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The California Gold Rush

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The California Gold Rush

In 1848 John Sutter was having a water-powered sawmill built along the American River in Coloma, California, approximately 50 miles (80 km) east of present-day Sacramento.  On January 24th his carpenter, James W. Marshall, found flakes of gold in a streambed.  Sutter and Marshall agreed to become partners and tried to keep their find a secret.  News of the discovery, however, soon spread, and they were besieged by thousands of fortune seekers. (With his property overrun and his goods and livestock stolen or destroyed, Sutter was bankrupt by 1852.)  From the East, prospectors sailed around Cape Horn or risked disease hiking the Isthmus of Panama.  The hardiest took the 2,000-mile (3,220-km) overland route on which cholera proved a far greater killer than the Native Americans.  By August 1848, 4,000 gold miners were in the area, and within a year about 80,000 "forty-niners" (as the fortune seekers of 1849 were called) had arrived at the California goldfields.  By 1853, their numbers had grown to 250,000.  Although it was estimated that some $2 billion in gold was extracted, few of the prospectors struck it rich. The work was hard, prices were high, and living conditions were primitive. 

In what was a typical pattern, the Gold Rush slackened as the most-workable deposits were exhausted and organized capital and machinery replaced the efforts of individual miner-adventurers with more efficient and businesslike operations. Likewise, the lawless and violent mining camps gave way to permanent settlements with organized government and law enforcement. Those settlements that lacked other viable economic activities soon became ghost towns after the gold was exhausted. The California Gold Rush peaked in 1852, and by the end of the decade, it was over. Continue reading from Britannica 

From Our Collection
Link to The Age of Gold by H.W. Brands in the catalog
Link to Gold Rush A Primary Source by Kerri O'Donnell.
Link to Boom and Bust by William Quin in the catalog
Link to The Great Courses' Crashes and Crisis in Kanopy
Link to Gold! by Fred Rosen in the catalog
Link to Gold by Matthew Hart in Hoopla