The Western Experience
Ashley J. Seay
HIS 110
April 8, 2015
Professor Muhammad

The Western Experience
The 19th century was a very prosperous and interesting moment in history for my family. Living in California at the time gave plenty of opportunities for many miners because of the overflow of gold that had been presented. Before the discovery of gold in 1848, most of the West didn't belong to the U.S. Many Americans believed it was the country's "manifest destiny" to stretch from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, and President James Polk (1845-1849) was determined to acquire the Oregon territory from Great Britain and California from Mexico. He secured Oregon through a series of treaties, but California was a lot tougher (Elder, 2013). From January 1848 to 1860, the rivers that flowed from the Sierra Nevada produced a flood and abundance of gold. As soon as word passed around many people migrated to California in hopes of getting a piece of the “pie”. In 1849 almost one hundred thousand people came over from other places, while an estimated two hundred fifty thousand came by 1855. From San Francisco to China, from Australia to Western Europe, the social, economic, and political effects of California gold were profound. Among European nations, the impact in France and on the French was perhaps the most profound. Once it hit, gold fever attracted experienced miners from Latin America, laborers from China, investors from Europe, and speculators from Australia.
Almost overnight, San Francisco was transformed from a tiny settlement of 1,000 in 1848 to a boomtown of 25,000 by the end of 1849 (the rush of gold prospectors eventually lent their nickname "the 49ers," to San Francisco's NFL team) (Elder, 2013). France began 1848 with a violent revolution that gave rise to the country’s second experiment in republican government. The course of that revolution was