There was gold in them thar hills
It seems incredible in this era of 24-hour news coverage. But it took seven months for a newspaper to break the story that gold had been found in California. The legendary Gold Rush had actually started in January 1848, but it wasn’t until August of that year that the New York Herald brought the story to the east coast of America. Gold had been found by James W Marshall on January 24 at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California, and the news eventually saw more than 300,000 flood into the west coast state from the rest of the United States and beyond. This sudden influx of immigration and gold reinvigorated the stagnant American economy, but the Gold Rush wasn’t good news for everyone. Native Americans saw their population sharply decline as a result of disease, genocide and starvation while the prospectors monopolised food supplies. Indigenous communities were attacked and pushed off their ancestral lands by the so-called “Forty-Niners”, the name relating to the following year of 1849, which saw the biggest surge of incomers looking to make their fortune. Half of those who headed for California travelled by sea while the remainder trekked overland on the California and Gila River trails where conditions could be extreme. Most were American but there were also substantial arrivals from Latin America, Europe, Australia and China. The distinctive clothes the Chinese workers wore made them easily recognisable and they suffered violent racism from white miners and were discriminated against by the Foreign Miners Tax which meant they had to pay $20 (almost $600 in today’s terms) a month. Agriculture and ranching expanded through California to meet the needs of the new settlers and San Francisco – which initially became a ghost town of abandoned ships and businesses as people headed for the goldfields – grew from a small settlement of about 200 souls in 1846 to a boomtown of 36,000 just six years later. Roads, churches, schools and towns were built and the sudden influx meant California became one of very few states to go directly to statehood without first being a territory thanks to the Compromise of 1850. But, while gold worth tens of billions of today’s dollars was recovered, very few prospectors became wealthy. Most ended up with little more than they started with. Sutter, the owner of the mill where the first nugget was noticed, was among them. He didn’t want word to leak out lest it interfere with his dream of an agricultural empire, and his fears proved well-founded as his workers left to look for gold and squatters took over his land and stole his crops and cattle.