The Gold Rush

In order to understand the significance of the Gold Rush, it is important to look back at the events that led to the discovery of gold in California. One of the most important events was the Mexican-American War (1846-48). The Mexican-American War was a war of national aggression to gain territory. It followed the 1845 annexation of Texas, which Mexico regarded as its territory. In 1836 the Texian Army won the Battle of San Jacinto against Mexican forces, led by famed general Santa Anna, and the Republic of Texas declared its independence from Mexico. But Mexico had refused to acknowledge this action and warned the U.S. that if it tried to make Texas part of the U.S., Mexico would declare war. In 1845 Texas voluntarily asked to join the U.S., and became the 28th state. This action led to Mexico to declare war on the United States, starting the Mexican-American War.

U.S. Territorial Acquisition map courtesy of nationalatlas.gov

After a series of conflicts spanning two years, the United States won the war. When the dust settled, the U.S. had gained a significant amount of new territory. The region collectively known as the Mexican Cession included all of present-day California, Texas, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah. The signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo officially ended the war on February 2, 1848. In addition to the ceded territory, Mexico gave up its claims on Texas and recognized the Rio Grande River as America’s southern border.

At the time, the war was regarded as a major American victory over a hostile foe, but in the wake of the sectional strife of the Civil War the Mexican-American War was all but forgotten by history. But the war was pivotal in shaping our nation’s future. It cemented the idea of the United States as an expansionist, transcontinental empire. It fulfilled the nation’s vision of Manifest Destiny – creating one nation from Atlantic to Pacific. It shaped the land on which many Americans live today. And it led directly to the California Gold Rush.

The Discovery of Gold

Unbeknownst to both the United States and Mexico at the time, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo would serve to further America’s growing wealth and prestige. For just six days before the treaty was signed, gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. None of the delegates at the signing of the treaty could have imagined that the rivers and streams in California were soon to yield a fortune in gold. In reality, neither the United States nor Mexico thought much of California. The land in California was a dangerous, semi-arid wilderness, inhabited with native tribes. The war had simply been about borders and territory – not what the territory actually held. Pioneers and migrants were more likely to choose the fertile territory of Oregon than they were California.

Gold was discovered on January 24, 1848 by John W. Marshall, a carpenter and sawmill operator who worked at Sutter’s Mill, owned by pioneer and German-born immigrant John Sutter. During his early morning routine check of the water-powered sawmill, Marshall spotted a glint of gold beneath the surface of the South Fork American River. Marshall plucked the pea-sized particle from the water and recalled, “I reached my hand down and picked it up; it made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold.” Marshall took his discovery to Sutter, who used an encyclopedia to confirm the find. Sutter recalled the even years later in a magazine:

It was a rainy afternoon when Mr. Marshall arrived at my office in the Fort, very wet. . . . He told me then that he had some important and interesting news which he wished to communicate secretly to me, and wished me to go with him to a place where we should not be disturbed, and where no listeners could come and hear what we had to say. I went with him to my private rooms . . . I forgot to lock the doors, and it happened that the door was opened by the clerk just at the moment when Marshall took a rag from his pocket, showing me the yellow metal; he had about two ounces of it. . . . After [reading] the long article “gold” in the Encyclopedia Americana, I declared this to be gold of the finest quality, of at least 23 carats.

Sutter swore his workers to secrecy, but within months the secret was out, and the Gold Rush was on. Newspaper reports on the discovery were initially met with disbelief, but once evidence of gold was brought into San Francisco the frenzy began. The San Francisco-based journal, The Californian, published the following on May 29, 1848:

The whole country from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and from the sea shore to the base of the Sierra Nevada, resounds with the sordid cry of gold! GOLD!! GOLD!!! – while the field is left half planted, the house half built, and everything neglected but the manufacture of shovels and pickaxes.

By mid-June 1848, three-quarters of San Francisco’s male population had left the city for the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in search of gold. All of Sutter’s workmen abandoned him to seek their fortunes in the rivers and streams, gripped with “gold fever Sutter complained that “even my cook has left me.” The Gold Rush turned life upside down.” When the news of gold reached the East coast, many men who had trained as bankers, lawyers, and doctors in the East now migrated westward, spending their days knee-deep in freezing water, moving rocks and stones until their hands were numb searching for gold.

This small piece of yellow metal is believed to be the first piece of gold discovered in 1848 at Sutter’s. Smithsonian Museum of American History

One man likened the “gold fever” to a highly contagious disease. Writing to his friends on the East coast he said, “The whole population are going crazy . . . Old as well as young are daily falling victim to the gold fever.” Wives and families were abandoned, left behind to figure out ways to support themselves. Shops were boarded up. Schools were closed. Soldiers abandoned their posts. Benjamin Kloozer, a soldier stationed in California, was torn between duty to his country and the lure of gold. As a soldier his wages were six dollars a month, but mining for gold he stood to make as much as $150 per day. Writing to his brother in Boston, he detailed his predicament, “I hate to desert . . . I am almost crazy. . . . Excuse this letter, as I have the ‘gold fever’ shockingly bad.”

Not all Americans viewed the Gold Rush as a positive occurrence for the country. Literary greats Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau spoke out on the detrimental effects of the event. Emerson wrote, “It was a rush and a scramble or needy adventurers, and, in the western country, a general jail-delivery of all the rowdies of the rivers.” Thoreau went further in his denunciation of the gold seekers, writing:

The recent rush to California and the attitude of the world, even or its philosophers and prophets, in relation to it appears to me to reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. That so many are ready to get their living by the lottery of gold-digging without contributing any value to society, and that the great majority who stay at home justify them in this both by precept and example! . . . Going to California. It is only three thousand miles nearer to hell. . . . Did God direct us so to get our living, digging where we never planted, and He would perchance reward us with lumps of gold? It is a text, oh! for the Jonahs of this generation, and yet the pulpits are as silent as immortal Greece, silent, some of them, because the preacher is gone to California himself. The gold of California is a touchstone which has betrayed the rottenness, the baseness, of mankind. Satan, from one of his elevations, showed mankind the kingdom of California, and they entered into a compact with him at once.

Arrival of the Forty-niners

The discovery of gold in 1848 by James Marshall sparked a massive wave of westward migration. The largest influx occurred in 1849, and those prospectors who sought their fortunes became known collectively as forty-niners, in reference to the year they arrived. Fortune seekers came by land and sea, from every corner of the world. There were three ways to journey to California in the days of the Gold Rush. By far the easiest and most popular route was the “Panama shortcut.” This journey was 7,000 miles and took approximately two to three months. Gold seekers would sail down the eastern coast of the United States to Panama. There they faced a thirty-five mile overland journey through the jungle, cutting across the Isthmus of Panama to reach the waters of the Pacific Ocean. They then boarded another ship which took them north along the western coast of Mexico to San Francisco. As California’s major port city, San Francisco became the gateway to gold.

“Forty-niner” Street Advertiser in Studio, San Francisco, 1890, Unidentified artist, Smithsonian American Art Museum

The second route was also by sea. Although it was the longest in terms of distance, nearly 15,000 miles, it was also the safest route, despite the risk of high waves, frigid temperatures, and a lack of fresh food. Travelers would sail south from the U.S. east coast past South America, down around the tip of Cape Horn, and back north through the Pacific Ocean to California. This route took approximately four to eight months.

The third and most treacherous route was by land – cutting across the continental United States by wagon train. The shortest in terms of distance – only 3,000 miles – the overland journey could take three to seven months. Traveling by ship was costly, so for many this was the only viable option. Travelers feared attacks from American Indians and wildlife, but the biggest threat actually came from diseases and sicknesses such as cholera, diphtheria, “mountain fever” (similar to typhoid), and pneumonia. The hardships that were encountered were numerous; belongings were lost crossing rivers, wagons broke down after encountering barely cleared trails, pack animals dropped dead from exhaustion, and weather ranging from violent thunderstorms and torrential rain to dust storms and scorching heat plagued gold seekers.

In 1849, San Francisco’s population skyrocketed from 812 to 20,000 people. The cost of land soared – the same plot of land which had cost $16 in 1847, sold for $45,000 just eighteen months later. Prices of goods and commodities also rose. Fresh produce was in high demand, with apples selling for $5 each and a dozen eggs for $50.

Miners in the Sierras (detail)

The reality of the Gold Rush was that people were likely to find greater financial success in selling goods and services to miners than they actually were in mining for gold. Enterprising individuals in the many mining towns that sprang up often made more money than those who mined for gold. Domestic workers could command $200 per month –matching what members of Congress earned. Women, more so than men, profited enormously from the opportunities the Gold Rush provided. The female population was significantly smaller than the male population, and so jobs that were traditionally assigned to women – clothes washing, ironing, and cooking – became in demand and highly paid professions. Artist Charles Christian Nahl’s mother Henriette supported the family by washing miners’ laundry. It has been suggested that the laundry hanging outside the cabin in the background of Miners in the Sierras is a nod to Henriette.

Outcome

There were other gold rushes in North America, most notably the 1896 Klondike Gold Rush in Canada’s Yukon Territory, but none was as historically and culturally significant as the California Gold Rush. The rush produced on average seventy-six tons of gold per year. By the end of the 1850s, it was estimated that $550 million worth of gold had been mined – approximately $187 billion in today’s dollars. The gold rush propelled the expansion and settlement of the western United States on a massive scale. In the years prior to the Gold Rush, a paltry 2,700 settlers had arrived in California. By 1854, more than 300,000 pioneers had settled there, including many settlers from other countries, some from as far as Australia and China.

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The painting Miners in the Sierras, depicts a type of mining called placer mining. The figure in the red shirt wields a pick-axe to loosen rock and gravel from the riverbed, while the figure next to him shovels rock into the bed of the long wooden device called a long tom. The long tom is balanced on the rocks of the river in such a way that water can course through it, so that the heavier particles of gold sink and become trapped at the bottom. The second figure in red at the end of the long tom sifts the debris in the box with a shovel. Gold Rush miner Luther M. Schaeffer, a native of Frederick, Maryland, spent nearly three years mining the gold fields in Nevada County, California and recalled the operation of the long tom. The description of the process in his journal entry from 1851 (the same year Miners in the Sierras was painted) makes it clear that this mining technology was already considered to be outdated:

Mining implements had undergone a vast improvement since the days of my first experience in mining. Then we used a rocker or cradle; now the ”long-tom” was introduced, by which twenty times as much dirt could be washed out. A long-tom is a trough about sixteen feet long, with a perforated sheet of iron inserted at one end; water is let on, and dirt thrown in, which it is only necessary to stir up and throw out the stones. It was a strange sight to see a hundred men working in pits, some digging, some throwing up the mud and stones, others shoveling it into the box, and others again stirring up the mass and throwing out the rocks. The noise was so great that one could scarcely hear anything beside the incessant rattle, rattle, rattle. Men worked faithfully, constantly and expeditiously.

The heyday of placer mining, or surface mining, occurred between 1848 and 1855. Over 1400 towns or camps were set up along hillsides along mountain streams. Miners worked the streams with long toms searching for gold in the surface gravel, but this supply was depleted rapidly, and placer mining went into a steep decline on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada from 1854 onwards. By the late 1860’s, only part-time miners and miners of Chinese ethnicity (who due to racial prejudice, were excluded from many industrial mines) continued to employ the old-fashioned methods used in placer mining.

During the dry months of the summer and early fall, the lack of rain and scarcity of water made it difficult to run the long toms. In a journal entry from June 14, 1851, about the same time that Nahl was in the mining camp Rough and Ready, miner Luther Schaeffer wrote that:

The great difficulty which miners labored under at this time, was in procuring a sufficient supply of water to wash their ”dirt.” No water and ditch companies had yet been formed, and men who owned valuable claims, were compelled to exercise the patience of grandfather Job, in waiting until the rainy season came around . . . During the summer months not a drop of water descends upon the parched ground, and those settlements destitute of never-failing streams, present a languishing aspect. But the winter months bring copious showers, and during this season everything assumes a cheerful appearance, and the miner’s heart is gladdened.

When surface deposits of gold declined, placer mining and the settlements built for this purpose were abandoned. If the harder to access deposits of gold were to be extracted, a new, more effective method would have to be implemented.

The Transition to Hydraulic Mining

The advent of the Industrial Revolution brought with it a stunning array of technological changes with a wide scope of applicability to different industries. Americans with their eyes on the West saw an opportunity to apply these technologies to the booming mining industry. At the forefront was hydraulic mining, a process in which large, pressurized water cannons propelled hundreds of gallons of water per second to wash away hillsides into sluices where the heavy gold could be separated from lighter particles and debris. This new technology, implemented by large-scale mining corporations, was faster, broader, and less labor intensive than any previous form of mining had been. In his 1873 California guidebook, author Charles Nordhoff described the hydraulic mining process:

Water brought from a hundred and fifty miles away and from a considerable height is fed from reservoirs through eight, ten or twelve in iron pipes through . . . a nozzle, five or six inches in diameter, is thus forced against the side of a hill one or two hundred feet high. The stream when it leaves the pipe has such force that it would cut a man in two if it should hit him. Two or three and sometimes even six such streams play against the bottom of a hill, and earth and stones, often of great size, are washed away until at last an immense slice if hill itself gives way and tumbles down. . . . I suppose they wash away into the sluices half a dozen acres a day, from fifty to two hundred feet deep, and in the muddy torrent which rushes down at railroad speed through the channels prepared for it, you may see large rocks helplessly rolling along. . . the gold is saved in long sluice boxes, through which the earth and water are run, and in the bottom of which gold is caught by quicksilver. . . . But, in order to run off this enormous mass of earth and gravel, a rapid fall must be got into some deep valley or river. . . .the acres washed away must go somewhere and they are filling up the Yuba River. This was once, I am told by old residents, a swift and clear mountain torrent; it is now a turbid and not rapid stream, whose bed has been raised by the washings of the miners not less than fifty feel above its level in 1849. It once contained trout, but now I imagine a catfish would die in it.

As effective as hydraulic mining was, it was not without consequences, as this type of mining was the most damaging to the region’s ecosystem. The lighter debris from the hillsides, including sand, clay, rocks, and wood, was washed downstream, clogging and flooding rivers. Thousands of acres of farmland were buried beneath the silt and debris. The giant nozzles, called monitors, which sprayed the pressurized water onto the hillsides could, depending on the size of the monitor, eject anywhere from 5,000 to 11,000 gallons of water per minute. This caused flooding and mudslides to become major problems. The addition of heavy rains and floods in 1861 and 1862 exacerbated the problem, pushing the silt and debris from mining operations into once-clear streams and rivers of the Sacramento Valley. One observer wrote in January 1862 that “the Central Valley of the state is underwater – the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys – a region 250 to 300 miles long and an average of at least twenty miles wide,” and that prior “to 1848 the [Sacramento] river was noted for the purity of its water, flowing from the mountains as clear as crystal; but, since the discovery of gold, the ‘washings’ render it as muddy as the Ohio in spring flood.”

The farming industry was the hardest hit by the mining activities. The resulting deluge of debris from hydraulic mining had washed silt and sediment – 4.5 million cubic yards annually – onto crop fields and had poisoned water supplies. Yet a cruel paradox existed, for in many cases the farmers owed much of their prosperity to the miners; the wheat, potatoes, and other food commodities grown by farmers were purchased by the ever-expanding mining communities. Any effort to curtail the mining industry would be both a blessing and a curse. The editor of the Nevada City Transcript opined on the dilemma, writing in 1875:

What are the owners of farms to do? It is an industry the whole world desires to foster. The Government will encourage it, notwithstanding agriculture may suffer. Hydraulic mining is in its infancy. The very storms which are so destructive to the valleys are just what the mines require. The sediment, which has been accumulated for years in the ravines and river beds, and preventing a good fall, has all been washed away, and made a place for the deposit of other quantities unwashed . . . It is evident mining will have to be stopped or that country will have to be abandoned for its present purposes, unless some method can be devised to overcome the difficulty. It is certain mining will never be stopped . . . What relief can be afforded we cannot apprehend.

Additional economic activities needed to support mining operations, such as hunting and fishing, also took their toll on the environment. The fish and wild game populations were absolutely devastated with the influx of miners in the years after the start of the Gold Rush. Already by 1877, residents were complaining to the state government of the conditions, stating that “a few years ago deer and kindred game were plentiful; in our mountains and valleys [because of] the wanton destructions of these animals [they] . . . will soon become extinct.”

Conservation Movement in California

Today with our twenty-first century eyes, it is easy to view the destruction caused by hydraulic mining and think about the long-term effects. Yet, in the nineteenth century, Americans were far less, if at all, concerned with the long-term effects of the hydraulic technique as they were with its output and the large financial gains to be made. This is because a unique dichotomy existed in the mind of the nineteenth century American, where a harmonious intersection between industry and the natural world existed, and was in fact celebrated. Nature was prized for very different reasons than we celebrate it today. Then, nature was valued for its ability to promote a particular sensibility. The first preserved lands in the nation, such as Yosemite in 1868, were not set aside for modern-day conservation concerns, but rather they were preserved for their potential to produce natural resources. It was believed that by tapping into natural resources, Americans could transform the beautiful, yet unproductive and uncivilized, wilderness into an equally beautiful, yet cultivated and bountiful garden. This sentiment was very much in keeping with the idea of manifest destiny, that it was the duty of Americans to civilize and settle the land from Atlantic to Pacific. Therefore it should come as no surprise that Carleton Watkin’s photographs were at the time, celebrated for both their representations of both nature and industry.

As long as the extraction of resources did not interfere with those elements of the landscape which provided Americans with a visual representation of their cultural values (e.g. vistas and geological formations), the public had no objection to such activities as mining, land development, farming etc. It was thought that the natural world was actually improved when man interfered and put his mark on nature. Whereas today, we value the American wilderness as an example of the world untouched by mankind; one that must be preserved from any kind of human interference or development.

There were some observers, however, who lamented the transformation of the California landscape by mining operations. In 1857 traveler J.D. Borthwick stated, “Young as California was, it was in one respect older than its parent country, for life was so fast that already it could show ruins and deserted villages . . . even villages of thirty or forty shanties were to be seen deserted and desolate, where the diggings had not proved so productive.” Lorenzo Sawyer, later chief justice of the California State Supreme Court, wrote as early as 1850 that miners had spoiled the California landscape: “Cast your eye along those vallies [sic], Deer creek, Little Deer creek, Gold run and many others, see their beds to a great depth thrown up, behold the pine, the fir, the cedar, the oak, these monarchs of the forest undermined, uprooted.”

After observing the crippling effects mining activities had on the environment, wilderness conservationist John Muir remarked that “the hills have been cut and scalped and every gorge and gulch and broad valley have been fairly torn to pieces and disemboweled, expressing a fierce and desperate energy hard to understand.”  Likewise, in his 1868 survey of California’s natural resources, author Titus Fey Cronise lamented the havoc the mines had caused:

By no other means does man so completely change the face of nature than by this process of hydraulic mining. Hills melt away and disappear under its influence. . . . The desolation that remains after the ground, thus washed, is abandoned, is remediless and appalling. The rounded surface of the bed rock, torn with picks and strewn with enormous boulders too large to be removed, shows here and there islands of the poorer gravel rising in vertical cliffs with red and blue stains, serving to mark the former levels, and filling the minds with astonishment at the changes, geologic in their nature and extent, which the hand of man has wrought.

The expanding ecological disasters caused by hydraulic mining did little to slow down operations, despite the constant complaints of farmers and valley landholders. Industrialists were not unaware of the resulting conditions, and certainly the profits produced for them by the exploitation of gold and other resources outweighed any concerns during the 1850s and 1860s. The mining companies also had far too much political influence for any complaints from farmers or land holders to take effect. It took many sessions of the California state legislature and the U.S. Congress before any regulations were put into place. Even then, the regulations were largely ineffectual until 1884 when a federal injunction finally put an end to hydraulic mining. It has been estimated that nearly one third of the gold extracted during the Gold Rush era, approximately $100 million worth, was extracted by hydraulic mining.

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