WWWest-Online Development Blog

For many people, when they think of the Wild West, they think of the Gold Rush. But the thing is, there wasn’t just the one gold rush, but rather several separate, sometimes overlapping rushes to different locations where gold had been found in large quantities: the Georgia Gold Rush, the Colorado Gold Rush (aka the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush), the California Gold Rush, the Klondike Gold Rush. And that’s just a few of them.

The California Gold Rush started with a whisper in early 1848, when James W. Marshal, a carpenter at Sutter’s Mill (a sawmill being built in Coloma) found traces of gold. Reports vary as to whether he found them while digging, or in the mill’s waterwheel, but regardless of where he found them, he brought them to Sutter’s attention. Sutter, whose plans for the area were agricultural, was somewhat distraught by the find and wanted to keep it a secret, but as was bound to happen, rumors of the find started circulating.

Once word got out, hundreds of thousands of people rushed to the area to try their luck. Word spread not only in the Unites States, though. People from Australia, Asia (most of them from China), Latin America and Europe all came to find gold and to strike it rich. The gold seekers came to California by sea and by land.  The first waves of gold seekers got the nickname “The forty-niners” (49ers),  as a reference to the year 1849. People left their homes, jobs and their entire lives behind to fulfill their dream of becoming rich. The first waves consisted of individuals; the next waves were made up of entire families.

Though more than a few miners managed to find enough gold to become quite rich, gold hunting wasn’t the only way to make a profit in those days. Many people, both local and immigrants, opened up shop in and around mining camps and nearby towns, selling provisions, tools, sturdy clothes, and anything else the miners used and bought on a regular basis (remember Levi Strauss?). Many ad-hoc bars, saloons and guesthouses were also opened to provide entertainment for the miners. These tradesmen mostly made a nice income, too, since their businesses were the first places where the miners spent their gold. Some of them made millions of dollars, more than many miners.

As more and more gold was found, its value began to drop. This meant that, since they needed more gold for the same income, the miners had to work more and more hours, and after a while the whole endeavor stopped being worthwhile (that is to say, the day-to-day rut of finding little gold and selling it; if a miner found a big load, he’d still make a tidy profit), and some miners decided to cut their losses, sell their plot and try their hand at something else. Some returned from whence they came, but many decided to stick around California.

The immigration that followed the gold rush was huge. In the first year of the rush, 80,000 immigrants arrived in California. In all the years of the gold rush it has been estimated that over 300,000 people came to California, and most elected to stick around for good, even if they eventually stopped prospecting for gold. These numbers caused a huge jump in Californian population. New towns were established, and towns around gold concentrations grew bigger. A great example of this is San Francisco, formerly a small town of around 800 people, which boomed to upwards of 40,000 people. Another city to boom following the gold rush was Sacramento. Both these cities (and several other towns) retained their population even after the rush was over, and both are still well known today; Sacramento even became California’s state capital. Other towns and settlements did not fare so well, and their population dwindled as the gold deposits were depleted, until eventually they became ghost towns. California itself was elevated from the backyard of North America, to a hub of population and commerce. Incidentally, the years of the gold rush were also the time when California became a state of the Union.

To this day, California is associated to some degree with dreams – miners came to follow the dream of gold, computer start-ups came for the dream of a big exit, actors and other cinematically-inclined folk came following the Hollywood dream. And California still remembers the gold rush and the miners; Many Californian sports teams are called the 49ers, most notably the San Francisco 49ers; the city’s NFL team.

Stego