Dan Snow's History Hit - California Gold Rush

Episode Date: July 3, 2023

From the rings on our fingers to coins in our pockets and, for a select few, the medals hanging around our necks. Gold is one of the most coveted metals in the world.Gold still has the power to change lives, but in the mid-19th century, it also sparked the largest migration in the history of the United States.Don is joined by Professor Mark Eifler, author of 'The California Gold Rush: The Stampede that Changed the Nation', to find out how gold was discovered in California and who benefitted from it.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Siobhan Dale. The senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!You can take part in our listener survey here.

It is sure cold up here in Coloma, in this part of Northern California. It's the 24th of January in 1848, and we've been tasked with repairing the sawmill for Sutter's Fort. This ragged crew of local natives, plus a couple Mormons from the battalion, come up from the Mexican War. Our foreman, James Marshall, he also volunteered in the war, but he is here now making his daily inspection. As we toil away on the structure, I watch him pace the tail race of the mill, checking the flow. But suddenly he stops, noticing something in the stream of water.

Bends over, reaches down, and fishes out something small, holding it up in the sunlight. Even from where I stand, I can see the glimmer of the thing in Mr. Marshall's hand and an utterly dumbfounded look on his face. Seems impossible, unthinkable, but there it is. Mr. Marshall just discovered gold.

Hello and welcome to American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman and we are happy you're listening. Back when the Earth was young and forming, say about two billion years ago, meteors plummeting to the planet's still soft surface carried within them heavy metals forged by distant super high energy astronomical phenomena. Dying stars exploding, supernovas, neutron star collisions, kilonovas, all this outer space mayhem, the theorized source of the elements so greedily desired here on Earth, especially gold. It's really rather magical to think about it. At first, buried deep within the Earth's crust, eons later, magma from volcanic eruptions ferry the material back to the surface, depositing nuggets of the stuff across the earth in places where one day humans would spot them in the soil or in the riverbeds, getting very excited and a few of them getting very rich.

It happened multiple times all over this country from one generation to the next, but it was in the 1840s when the biggest discovery was made out west in California in the Sierra Nevadas at a place called Sutter's Mill. But the California gold rush was about much more than gold, a collision of its own, of culture and economy, of migration and mining. And finally, all of that forging the most glittering gold piece of them all, the state of California. Mark Eifler is a writer, speaker, professor at the University of Portland in Oregon, and author of The California Gold Rush, the stampede that changed the world. Mark, welcome to American History Hit. Thanks. Mark, your bio on the University of Portland's website

quotes you as saying, and I'm paraphrasing here, there are many parallels between the 1840s and today. It was a period of great inequity as people struggled to rise economically and socially. There was immigration, refugees, a threat to American tradition. As I said before, the California gold rush is about way more than gold, isn't it? Yes. In many ways, the 1840s, they're a parallel to today. Many of the same kind of things that concern us today were concerning people back then, too. Let's discuss the discovery of the gold and then talk about the context of the event. It's rather amazing how it all begins. January 24th, 1848.

Who finds the gold first and where? Well, according to the traditional story, James Marshall discovers gold at Sutter's Mill, which is a little lumber milling site that's under construction in the Sierra foothills just to the east of Sacramento. There are a handful of workers who are building the site and they've been having trouble. There's been a big storm that's come through. It's kind of washed away some of the equipment. And so Marshall gets this idea that why don't we let the river help create the power for this mill by having the workers dig a canal during the day and then at night let the water just rush through to carry all the debris away rather than the workers having to carry it. And so each morning Marshall would go out and check the mill race and when he did

he discovered some nuggets of gold. This was again supposedly about January 24th, beginning of the year 1848. The exact date isn't clear. He goes down to Sutter to tell him, basically, I think we found a gold mine. Sutter doesn't want to do anything about it. He wants to leave it alone. He says, basically, there's been rumors of gold up there before. People claim they find a nugget here or there, but they never see anything. This would just be an excuse to keep the mill from being built. And once the Americans start coming in and within the next year or two, their real gold, if you will, is to be made from selling lumber to them to build housing and things like that. And so he didn't want them to give up the work. And he told the workers, you can go looking for the gold, but anything you find, you have to share with us. Well, the workers, for the most

part, it's again, it's January, it's February. It's very cold. It's very wet. They're doing the work. They're not really going out looking for gold, except for one guy named Henry Bigler. And Bigler, for two reasons, starts wandering away from the site. First of all, he's noticed when he looks for gold that it's been washed downstream and is in little crevices and things like that. So he decides, okay, fine, if it's being washed downstream, I should go farther downstream to find more. And second, he figures if he goes downstream, he's getting off of Sutter's land, he'd be able to keep whatever he finds. And sure enough, he finds a place about a month later where he's getting $30 a day digging for gold.

Now, that might not sound like much to us, but Sutter was paying them $25 a month to dig this ditch. So they begin to wander down there, and of course, they start finding it. What makes it even better is that the men who are working are not really Californians. They have joined the U.S. Army. They're known as the Mormon Battalion. They were in the recent war with Mexico. They have marched from the Midwest down to the Southwest, and they're discharged at the end of the war in California. Well, they've got to figure out some way to get back. And so they go to work for Sutter, basically just to get some wintering over money, and then they're going to

head off to Salt Lake City, which means that when Bigler finds this gold, he is part of a larger community. And he starts spreading the word around to the other Mormons, including one of the leaders out there named Sam Brannan. And Sam Brannan is interesting in his view on this whole thing, because he was one of the leaders of another group that had headed to California of Mormon settlers. He had always looked at the Mormon movement from the perspective of a leader. He's thinking about what supplies do we need? How do we work this out? He's not looking at an individual. So when he hears about this gold, his first thoughts are things like, well, we're going to need shovels, we're going to need blankets, we're going to need things like this.

And so he, of course, buys all those things up and then goes down to San Francisco and starts announcing to everybody he can call her in the street that gold has been discovered. Oh, and by the way, I have all the blankets and everything else you need. way I have all the blankets and everything else you need. And honest to God, shovels that he bought the week before for $1.20 are now selling for $12 each. It's the old story. You want to make money, start a hardware store. There had been an earlier gold rush down south around what becomes Los Angeles, right? I mean, not a few years earlier. Right. No, it wasn't too much earlier. It was just about, oh, I think about 40 miles east of Los Angeles. It was a little local gold rush. And in many ways, the gold rush in 1848 is a local gold rush. It starts out mostly with the people from San Francisco, from California, heading up to see what they could find.

Now, reports note that San Francisco is completely deserted. That's not as impressive as it might sound, since San Francisco had a population of about 400 people. It's not the big city we think of today. And, of course, it was easy to go. It was easy to find. Over the 1848, they started realizing they were finding gold not just where Bigler had begun to find it, but it seemed like every street in the Sierra seemed to have it. This all happens before California is a state. It was only a year earlier, 1847, that the Mexican-American War is winding down and California is ceded to the U.S. 1848, the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty.

It gives the rest of the American Southwest incredible negotiation there. We get basically most of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. It's just extraordinary. All of that happens in the same time frame as gold is discovered in the Sierra Nevada. Makes you kind of wince for Mexico, really. But an amazing confluence of events in terms of the expansion of the United States and then this gold rush. Right. And that was one of the reasons why people turned to it. The argument, at least some people made, was, well, Spain had discovered gold in Mexico and in South America, but had never found it in North America. And as soon as the United States takes

over, God revealed the gold that he had hidden from the Spanish before. Obviously, it's just a coincidence, but that helped give Americans a sense of we are, in fact, part of manifest destiny. Is it coincidence or I mean, it seems suspiciously fortuitous that the biggest gold rush discovery happens just after we possess California. Is there any correlation there? Yes. In a weird way, there is. First of all, like I said, the people who discovered the gold were essentially soldiers from that war. So they were out there. They wouldn't have seen it otherwise. Second, despite the fact that so many people go to California because there's gold there, one of the things that the first year they're not too sure about is how much gold really is there. And so when the president announces at the end of 1848

that, oh, there really is gold, look, for sure, you can go see it. A lot of people thought this is just Polk trying to get a lot of people into California, basically boots on the ground to hold the state. There's some question, at least, of whether or not there really was any gold, that this was just a publicity stunt by the president, who was also getting ready to leave office and wanted to have a, pardon the pun, but a golden legacy for his administration. This is James Polk we're talking about, who's had a lot to do with the manifest destiny age. How do the feds view this circumstance of a state suddenly sitting on tons of wealth? How does that tip? Unfortunately, two different ways. The first real report to come

out of the gold rush is written by a guy named Mason, Richard Mason, who with William Tecumseh Sherman, these are the officers at the end of the war, and they go up and they take a look to see, is the gold rush real? And what they discover in their report, which is very interesting, it's one of the first really good in-depth reports of what's going on is that, yes, there's gold here, but we are not set up to handle this. There's no infrastructure. The soldiers we have here are not going to stay at their post if they can just go get gold on the ground somewhere. And so he warns that this is going to be a disaster. Now, that's the first reaction to having a suddenly in the United States, a kind of a federal reaction. But then the second one is because of the end of the Mexican war and the problems in the United States,

dividing it over slavery, there was a real problem over how they were going to bring in states in the West, in the far West, whether they'd be slave states or not. So the result is that you get into a period of almost three years in which California actually isn't a state or a territory or anything. It's just Congress basically says, we're not going to do anything until we figure this out. And several people from California, of course, write to Congress and different congressmen and say, what do we do? And they say, well, check some other territory like Iowa or something like that. Borrow their constitution until we get this resolved. Well, Iowa's constitution is not a bad one, but it doesn't

provide for gold. So basically the first few years of California history is a free for all. The guys are making it up on the spot, what the rules are, how it will work and everything like that. But there had been other gold rushes. I'm thinking of one. Is it Arkansas? I forget. Down south. Georgia had a big one. There were other gold rushes. They tended to always bring an increase in the local population. Obviously, it brings in merchants and miners. It kind of quickens the economic environment of the region. But mining, generally speaking, is a professional job. I mean, you have to learn how to dig the tunnels, how to reinforce them. It's not just all sitting around on the surface. California, at least the first couple of years, that Placer Gold was just remarkable.

It opened it up to anyone. When we're talking about it, I mean, this even astonished me when I was one day taking my niece through the History Museum in Los Angeles. And they have a California Gold Rush exhibit there. And you see these nuggets and they are huge. Like, it's amazing. Big pieces of gold are in this thing. I don't know if they faked it or what for the exhibition, I'm sure. But it's at least representative of what these guys were really finding.

And it's amazing how big these pieces really were. Some of them. I mean, most of them are getting very, very small grains, like the size of a pea or something like that. When you find a big one like that, your life is made, I guess. You've made yourself rich forever. But most are actually working very, very hard to find little pieces. And as many of the miners would say later on, this is like digging ditches. It's basically a granite soil. So they're digging through that. It's out in the hot sun. They're bent over all day long. It's amazing how many of them give up after just the first few days,

after coming all this way, because it's so hard and there's so little returns. How does it work exactly? The ordinary guy arrives out there from, say, Beck East, and it would be hard to get there, first of all, because there's no railway across the country at that point. They have to take ships or these more local guys who are coming down from Oregon, I suppose, soldiers who are posted there. But once you've decided to become part of this, how do you go about it? Like you say, the people who are local generally during 1848, before the big rush, they see it as almost like a summer vacation or something they can go. It's easy to get to. That's okay. The next little group that comes in are basically merchants from around the Pacific

Rim who have begun working in different places and trading, and they see this as an opportunity. By the time 1848 rolls to an end and it begins to realize you're going to have this rush, the main way of getting to California is by sea, by ship. You think about Americans generally leaving from places like New York or Boston. These are already seaports, already have a thriving industry. But then I also remember that anybody coming from Europe or China or Australia is also coming by ship. So the majority are coming in by sea. The sea voyage from New England around to California is a hard trip to endure in many ways. You're sailing from a far northern latitude practically down to the bottom of the

earth to get around South America. The currents and the winds there are actually going directly against you. So often ships would get caught in that region for a long time. Then they sail up the coast along South America. But once you get to about the equator on, the currents and the winds are actually blowing you away from California. So often the longest part of the trip it would seem is the part when you're basically on the doorstep. You just can't quite get that last little way in. Now, another thing to kind of keep in mind with these guys is they're on ships. It was something like 177 ships that set out from New England for California in that first year of the rush. And they all see this and they

all see everybody else on the ship. Now, most of these guys are thinking, oh, this is going to be great. I'm going to get out there. I'm going to find gold. It's going to be easy. Then they start looking at all the other ships and say, oh, I've got some competition here. And by the time they get to San Francisco, they realize they are not alone. So they start off with this idea. It's going to be easy. But now they see themselves in a real competition to get there. A second way to get there is to go down to the Caribbean and cut across Panama, then take a ship up to San Francisco. That is a little bit cheaper. It would seem to be the best way to go.

And after several years, the gold rush is going on. That would become one of the major routes. But in 1849, there's no simple way across the Isthmus of Panama. There's trails, but there's no other way. Plus, when they get into the Pacific, there's no ships. They've all gone to San Francisco and they're not coming back. So that first year to go in across Panama is a tough way to go. The last way to go is, of course, across the Great Plains in a wagon or something like that. And this is the cheapest way, but it takes the longest amount of time and it's the most dangerous.

First of all, you're walking across the continent, basically, but you can't leave until April, May. Earlier in that, the grass isn't up for the animals you need for transportation and things like that. So you've got to wait until roughly the beginning of spring. You've got to be done by basically October, November on the other side before the snow starts setting in. So you've got everybody going in this congested period of time. The problem with that is that every place they're going through, they are like a plague of locusts. Yeah. Whenever they want to make a fire, they take all the firewood. And we're talking about tens of thousands of people. Sure.

So they start marching through these areas. And what we think of as a small trail becomes wider and wider as more and more people come through. It's becoming more and more desolate. And then cholera breaks out on the trail. And this really surprised the miners because cholera was considered to be an urban disease. It only broke out in cities. What they didn't realize is that you put 20,000, 30,000 people on a trail. That's a city. It's just moving slowly. And of course, what's happening is the water along the plat and places like this are becoming infected with bacteria and things that

are going to cause the cholera. It starts continentally, but then it goes international after that. I mean, when we talk about a migration, it's from as far away as China. Yes, it's from everywhere. I've looked at some of the census records and there's almost no place on earth you can't find somebody who isn't there, whether it's from Africa, from India. There was one from Calcutta, all these things. However, the majority of people tend to come from either the United States and generally the northern states or from Europe or from China. Now, China is having all kinds of problems in the 1840s. They've lost the opium war to the British. They have overpopulation. Their economy is starting to break down. This is just the very beginning of what would become the Taiping Rebellion. We sometimes don't think about this, but the Taiping Rebellion ended up with something like 50 to 70 million casualties over the next few years.

try to get some resources for their families. And so even before the gold rush, you have a number of Chinese who are starting to go down to the Malay Peninsula, to India to work for the British. They are called somewhat derogatorily Kuli labor, but it comes from the Chinese words Kuli, which means bitter strength. And so these are sojourners

trying to make some kind of income. When the gold rush comes, that stream just starts to divert off towards the United States. At the same time this is going on, 1848 is a time of upheaval in Europe. Of course, we know about the Irish famine, but you've got famines like that throughout Europe. By 1848, you've got revolutions all over the place in Europe. And you've got a lot of people who are trying to get out. So then already for years, seeing America as a place of opportunity. So this becomes one more stream. Finally, in the United States, and it's not that Southerners don't go,

there's people from every state, but it's in the North, particularly that the gold rush is attractive. In the North, you've got a real change in the population where people kind of moving away from farming and moving towards more urban environments and more urban occupations. Now, if you're a farmer, land is the basis of wealth. It's the basis of security. But if you're in a city, it's not land, it's money. So it's already starting to shift this idea that you're not out there to get land, you're out there to get money. The gold rush, of course, obviously directly, gold, money, essentially. Second, as you're moving up into those areas, life is a little different. If you're on a farm, you might have 15 kids. But if you're

in a city, you want to have only one or two. Now, you can imagine some of these guys are sitting there saying, well, my dad had 15 kids and his father had 15 kids and I'm here. I'm only having two and they have lots of land and I don't have very much land. And here's my chance to be macho. Here's my chance to kind of regain what we almost today call toxic masculinity. But it's that sense of identity. I found several Gold Rush songs. These were written by the minors. And some of my favorites are these ones of, we're going west, we're facing the elements, we are, you know, macho, macho men. And you look at it closer, and you realize they wrote this song before they'd even left. This is what they're expecting

to do. This isn't what they've actually done, you know. Macho, macho man was the village people, This isn't what they've actually done. You know, macho, macho man was the village people, Mark. Yes. Well, see, there you go. That is exactly right. Yeah. And speaking of village people, this really does begin the sociological groundwork of the state, doesn't it?

I mean, this huge diversity population that comes in because of the 1840s, it really does lay the groundwork for the whole society of California. Yeah. Many of the miners who were there and the reporters made mention of this. They said that as much as the golds we're finding, as much as we're trying to do, the really amazing thing for history is to see how fast places like San Francisco just goes. They believe they were magic tricks or had like one guy described them as like a genie suddenly just conjuring all this up.

And you can imagine going to San Francisco, 400 people, it's basically two blocks. And then suddenly have all these people coming in. And at night, they have little lanterns in their tents. And these kind of like lanterns all around the peninsula. Within about 10 years, San Francisco is the ninth largest iron manufacturing place in the world. It's amazing how fast this goes. Right. It's ironic that we today think of California as just that challenging Moors with the whole kind of liberalism and stuff like that. And actually, all those people are there because their ancestors wanted to get rich fast. That was basically why.

Right, right. And that could cause problems for these guys, because a lot of these guys who went off to California went off with the promise to their families that they would go for a year or two and come home with gold. Well, a few did, a few did, but a lot of them got out there, couldn't get the gold. It was too hard to get or it was too difficult to find. And they started switching over to being merchants. Now, that's an easy switch if you're in a mining camp and you decide you'll go down to Sacramento to get some supplies. And somebody else in the mining camp says, yeah, would you pick up that for me too? And you go down there and what used to be relatively inexpensive has now suddenly become a huge cost. Eggs were going for a dollar each. And this is at a time when

that's about a day's wage back in the East for one egg. So they get down there and they get these things and they carry some back for their friends or associates in the mines. But then they charge a little extra, of course, and they start realizing it makes much more sense to mine the miners. So a lot of these guys then start staying as merchants, as businessmen, which is great. And it is a lot of the beginning of the population of California. But the problem, though, is that they had promised their families they're coming home and they're not coming home. And so suddenly now they're trying to tell their family,

no, it's better if I stay here. Trying to tell a sweetheart or a wife, oh, come on out, bring the kids. It'll be great. There's one letter I've got that a guy is telling his wife to come on out and bring the newborn. It won't be any problem at all. And, of course, she's saying, let's see, it was three years ago. It was the Donner party. Yeah, exactly. But he's trying to get her to come on out. And so this causes a problem with the gold rush that we don't often think about.

It's these guys kind of get caught. I'll be back with more from Mark Eifler in just a moment. millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and on my podcast, Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, I try to make sense of everything that baffled our early modern ancestors. Like, what do you do with your waste? If you put your dunghill up against your neighbour's wall, you're going to cause rising damp. Would Henry VIII ever consider executing

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Is there any percentage of people who actually did get rich from this directly from the gold or is it a small percentage it's hard to put a percentage on there are a number of people who do get gold who go back home buy a farm or something like that it's probably more common that they got some gold managed to get in some bit of business, and then went back home with money that was not just from the ground, but also from basically impromptu mercantilism, if you will. But many of them stay. Now, you take somebody like Mark Hopkins, who was a merchant back in New York. He goes to California.

He tries to find gold. He gives it up pretty quickly. And he goes back to being a merchant. Very quickly, he's making a lot of money as a merchant. And he decides to stay in San Francisco doing this. He goes back east, gets married, comes back again, keeps building this up in Sacramento, and then becomes one of the founders of the Transcontinental Railroad, the big four out here in California. Where do you divide the gold that he found versus the gold he gathered versus what he made from reinvesting? But I had an experience shooting on a TV show out there about the U.S. mint, the San Francisco mint. The function of this mint comes

later, really. But the idea is that they've got to convert this gold on this gold dust and into something tangible, into something that can be considered money. And that's the function of any mint, but certainly the one in San Francisco. And it's unique in that regard because they've got this whole, this gold coming down from the hills. And it's a statement on how large amount of gold was really found and silver for that matter. These vaults, there are, I think, 13 of them or something like that.

And I mean like big doors and the lock and the whole thing exist in the basement of the U.S. Mint there. And I pass my hand on the wall and there are literally half circles of impressions on those wall surfaces in that original wallpaper, I believe. And it's all over the place. And he said, this is evidence of how many bags of gold and silver coins, big half dollar sized coins, were packed into these vaults. And the pressure of the whole thing on the pile on itself was pushing outward into the walls and actually pushing those coins into the walls. That's how

much money was in these vaults. Well, gold is heavy and you put it all together, it's going to push out on the walls. But they've estimated something like three hundred and forty five million dollars were mined during the first few years of the gold rush. And of course, that's largely based on the receipts at the Mint and estimates on the others. There's a lot of gold we just don't know. You know, somebody got it and they sent it home and that's not part of the calculation. Sure. The interesting story in the long run is about the population growing. I mean, it triples between 1847 and 1860. And many see this as a threat to American values, particularly as they consider

the Chinese. A lot of the xenophobic themes of American society really get entrenched here. Yes. One historian, Alexander Saxon, has called the Chinese the indispensable enemy. One of the things that happens in California, of course, is the Americans come out with this very much jingoistic sense of manifest destiny. And we just won, as we referred to earlier, the idea that, well, God gave this to us. And so they're chasing anybody out who they don't see as American. This includes the French, it includes the Chileans, but it also includes particularly the Mexicans and the Chinese. Now for Mexicans, of course, this is quite ironic because many of the Mexicans are actually born in California before the United States is there.

But they start coming up with foreign miners taxes, things like you have to pay a certain tax each month in order to mine if you're a foreigner. And these are selectively collected and tends to be mostly against the Chinese and the Mexican residents. These licenses or taxes would sometimes be $25, $30 a month. And again, at a time where back east, that was the most you could make in about a month anyway. So this is a lot. It's also clear that they're just not welcome there. They're being harried out, they're being pushed out, they're being attacked, and so forth. In San Francisco, particularly, where you've got people coming from all over the world, northerners, southerners, easterners, westerners in the United States, and then people from all over the world.

There's no real sense of community, except that we're all here to get gold. And some of the politicians began really early on to realize that we can't create a majority unless we have a them, an enemy. And so they start coming up with this idea that we might all disagree on this, this and this, but we can all agree, as they would say, the Chinese must go. Right. And that became kind of the basis of it. It was a way of forming a political unity out of very desperate groups by having a common enemy. It's so fascinating to me. I want to just drill down on this because against this very famous historical backdrop of the gold rush, sort of this glamorous

piece of history, is this real ugliness that happens. What is the source of it exactly? Because I'm just imagining the time and the context of this whole thing, because you've got a whole bunch of humanity that wasn't there just a few years ago. Everybody's new to this place. Everybody's come for the same purposes. They're all working together, most likely selling things to each other. There's a community of all sorts happening here. And yet somehow out of this comes this otherness. This is identification. And that seems very important to understand because it's kind of the way it happens everywhere. But in a subtler level, it really is a very stark difference, isn't it? Yes. Part of the reason why I think the Chinese become such a scapegoat, remember that the United States at this time, slavery is still going on, and slavery was based on race. So you've already got the American population coming in saying there are racial hierarchies. There were something like, historians figure about 150,000 Native Americans. After a few years, it's down to 30,000. Again, we attack the natives to clear the land kind of an idea. I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. When the Chinese come in here, then, they have very different cultural practices,

whether it's the long queue of hair, perhaps, or dress or diet or anything. They are seen as very, very different. Second, they come in often, like I said, they were looking for some kind of a way to get out. But these are basically poor people trying to get out. So they would often get a contract with a Chinese association that would pay their way over and then they would have to pay it back. So they're coming more or less as indentured servants. Now, Americans in California see these basically indentured servants working, particularly in California. They do not want slavery because they think it's fair that everyone should work their own piece of land. The state of California, before it's actually admitted, has already said, we won't allow slavery. So they see the Chinese

coming in and say, well, you're working for others. And that gives you an unfair advantage. So for all these reasons, the Americans were already kind of predisposed to be against the Chinese. What interests me is the fact that they were competition. There was a great deal of people who were just competitors. And so you had to identify them as others in order to sort of beat them, you know, to have an advantage over them. Well, and one of the worst sides of this, of course, is this is right around the time of Darwin's idea of survival of the fittest, particularly in the later years. And the Americans are looking at the Chinese and the Chinese would often, because they were being pushed out of the mines, would go to a site that had already been abandoned

and really drill down to get those little bitty nuggets of dust and would still get some gold out of it and living in terrible conditions. So the Americans would look at it and say, well, they're living on nothing. They're bringing down our standard of living. It's survival of the fittest in reverse. Because they're living on so little, it's going to degrade our wages, our lifestyle, everything else. And so it becomes used against them in that sense. The whole event, it realizes manifest destiny in a sense, because on the other end of this country, sea to shining sea, we have found gold, literally pot of gold at the end of the rainbow almost. This unites the nation, economically enriches it,

obviously. It motivates so much more from telegraph wires to the railroad. I mean, this is the event that really caps a whole march across the continent, isn't it? Yes. What's really interesting is that just before the gold rush, you've got the beginnings of steamships. You've got clipper ships really starting to make speed. But it's the gold rush that starts bringing people and actually propels it and gives the industry the chance to really expand. At the very beginning of the gold rush, there really aren't ocean-going passenger ships. I mean, you've got slave ships, you've got so-called coffin ships from the Irish Plague, but these are just basically cattle ships. The people are cargo. But after this, you start getting state rooms, you start getting regular transit back and forth.

People wanted mail desperately. And so Congress starts putting out things like for the Pony Express and for stagecoaches and of course, eventually the railroad. And all these things are going to come together to actually tie California in to make it easy to go back and forth and to make it easy to have the communications back and forth. One of the things I find kind of interesting is that several letters I've been looking at have guys who were in California during the rush. However they got there, whether by sea or overland, they'd take this long trip. And then several decades later, they're tourists in California who have gone back with their families on a railroad. In a couple of days, they're showing here's where I did this, here's where I did that, you know, things like that. And so they

are their own tourists. But that shows you just how much has changed in just a few decades from walking across to riding across in comfort. It really does create the modern United States. It reminds me of how people, the Aztec gold really enriched the Spanish back in the day. That created the state of Spain. This is very similar in a sense. This gigantic amount of wealth in the middle of the state of Spain. This is very similar in a sense. This gigantic amount of wealth in the middle of the 19th century really vaults the United States towards becoming a modern nation. Civil war has a lot to do with it, of course, but it's one of those many events in the 19th century that really does it. One of the fascinating parts of this story that interests me is that, this is a little bit later, but you have all this gold in that mint. You know, this gigantic amount of wealth has been built up and they don't have the means to transport it.

I mean, we certainly know about the galleons of Spain sinking all over the place, you know, taking the gold back to Spain. That's a very dangerous thing to do. So this huge amount of wealth is sitting in San Francisco. Very scary to the U.S. government that someone can come in and take it. So what becomes Alcatraz, the prison, was actually set up as a fortress, especially against the Confederates, who the United States government feared would sail around South America and come up and attack San Francisco and steal that gold. That's actually the beginning of Alcatraz. They end up building a prison on top of that foundation,

but that's the original function of that island. It's amazing. Well, and it's amazing. How do you get the gold back? Well, you build a railroad, right? Well, even before building a railroad, how do you send the gold back to your family? And so places like Wells Fargo, which is just a shipping company, it'd be like UPS today.

Say, well, we'll ship it back for you. But of course, it's not really necessary that they ship the exact piece of gold as long as they get the value of the gold back. So Wells Fargo goes from being a shipper, a team street, a freighting company to a bank. I think it's still around today. Yes, it is quite large. I think my mortgage belongs to Wells Fargo. Thank you very much. The effect on the world economy. I mean, later on, gold rushes happened in Australia and other countries. And this becomes almost this sort of march around the world as people figure out how to find this stuff and what to look for.

I'm sure prospecting gets a lot more skillful after a while. There's an 1875 rush in South Dakota, which leads eventually to all sorts of things, including Little Bighorn and the whole battle there. I mean, it really is a giant part of westward expansion and then the world. It is. And I don't want to make light of the gold itself. But one more of those rushes you talk about in the west is up in Alaska in the late 19th century. Of course, Seattle becomes the kind of the big stepping off place. And it grows the way San Francisco had to support the Alaska rush. The thing is, though, that something like five times as much was spent on supporting that rush as was ever gotten out of it. And I think that's really what all these gold rushes are about. It's not so much the gold that goes into the economy.

It's the number of people who get their hands on it, who get business experience, who begin to see how this works. How do I get supplies into the miners? How do I get all this out? And then a few years later in the Civil War, they're already trained for these large operations. When they start building the railroads, they already got some sense of how a large operation should work. So in many ways, it's the educational side of it that gives business and entrepreneurial experience to many of these guys. It's a fascinating story. It's a fundamental story. I'm so glad to talk about this with you, Mark. What's on the docket for you later? Are you writing new books and stuff? I'm working on one right now on, it's tentatively called the measure of fortune. And it's about

four people who go to the California gold rush. One succeeds, one fails miserably. The next two don't even know whether they've succeeded or not. And partly it was the idea is to try to kind of gauge what do you consider success? What I find in this, just skip to the ending of my own work, you begin to realize the amount of goal is not as important as the family has, that they had, that's what they were trying to get before, or that they gave up trying to get it and things like that. All the contextual stuff is always so interesting. The book is called California Gold Rush, The Stampede That Changed the World.

The author is Mark Ifill. Thank you so much for joining us on American History. I really appreciate it. Thank you. It was a lot of fun. Hey, folks, if you listen to the show on any kind of regular basis, maybe you'd like to have a say on what we do. Let us know what you'd like us to cover on American History Hit, and we'll look into finding an expert. We turn these shows around pretty fast, so send word to AHH at HistoryHit.com, and you might be surprised how quickly it all happens.

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