California Gold Rush

The California gold rush began on 24 January 1848, when James W. Marshall found gold at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and lasted until about 1855. News of the find drew some 300,000 people from other parts of the country and from overseas to a territory just taken from Mexico. The rush turned California into a state within three years, but it was catastrophic for the region's Native peoples.

California had been occupied by American forces during the Mexican–American War. Marshall was building a sawmill on the American River for the settler John Sutter when he noticed flakes of metal in the mill's channel. Sutter tried to keep the discovery quiet, fearing for his farming plans, but word soon spread. In February 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred California to the United States, and by March the San Francisco merchant Samuel Brannan was parading a vial of gold through the streets. In December 1848 President James K. Polk told Congress that the reports were true.

The first arrivals in 1848 were Californians themselves, followed by settlers from Oregon and people from Hawaii, Mexico, Peru and Chile. In 1849, the peak year that gave the forty-niners their name, about 90,000 people arrived, roughly half by sea and half overland. Americans came by wagon on the California Trail, by sailing routes including the crossing of the Isthmus of Panama, and others came from Europe, Australia and China. Thousands died on the way or in the goldfields from accidents and disease. San Francisco, a village of a few hundred people in 1846, had about 36,000 inhabitants by 1852.

There was at first no civil government and no law on mining rights, so miners adapted older Mexican customs: a claim could be staked, but remained valid only while it was being worked. Early prospectors panned gold from streams and riverbeds, and some collected thousands of dollars' worth in a day. As surface gold ran out, mining needed more money and labour, and from about 1853 companies used high-pressure hoses to wash away whole hillsides, a technique that badly polluted rivers and was later restricted. On average, merchants such as Brannan did better than miners, and many late arrivals made little or lost money.

For Native Californians the rush was a disaster. Mining destroyed fisheries and food sources, bringing starvation and disease, and settlers and militias carried out repeated massacres. The historian Benjamin Madley estimates that non-Native people killed at least 9,400 to 16,000 Native Californians between 1846 and 1873, and these killings are now often referred to as the California genocide. A state law of 1850 allowed settlers to hold Native people as bound labourers. Foreign miners also faced hostility: a foreign miners' tax of 1850 fell mainly on Latin Americans, and Chinese miners suffered violent racism.

The rapid growth in population pushed California to draft a constitution in 1849, and on 9 September 1850 it entered the Union as the 31st state under the Compromise of 1850. Gold financed new shipping lines and the Panama Railway, completed in 1855, and by 1869 railways linked California with the eastern states. Agriculture expanded to feed the newcomers, and the idea of sudden fortune in the West became part of what is often called the California Dream.

Our 1815 map shows California as a remote northern province of New Spain, and our 1878 map shows it as part of the United States, with the goldfields in the Sierra Nevada east of Sacramento.