The California Gold Rush (1848-1855) was the "first world-class gold rush." Coming just as the world was moving from sail to steam, and from stagecoach to rail, the Gold Rush transformed California from a distant, quiet province to a focus of the world’s interest and imagination. The Gold Rush laid the foundation of the “California Dream” – a place to begin again, a place where untold wealth was just waiting to be found.

The Gold Rush started in January 1848, in the mountains of California, when a foreman building a saw mill found shiny pieces of metal in the tailrace of the mill; tests showed the metal was gold. Word soon leaked out, first to the rest of California, and then to the world. Within a few years, hundreds of thousands of prospectors and merchants came to California from around the globe, drawn by “gold fever” and the tales of riches available.

Gold had concentrated in the mountains of California as the result of hundreds of millions of years of geologic action. Early prospectors, called "Forty-Niners," at first retrieved the gold from streams and riverbeds using simple techniques, and later developed ways to recover gold which then spread around the world.

The Gold Rush brought wide-spread change to California, primarily because of an over-whelming increase in the non-Native American population; in just a few years, some 300,000 people (mostly young men) came to California from the rest of the United States and from around the globe. Stories of the fabulous "Golden State" and shiploads of California gold returned to every corner of the world – setting the stage for an on-going world-wide fascination with California which has lasted more than 150 years.

The Gold Rush started at Sutter's Mill near Coloma on January 24, 1848. James W. Marshall, a foreman working for Sacramento pioneer John Sutter, found pieces of gold in the tailrace of a lumber mill Marshall was building for Sutter along the American River.• Marshall quietly brought what he found to Sutter, and the two of them privately tested the findings. Dismayed that Marshall's particles passed tests for gold, Sutter wanted to keep the news quiet because he feared what would happen to his plans for an agricultural empire if there were a mass search for gold. However, rumors soon started to spread, and were confirmed in March 1848 by San Francisco newspaper publisher and merchant Samuel Brannan. The most famous quote of the California Gold Rush was by Brannan; after he hurriedly set up a store to sell gold prospecting supplies,• Brannan strode through the streets of San Francisco, holding aloft a vial of gold, shouting "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!"



On August 19, 1848, the New York Herald was the first major newspaper on the East Coast to report that there was a gold rush in California; on December 5, 1848, President James Polk confirmed the discovery of gold in an address to Congress.• Soon, waves of immigrants from around the world, later called the "Forty-Niners," invaded the Gold Country of California or “Mother Lode.” As Sutter had feared, he was ruined as his workers left in search of gold, and squatters invaded his land and stole his crops and cattle.

The then-tiny settlement of San Francisco at first became a ghost town of abandoned ships and businesses whose owners joined the Gold Rush. Then, it boomed as merchants and new people arrived. The population of San Francisco exploded from perhaps 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 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.

There was no easy way to get to California; Forty-Niners faced hardship and often death on the way to the gold fields. At first, most Argonauts, as they were also known, traveled by sea. From the East Coast, a sailing voyage around the tip of South America would take five to eight months,• and cover some 18,000 nautical miles. An alternative route was to sail to the Isthmus of Panama, take canoes and mules for a week through the jungle, and then on the Pacific side, wait for a ship sailing for San Francisco. Eventually, most gold-seekers took the overland route across the continental United States, particularly along the California Trail. Each of these routes had its own deadly hazards, from shipwreck to typhoid to cholera.



To meet the demands of the new arrivals, ships bearing goods from around the world—porcelain and silk from China, ale from Scotland—poured into San Francisco as well. Upon reaching San Francisco, ship captains found that their crews deserted and went to the gold fields. The wharves and docks of San Francisco became a forest of masts, as hundreds of ships were abandoned. Enterprising San Franciscans then took over these abandoned ships and turned them into stores, taverns, brothels, and one into a jail.

Within a few years, there was an important, but lesser-known surge of prospectors into far Northern California, specifically into present-day Siskiyou County, Shasta County and Trinity County. Discovery of gold nuggets at the site of present-day Yreka in 1851 brought thousands of gold-seekers up the Siskiyou Trail• and throughout California's northern counties.• Gold Rush-era settlements, such as Portuguese Flat on the Sacramento River sprang into existence and then faded. The Gold Rush-era town of Weaverville on the Trinity River today retains the oldest continuously-used Taoist temple in California, a legacy of Chinese miners who came. While there are not many Gold Rush-era "ghost towns" which are in existence, the well-preserved remains of the once-bustling town of Shasta, California is a California state historic park in Northern California.

Gold was also discovered in Southern California, but on a much smaller scale. The first discovery of gold, in the mountains north of present-day Los Angeles, had been in 1842, six years before Marshall's discovery, while California was still part of Mexico. However, these first deposits, and later discoveries in Southern California mountains, attracted little notice, and were of limited consequence economically.



By 1850, most of the easily accessible gold had been collected, and attention turned to the task of extracting the gold from more difficult locations. Faced with gold that was increasingly difficult to retrieve, Americans began to drive out foreigners to get at the most accessible gold that remained. The new California Legislature passed a foreign miners tax of twenty dollars a month, and American prospectors began organized attacks on foreign miners, particularly Latin Americans and Chinese.

In addition, the huge numbers of newcomers were driving Native Americans out of traditional hunting, fishing and food gathering areas, and conflict developed. Native Americans struck back to protect their homes and food-gathering areas. These actions provoked genocidal attacks by miners on native villages; out-gunned, the Native Americans, including women and children, were often slaughtered. Those who escaped the massacres were many times unable to survive without access to their food-gathering areas, and starved to death. Novelist and poet Joaquin Miller vividly captured one such attack in his work, Life Amongst the Modocs.

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. At its most complex, groups of prospectors would divert the water from an entire river into a sluice, and then dig for gold in the newly-exposed river bottom. Modern estimates by the U.S. Geological Survey are that some 12 million ounces (373 t) of gold were removed in the first five years of the Gold Rush (worth approximately US$7.2 billion at Nov. 2006 prices).


In the next stage, by 1853, the first hydraulic mining was used on ancient gold-bearing gravel beds which were on hillsides and bluffs in the gold fields. 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 (342 t) of gold (worth approximately US$6.6 billion at Nov. 2006 prices) had been recovered via "hydraulicking."



An unfortunate byproduct of this method of extraction was that large amounts of gravel and silt, in addition to heavy metals and other pollutants, went into streams and rivers. Many areas still bear the scars of hydraulic mining as the resulting exposed earth and downstream gravel deposits are unable to support plant life.

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 (which was also invented in California) had finally become economical, and it is estimated that more than 20 million ounces (622 t) were recovered by dredging (worth approximately US$12 billion at Nov. 2006 prices).

The Forty-Niners also engaged in "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 (yet another source of environmental contamination). Eventually, hard-rock mining wound up being the single largest source of gold produced in the Gold Country.

The arrival of hundreds of thousand of new people within a few years, compared to a population of some 15,000 Europeans and Californios previously, had many dramatic effects.

On the one hand, the human and environmental costs of the Gold Rush were substantial. Native Americans became the victims of disease, starvation and genocidal attacks;• the Native American population, estimated at 150,000 in 1845, was less than 30,000 by 1870. Explicitly racist attacks and laws sought to drive out Chinese and Latin American immigrants. The toll on the American immigrants could be severe as well: one in twelve Forty-Niners lost his or her life, as the death and crime rates during the Gold Rush were extraordinarily high, and the resulting vigilantism took its toll. In addition, the environment suffered as gravel, silt and toxic chemicals from prospecting operations killed fish and destroyed habitats.

On the other hand, the Gold Rush propelled California from a sleepy, little-known backwater, to a center of the global imagination - the destination of hundreds of thousands. The new immigrants often showed remarkable inventiveness and civic-mindedness. 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. The seeds of large-scale agriculture (California's second "Gold Rush") were planted during this time. Roads, schools, churches,• and civic organizations blossomed into existence.

The vast majority of these immigrants were Americans. 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 of the United States.

The Gold Rush wealth and population increase led to significantly improved transportation between California and the East Coast. The Panama Railway, spanning the Isthmus of Panama was finished in 1855. Steamships began regular service from San Francisco to Panama, where passengers, goods and mail would take the train across the Isthmus, and would board steamships headed to the East Coast. One ill-fated journey, that of the S.S. Central America, ended in disaster as the ship sank in a hurricane off the coast of the Carolinas in 1857, with an estimated three tons of California gold aboard.•

Within a few years thereafter, in 1863, the groundbreaking ceremony for the western leg of the First Transcontinental Railroad was held in Sacramento. The line's completion some six years later, financed in part with Gold Rush money, united California with the central and eastern United States; travel that had taken weeks or even months could now be accomplished in days.

The Gold Rush stimulated economies around the world as well -- farmers in Chile, Australia and Hawaii found a huge new market for their food, British manufactured goods were in high demand, clothing and even pre-fabricated houses arrived from China. The return of large amounts of California gold to pay for these goods raised prices and stimulated investment and the creation of jobs around the world.