life could be especially hard in the mining towns, instead of mining they had to become entrepreneurs in their own right. One woman, Luzena Wilson did just that. She decided that the food trade would be the most lucrative for her. She set up her stove and went to work. This is a portion of her autobiography.
"I bought two boards from a precious pile belonging to a man who was building the second wooden house in town. With my own hands I chopped stakes, drove them into the ground, and set up my table. I bought provisions at a neighboring store, and when my husband came back at night he found, mid the weird light of the pine torches, twenty miners eating at my table. Each man as he rose put a dollar in my hand and said I might count him as a permanent customer. I called my hotel El Dorado. From the first day it was well patronized, and I shortly after took my husband into partnership (As Quoted in Calliope 3)." The life of the Native American was also very difficult during the time of the California Gold Rush. At the time when James Sutter first found gold in California there were approximately 150,000-200,000 Native Americans living in California alone. Soon after by the end of the gold mining period in California there were less than 20,000 Native Americans left in California due to “Ethnic Cleansing” done by white settlers who believed that Natives were trespassing on their land and decided to hunt them for it (Kumeyaay 2 ).During this time period, much like many others, the Natives were heavily taken advantage of. Many of the Native Americans in California had little to no idea what gold really was and how much the white men valued it. It is said that often white people would trade small glass beads and other cheap trinkets for gold just because there was a large profit to be made (Effects of the California1). It has also been estimated that as much as $10 billion in gold has been taken from California lands that were once Native American tribal lands (Kumeyaay 1). The harshness of the gold rush of the Californian wilderness and wildlife was also horrendous for the people of the newfound state. After reaching its highest production point in 1853 where over $81 million dollars in gold was pulled out of California soils, it then gradually declined to about $45 million a year and stayed at that point for a while because all of the surface gold was gone ("Gold Rush of 1849" 3). Bigger and better ways of mining were therefore forced to come about and soon they started using more destructive methods of mining with heavy metals like mercury and arsenic being released into the water, killing or sickening many people. The ancient trees were taken down by miners to build equipment and the hillsides were washed away in mass numbers by the rising rivers. These mudflows would then flow downstream and flood and destroy any towns in their path with massive quantities of muddy slurry often killing or injuring hundreds of people ("Gold Rush of 1849" 4). Altogether these rather often incidents led to the killing of hundreds of people. California grew as a whole and as a people all throughout the gold rush. The Gold Rush forced California to go from a small town, easy-going territory to an area of great imagination and creativity and the new home for hundreds of thousands of people. The immigrants often shined a new light on issues and brought up new ideas that were very helpful in the new government of California. For example, in the midst of the Gold Rush, towns and cities were chartered, a state constitutional convention was convened, a state constitution written, elections held, and representatives sent to Washington, D.C. to negotiate the admission of California as a state (Stanford School of Medicine 1). Large-scale agriculture began during this time creating a new group of farmers that could make immense sums of money just by farming on very large plots of land. Roads, schools, and churches quickly came into existence. The vast majority of the immigrants were Americans which created a sense of nationalism that was easy to see when you look at how fast California became a state (Rhode 3). Pressure grew for better communications and political ties to the rest of the United States, leading to union with California on September 9, 1850, in the Compromise of 1850 as the 31st state of the United States. Undeniably the California Gold Rush of 1849 was a time of great difficulties and hardships for many people, especially Native Americans. These times were not wasted though, through these hardships a new state is born from an infant to a full grown adult in a matter of years where gold and guns ruled the land and everybody had a fair chance to succeed. Whether this success was in mining gold like some had or making money off of the miners it still gave California a new sense of optimism that even the small, poor guy has the ability to become great and powerful.