Facts-
1. Gold was discovered on January 24, 1848 by James Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma. Gold initially was valued from $12.00 to $35.00 an ounce. (In 2012, an ounce is worth approximately $1,500)
2. The lure of sudden wealth brought about rapid, uncontrolled population growth of California.
3. All the gold produced in the century between 1840-1940 was worth less than the value of 1 year's agricultural output of the state in the 1960s
Major Consequences of the Gold Rush
1. Many of the men already in California - sailors, soldiers, landless tenants - abandoned their jobs/trades to get rich quick.
2. Americans as well as people from around the world came to California to get rich quick and then return home to live on their wealth.
3. Some east coast businessmen who were already wealthy gained further wealth, especially by transporting people to California by sea.
3.Chinese workers immigrated to the gold fields and attempted to assimilate into the economic life of California.
4.Very few individuals really prospered from placer mining. Most of the large profits fell into the hands of corporations who could afford hydraulic and quartz mining. In 1855, Hinton Rowland Helper published The Land of Gold: Reality versus Fiction. In it he stated that after three months of digging in the mines, he had realized a profit of 93 and three-quarter cents. His conclusion, "California can and does furnish the best bad things that are obtainable anywhere in America."
5.Hydraulic and quartz mining dramatically damaged California's landscape - damage that can still be seen in some parts of the Sierras today. Bayard Taylor's publication in 1852 of New Pictures from California described a hydraulic operation where a sixteen-foot nozzle directed water at a hillside at 120 pounds of pressure per square inch: "Like a giant bleeding to death from a single vein - the mountain washed itself away." In a later book published in 1854, he wrote the hydraulic mining had washed "enough material into the Yuba River to fill the Erie Canal." As can be seen in the photograph to the left taken on the American River in 1852, placer mining attracted huge populations of miners.
6.Mexicans were dispossessed of their land and their political power - not just by racial policies and procedures directed against them, but also at the hands of Mexican rancheros who assumed that siding with the white settlers would guarantee them positions of power and prestige in the new state of California.
7.Small-time politicians, or those seeking greater political power, came to California looking for new political opportunities. Many Southerners who feared the federal government planned to legally bring an end to slavery, saw bringing California into the union as a slave state as the key to their economic survival.
8.California might have been better off if gold had never been discovered; given its other natural advantages, it might have become just a populous and prosperous - but such prosperity would have been more gradual, orderly, and civilized. This is a recent, revisionist interpretation of the consequences of the Gold Rush.
1. Gold was discovered on January 24, 1848 by James Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma. Gold initially was valued from $12.00 to $35.00 an ounce. (In 2012, an ounce is worth approximately $1,500)
2. The lure of sudden wealth brought about rapid, uncontrolled population growth of California.
3. All the gold produced in the century between 1840-1940 was worth less than the value of 1 year's agricultural output of the state in the 1960s
Major Consequences of the Gold Rush
1. Many of the men already in California - sailors, soldiers, landless tenants - abandoned their jobs/trades to get rich quick.
2. Americans as well as people from around the world came to California to get rich quick and then return home to live on their wealth.
3. Some east coast businessmen who were already wealthy gained further wealth, especially by transporting people to California by sea.
3.Chinese workers immigrated to the gold fields and attempted to assimilate into the economic life of California.
4.Very few individuals really prospered from placer mining. Most of the large profits fell into the hands of corporations who could afford hydraulic and quartz mining. In 1855, Hinton Rowland Helper published The Land of Gold: Reality versus Fiction. In it he stated that after three months of digging in the mines, he had realized a profit of 93 and three-quarter cents. His conclusion, "California can and does furnish the best bad things that are obtainable anywhere in America."
5.Hydraulic and quartz mining dramatically damaged California's landscape - damage that can still be seen in some parts of the Sierras today. Bayard Taylor's publication in 1852 of New Pictures from California described a hydraulic operation where a sixteen-foot nozzle directed water at a hillside at 120 pounds of pressure per square inch: "Like a giant bleeding to death from a single vein - the mountain washed itself away." In a later book published in 1854, he wrote the hydraulic mining had washed "enough material into the Yuba River to fill the Erie Canal." As can be seen in the photograph to the left taken on the American River in 1852, placer mining attracted huge populations of miners.
6.Mexicans were dispossessed of their land and their political power - not just by racial policies and procedures directed against them, but also at the hands of Mexican rancheros who assumed that siding with the white settlers would guarantee them positions of power and prestige in the new state of California.
7.Small-time politicians, or those seeking greater political power, came to California looking for new political opportunities. Many Southerners who feared the federal government planned to legally bring an end to slavery, saw bringing California into the union as a slave state as the key to their economic survival.
8.California might have been better off if gold had never been discovered; given its other natural advantages, it might have become just a populous and prosperous - but such prosperity would have been more gradual, orderly, and civilized. This is a recent, revisionist interpretation of the consequences of the Gold Rush.