In Our Time - The California Gold Rush

Episode Date: April 2, 2015

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the California Gold Rush. In 1849 the recent discovery of gold at Coloma, near Sacramento in California, led to a massive influx of prospectors seeking to make their fortunes. Within a couple of years the tiny settlement of San Francisco had become a major city, with tens of thousands of immigrants, the so-called Forty-Niners, arriving by boat and over land. The gold rush transformed the west coast of America and its economy, but also uprooted local populations of Native Americans and made irreversible changes to natural habitats.With:Kathleen Burk Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at University College LondonJacqueline Fear-Segal Reader in American History and Culture at the University of East AngliaFrank Cogliano Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in California, in January 1848, James Marshall was building a sawmill by the American River. When he spotted something shiny in the water, it turned out to be gold. At first there were doubts, but in December, the United States President James Polk announced accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory out of such an extraordinary character, as would scarcely command belief, where they're not corroborated by officers from personal observation.

The rush was on. Over the next decade, hundreds of thousands from around the world made the long and dangerous journey to California in the hope of getting rich quick. The prospectors, their gold and the trade that grew up around them transformed this remote area. The American economy surged, overtaking Britain by the end of the century. Between 1848 and 1851,

the amount of gold coinage in the USA increased 20. fold. With me to discuss the California Gold Rush are Kathleen Burke, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London, Jacqueline Fierce Eagle, reader in American History and Culture at the University of East Anglia, and Frank Coggiano,

Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh. Frank Coguaggiana, who owned California when Marshall discovered the gold? Thank you, Melvin. Bismarck is reputed to have said that there's a special providence for drunkards, children, idiots, and the United States of America.

And the United States of America just came into ownership of California as gold was discovered. So the gold was discovered on January 24, 1848, and the Treaty of Guadalupe,idalgo, ending the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 48, was concluded nine days later on February 2nd. And so this was a moment of incredible providential serendipity from the standpoint of Americans. So the United States had just come into possession of California. So it could have been all Mexico? It could have been, indeed. Yes, indeed. It could have been. Although the Mexican-American War had been fairly decisive in California, so the United States had taken possession of California as early as 1846.

How well, can you give us some idea of California then, 1848? Who was there? What were they doing? Sure. California is very, very different from what we might imagine. It's relatively sparsely populated. So there are approximately 150,000 Native Americans in California at that time. There's a much smaller population. We were discussing this earlier. The figures in dispute is between 6,000 and 12,000 so-called Californios. These are descendants of Spanish and Mexican settlers who colonize California from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century. And it's still the sort

of size we see now. Is it that great clock on the map on the west side? Yes, but most of the settlement is concentrated on the coast along sort of coastal missions that were created by the Spanish. Except for the Native Americans, it was virtually empty. Indeed, yes. And what we're talking about, we're talking about, ranches, farms, and a bit of fishing? Yes, it's mainly ranching and farming, a little bit of fishing, and there is the Spanish and laterally the Mexicans sought to just exercise a little bit of control over this territory, if only to keep the Russians and the British out.

Well, as you know, the Europeans, particularly the Spanish, had been going to America, to the Americas, looking for gold for a long time. Did anyone ever think there was going to be gold in California? No. Most of the gold that the Spanish had found was the gold and silver was in the gold was in Mexico and the silver was in Peru. California had been lightly settled and nobody expected to find gold in California. It really was accidental in January of 1848. What was the state of geology then? Did they not think, well, there's these sort of mountains there and it goes up in a straight line. Wouldn't there be those sort of mountains there? No, I mean, among the many consequences of the gold rush is that we learned a lot more as a species about gold.

And so they didn't see those mountains and think there's gold in them there hills. That kind of thinking came as a result of the California gold rush. It didn't proceed it. It turned out that there wasn't. It was gold in them now rivers to start with. Indeed. Yes, that's right. Okay.

Kathy Burke, almost, can we just, it's a very good story that the actual discovery. Can you tell us what happened? Well, John Sutter was a Swiss immigrant. And he wanted to, he had large farms. and he wanted to get some of the trees and sawmill and send them down the river for buildings and so forth. And he hired a chap called John Marshall to build this sawmill. And this was down the American River.

And one day when Marshall was looking in the river, one might say, he saw these specks. And he picked them up and he looked like gold. And he took them back to Sutter. And they didn't really think there were sort of primitive, ways of checking it. They asked their cook, Jenny Wilton, to see, you know, put it in the lie or whatever,

and that came up, and they decided, well, probably it was. Put it in what? Lie, I think, as in L-Y-E. Which is what? A type of chemical mixture that is now part of soap and so forth. Why did she have it handy? Well, because you made soap out of it.

You used to wash clothes and so forth. It wasn't a chemical laboratory in the back garden, no. Essentially, the side part probably was, wanted to keep it pretty well a secret. It's not that he wanted to get it himself, although there was undoubtedly part of that, but he probably saw what would happen if anyone, if this came out. So then he was really trickled out.

It wasn't announced for a couple of months. How did he, so he's done it in his back kitchen, says this really is gold. He wanted further verification there, didn't he? They went to San Francisco, then a very small thousand people living there. Yes, well, he took it down. He wanted it verification, of course. The problem was, is that there was a man called Sam Brennan, who was a Mormon, and they had all come out to California to get away from the Americans because the Americans didn't treat them very well. And he opened a general store near Sutter's Fort. And he had the idea. He was in San Francisco, and he thought, well, I'm not going to make so much money in the minds. Perhaps I can make it all. off the miners, and he got this gold. And he, first of all, stocked up on shovels and picks and plaster pans and so forth,

and then went down the streets of San Francisco calling gold. There's gold down the American River. And he publicized it probably to help his business, shall we say. But that was the beginning. And destroyed Sertes' livelihood. They went and destroyed his buildings. They ate his cattle. That's right.

Sutter lost most of his... of his patrimony. Now, Kathy, almost a year passed between the discovery of gold and the great rush of 1849, the 49ers. What happened in that year? Well, essentially, that was when the Americans really took it seriously. But you remember that San Francisco was this great Pacific port, the only real Pacific port, and people came there and went out.

And word got around, and Mexicans came up first, families to place, and this trickled out. It trickled around South America, Chile, for example, and with the ships around the Cape of Goodhorn, and then finally to the East Coast of the United States. And newspapers heard about this. New York Herald published a story in August, but no one really took it seriously,

until, as you said, President Polk announced it in his State of the Union message, and then they took it seriously, and the rush began. Can you just describe some of the roots by which they got there. Frank's already said we were talking about a remote, massively underpopulated place. And we know they came from China, Australia, Britain, South America.

Can you just give us some idea of how long it took them to get there, how dangerous it was, and so on? Well, they could either go by sea or they could come overland, of course. If you weren't in eastern United States, you came by sea, which could take about four months. And you picked up a ship all along the coast in North America or, as you say, merchant ships would start in Australia or China even, South America, and they would come either. They had two choices.

They could go around the horn, the tip of South America and up again, up through the Pacific, which had dangers of being dashed on the rocks and huge storms. Or they could come to the Isthmus of Panama. Now, the problem there, of course, there's no canal. So you got off the ship. You went across either by mule, threatened by horrible diseases, or you went in native canoes down the river, and then you caught another ship, which was all right early on. But then, of course, when everyone was trying it, there'd be fights and so forth. Or you came overland.

A meabland route was just as dangerous. Well, the overland route could take five, six months or a year. You gathered together, you formed companies in a sense, you know, friends, family, or people you didn't know. and you got together in Missouri, you got in these wagon trains, and you started trundling across. You knew how to get to Oregon, but you didn't really know how to get to California.

It's hard to get into California. There's only two places you can get through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. And all along the trail, eventually everyone had to. You had stoves tossed out. You had clothes. You had food because it got harder and harder to get over the mountains. And you couldn't necessarily trust the guides, and it was appalling.

People died of heat, people died of coal, people died in a sense because they gave up hope and then reached California, some of them. Some of them, but actually tens of thousands of them very soon. Jacqueline Fier Shingle, we've said the prospectus came from around the world. Can you itemize the world in this regard a little more? Well, they came from 25 countries, so not Japan, not Russia, because they barred immigration. And so internationally it was pretty widespread. and within the United States they came from 21 states unless there were only 30 states.

Can you give us some idea of the 25 countries? Sounds nice and exotic. It does sound exotic, doesn't it? Well, they came from, first of all, as Kathy said, they came first of all from South America, from Chile, Peru, Mexico, and then they also, that whole band of the Pacific Sea board, they came from Oregon early on. They came from China.

I mean, one of the most notable emigrations was the Chinese. When the gold rush started, there were only six Chinese people living in California. And by the end of 1850, there were 12,000. So the Chinese was, if you like, the most remarkable one. They came from Europe, Germany, France. They came from England. I mean, every single person obviously was smitten with gold fever,

but they also had their own individual reasons. For example, from England, the tin miners in Cornwall were having a terrible time, and their industry was in decline. So as a group, they upsticks, and they came from Ireland. They'd already started to come to California from Ireland because of the potato famine. So from 1845 you'd had quite a lot of Irish people come to California when it was still under Mexican rule and they'd been given land in Marion County and it was known as Little Island.

Obviously it was the Catholic religion and they learnt Spanish. So they had, if you like, a foothold already and they were going to be very important in running the politics. They came from Australia, which already had a mining tradition. So almost everywhere had representatives. But the most important one I think probably that I haven't mentioned, this was right at the beginning and rather surprising was Hawaii. In that first year, before the 49ers came,

the 48ers were either Hispanics or Hawaiians. Can you give us some brief rough idea of the numbers involved? Because in the research that I've read from three of the other stuff, I'm slightly confused. It's tens of thousands and then it becomes hundreds of thousands, very quickly. So discovered 1848, people got the hang of in in 1849, about two years later

it seems to be an inundation. Well, the two main... 1848, it takes off at the end of December. So that first year within America, about 90,000 came. And then the next year about the same number. It's the biggest migration in American history. It's the biggest migration, yes, and huge distances. So that

by the time you get to 1850, you've got, within a decade, you've got 100,000 people, non-Nate I, citizens of the United States. So double the amount, you need to make it a state in one year. There were far more Native Americans in California than any more, massively more, even by aggregators, three of you together. What happened to them?

Well, by the time the Gold Rush began, there were about 150,000 of them. They'd already been diminished from about 300,000 because of the missions and the terrible diseases which had brought them down. and most of those were living up in the mountains, not on the plain, excuse me, because the land had been given was owned by Mexicans. They, to begin with, were not terribly interested in the gold, but then they realised they could trade in gold. And in fact, at Sutter's Mill, they were the workforce.

He had very good relations with them. They were a paid workforce. And they were a population that had been integrated into the landscape. They lived off the land. It was very bountiful. Only the ones in the southeast of California. The mohave and the Yuma actually cultivated squash and beans and corn. But the rest lived off the bounty of the land.

They lived, one of the staple indigenous foods was acorns. And of course, elk and deer and seafoods. But they also managed the land. They weren't just scavengers, although the Californians called them diggers. They were actually stewarding the land, using fires to burn the undergrowth, bring through the new growth in the wetlands so that wild file could breed. So there was, if you like, a very balanced relationship, which they had,

but they were totally dependent on that landscape. And they were going to become... Well, we'll talk about that in a minute or two. It was devastating what happened to them. That's part of the story. Frank, Frank Gullion. How did the 49ers extract the gold? They got there.

We know about the tin manners from Cornwall, so they knew a thing or two, but why do I have everybody else? Well, our image is, of course, of a kind of lone individual, well, you know, with a mule by a river bank, panning for gold. And indeed, that's true in the early days. You get what's called placer mining in the early days, which is when you have individuals with a wash basin and a sieve, more or less, as I said, panning for gold.

So you scoop out a lot of stuff from the riverbed, and then what? And you sift it and wash it, and you extract the gold flakes, or the gold nuggets. And that's possible in the early days, because there's a fair amount of gold in the riverbeds near the surfaces. as time progresses, and this kind of gradual evolution goes on, they begin to alter the course of rivers. So they put up dams, they create flumes and so on. And you get a kind of river mining is what emerges.

And that gradually evolves into hydraulic mining. When they're using water to wash away hillsides and to get far below the ground. And when that isn't sufficient, they begin to use explosives and they start to conduct what's called quartz mining. So they're extracting ore and they're grinding it. quartz mills and then using quicksilver or mercury to extract the gold from the ore. The crucial distinction here is we start with an image, Melvin, of kind of individual miners, the 49er, if you will, who's a kind of, if you, usually male, democratic paragon. But what happens is very quickly mining becomes much more capital intensive. And the individual miner striking at rich

becomes a thing of the past because capital is required and labor is required and far more of the 49ers or their successors end up working for somebody else in a much more labor-intensive capital-intensive industry. Can you give us some idea in those first few years, how much gold was discovered and how much more it was than they had been in circulation before then? Yes. Well, approximately $600 million worth of gold extracted between 1848 and 1860, Is that dollars in their terms? Dollars in their terms, so it's tens of billions today.

The amount of gold in circulation in the United States in terms of specie increases by 20 times. Specy being what? Coinage, gold coinage. And so the American economy gets this incredible infusion of wealth and capital, which will help transform the country. but there's a rapid, rapid increase in the amount of gold in circulation. And prices in California, prices in San Francisco, skyrocket,

and people are paying for everything with gold because gold is what they have to circulate. Kathy Burke, we know that settlements expanded massively. San Francisco is usually chosen as an example. You can tell us about that. But what were the conditions like for the gold hunters from the 49ers onwards, on these tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. Muddy, messy, noisy.

You had people there. There were just a few boarding houses, and that's one way women could make money cooking and letting people sleep on their floors whilst their husbands were out trying to find gold. Masses of tents everywhere. Cold during the winter, hot during the summer, uncomfortable, shall we say,

out in the minds themselves. Practically all men, 90% of the immigrants into California were males, very few women. Exotics, one might say, who were there to give pleasure to men, and it was a way of earning money as well. Yes, and girls in bars and so forth, yes. In the big cities, well, big, Yerba Buena, which then became San Francisco, was wooden houses, grew rapidly because that's where immigrants came if they came by sea, kept being burned down. and finally after 1851, the Great Fire, which went down and even burned a lot of ships,

they started rebuilding in stone. But what it was like in both the cities and the cities, Monterey was there as well, and the camps was a lawlessness. There weren't any laws as such, except what people decided they would have. It lacked form and regularity. Can I turn to you on this one, Jacqueline? So it's been Mexican and Mexicans are slowly drifting away

It's now American But they haven't settled in with their legal system at all So it's made to be a sort of no-man's land Before it becomes one de facto Can you give us some idea What law there was and how disputes which there would be All sorts of disputes and couldn't land And so on how they were handled

Well there was As Cathy says there were no laws There were no property rights what they did is they did maintain a system that they inherited from the Mexicans of how you staked out a claim and so there was if you like patterns of behaviour but there was no one to enforce the law

apart from the military governor and of course there was a contingent of the army there but it was basically I suppose vigilante groups often towns or communities or settlements would elect somebody who would be the law enforcer but there was an awful lot of whipping, which was the punishment when people were found guilty of something,

sort of kangaroo courts, not quite kangaroo courts, but also lynching. And this is as the supplies of gold diminished and as the number of people arriving increased, obviously the competition for the land for the claims also increased and the fights increased. And the groups that were hardest hit were the ones that had prejudice against,

the Chinese and what called the Hispanics. And in fact, a lot of the Mexican population who had made their money in the first 10 years withdrew because it became so violent. And in fact, there were between 1849 and 186, there were 163 people of Mexican descent lynched, including, well, and on top of that, one woman who was apparently about to be molested

or her house was broken in on, and she was hanged. So there was, if you like, vigilante justice. That was before California became a state, but it wasn't that much better once California had become a state because the laws that were passed by the legislature were very much discriminatory against the Hispanic population and the native population.

So the idea of these people a sort of melting pot doing the same thing, the Chinese, the Australians, the British, the Native Americans, didn't work at all. They separated and they were at each other's throats. There was no melting pot really. Well, maybe amongst the Europeans, and there was a moment, for example, after a tax law was passed for foreigners, you had to pay $20 a month tax for the right to mine.

And there was a what was called the French Revolution, when a whole group of Europeans joined together with the Mexican population and had a kind of battle. But mostly, no, there was division. And it became more and more, as time moved on, it became more and more violent and less and less amenable. At the beginning, it is said that you could stake your claim and you could go back home in the evening.

and put your spade down, and when you came back in the morning, it was still yours. But by rights, if you worked your claim, it was supposed to be yours. But there was claim jumping, and people used to push other people off when they saw there'd been a strike. And then when somebody had made a strike, they would often sell it, or pretend they'd make a strike and sprinkle gold around. It was called salting and sell it onto someone else. Frank. Frank, Krilyana. Just to follow on, with regard to the violence and the lawlessness,

you have to remember, this is an overwhelmingly male population. it's an overwhelmingly young population and many of them are walking around with gold in their pockets and there is as Jacqueline said there are no institutions to enforce law and order and so consequently vigilante justice is an

extra legal way of trying to impose order as far as people are concerned there are no banks yet and so people are striking gold or those that are finding gold are doing so and they have no place to put it except to carry it around on their persons and there are people who are frustrated because they haven't found gold

And, of course, many of these people are also armed because they're told when they jump off in Missouri, they need to make sure they've got plenty of guns and knives and so on. So it's a very, very unstable situation. How did, can you give us some idea how California prospered in the first year or two friends? And also people who didn't mind gold, but, excuse me,

but got fortunes out of shovels and things like that. If you want to make money in a gold rush, sell shovels. That's the lesson we know. But a lot of money. A lot of money indeed. Amazing wealth came to. the Stamford's, didn't they? Indeed. So you get the Leland Stanford,

who's a dry goods merchant, who'll later get into railroads. He becomes one of the wealthiest men in the United States. Levi Strauss is selling jeans and so on. So the people who supply miners do very, very well for themselves. Because there's 300,000 people by the early 1850s, they need to eat. How did this wealth manifest itself? Did people take the money and run?

Or did they stay there and build? Cathy referred earlier to the fire led to the building in stone. Are they saying we're going to settle that? This is our place. Are they saying, I've got enough, I'll go back to Ireland or whatever it was? Many in the kind of tradition of migration go fully intending to return, to strike at rich and go back home or back to the states, as they say, if they're from the eastern United States.

But many, of course, don't do that, and they end up settling. But they didn't necessarily go out with the intention to settle. They went out with the intention to make their fortunes and return home. Some returned home with wealth, some returned home destitute. Others, of course, put down roots in California like Leland Stanford, who arrived in 1852. Cathy Burke, California was admitted to the United States very quickly in 1850. It usually took up much longer than that. Why was it admitted so quickly?

Well, largely because the Californians presented a fat accompli. September 49, the acting governor decided they needed the Constitution, and he called together a constitutional convention, 48 people, very mixed, not just North Americans, but from all over Europeans, the old Californias, even a native. And they discussed the Constitution. They passed it by October. It was then presented to the voters in California, passed by 15 to 1, and then it was taken to Washington. And in late December, they reached Washington.

presented this, they already had twice as much. The thing was, they weren't even a territory yet. Congress had been rather dilatory. They hadn't really organized any of the land conquered from Mexico. And therefore, you were normally a territory, then you were a state. But California jumped this. And because they said, here we are, we're organized, we have enough people, we have a constitution, we have a structure of sorts. And therefore we want to be a state. And then Congress had to decide what to do about it. And the really strong, I'll come to that in a minute, we'll talk about what sort of state it was.

I just want to one more question. Juggling, how did the Goldrush affect the way Americans thought of themselves? I'm talking about this phrase, manifest destiny. Could you talk about that, please? Well, Manifest Destiny, it's a phrase we associate with America, and it came out of this time period. It was first used by John Louis, Sullivan in an article in the Democratic Review,

and he was using it to boost support for annexing Texas and Oregon. Manifest destiny and how he saw it in as our Americans came to sit, it was the destiny of the American people, and by that he meant white people, to take their democratic institutions and to occupy the continent. So it was very useful to have this book-ended situation with California coming in because then it just meant you had to fill in other bits in the middle, I think it's important to remember that California comes in,

but that whole sway of what are now the Midwestern states were still just territories. Did the idea of manifest destiny grow out of the feeling that the Presbyterians from Britain had when they went to the Eastern Seaboard and they thought themselves as the elect or this elected and they made a New England and so on? Did it grow out of that?

Well, it spins from that. It comes off that, the idea of being a city on a hill, being the sort of model for the world, with everybody looking at your institutions. But by the middle of the 19th century, it's got this rather unpleasant racial spike because built into it is the whole notion of an Anglo-Saxon white nation ruling

and eliminating other nations in terms of votes so that, for example, this constitution that Cathy's talked about, they did have a discussion about it, but they decided to give no vote to the native population and African-Americans as well. So in a way, manifest destiny is not quite as, pleasant as your city on a hill, setting yourself up as a religious and moral model,

as well as a political set of institutions. So we've got this. We've got thousands of people there. We've got masses of gold coming out. There was gold in the rivers and the hills, wherever it was. It was piling its way through America, around the globe and so on. And then California becomes a state, and now we can begin to talk about the consequences,

which were many, and from my reading, extraordinary. I thought this through. Frank, Frank, Frank Cugliana, How did California's admission as a free state because it became a free state affect their balance between north and south? Can you explain what was going on about the free state and slave straight? Sure, absolutely. California was the 31st state admitted to the United States.

There was an even balance up until then between the free states and the slave states. So prior to the admission of California, there were 15 free states in the union and 15 slave states in the union. Was this deliberate? This was engineered. there will be one slave state for every slave state. Yes, as a result of the Missouri compromise in 1820, they came upon a pattern whereby they would admit states in pairs in order to keep the balance within the U.S. Senate between free states and slave states.

As Kathy suggested, California applies for admission very, very quickly and speeds up the process. And as a result, in 1850, Congress is faced with a dilemma as to what to do about California. It admits California as a free state and enacts a very complicated, series of legislative actions called the compromise of 1850 to try and appease Southerners. But the

long and the short of it is there's now a majority of free states in the Union and ultimately this sets in store for all kinds of reasons the sectional dispute which will result in the Civil War in 1861. It's worth taking a bit of time about this because there's gold, that's one

big thing and there's slavery, that's another big thing. The slave states fought this, didn't they? They wanted other states who were made slaves straight to balance it up when California came out? That's right. And so the fudge, if you will, that the Congress enacts in 1850 is it says that other territories carved out of the so-called Mexican session, Utah and New Mexico, will be unincorporated, or they will be territories and their fate will be decided in the future. So it holds out the promise that perhaps they will be slave states in the future.

But I presume, Cathy Burke, that California's power, not only being a free state, but its power as a state, began to have a tremendous effect. Well, yes, I mean, not only was it an economic powerhouse by that time. It's not just gold as agriculture. It's more fishing, it's merchanting, it's all sorts of things. So it is powerful. But people didn't really know what it was going to do.

Indeed, there was a growing, strong, southerner element in California. but because it was seen as a place where fighting had not yet broken out, where it wasn't part of the ferocious, sectional element or fights, conflict in the rest of it, it had possibilities. Either side could have it, in a sense. It had gone in as a free state, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to last. So it is a possibility for both sides. Can you give us some idea?

we've got 1849 to say 1852 and it's gone from one man panning in a river that Frank was talking about to explosives and hydraulics and big engineering and mountains being blown apart and rivers being diverted so we're in a different arena there can you just fill in what happened over the next few years to California the economy of California the state of the state of California

well first of all this is a real California was known then for the following century as a real agricultural state. My own county, because I'm a Californian, was the richest agriculture area in the world. And the Germans came over, for example, ended up 14% of the population. And they really started the agricultural revolution.

You had to feed these miners. And then once there is a railway, you had to feed the rest of the country. So agricultural boomed. Merchanting boomed because there's not only these smaller areas, but San Francisco boomed. you have to feed San Francisco. San Francisco is a merchanting center. By 1857, you've got a mint there. And one thing that we haven't mentioned, which you may want to continue, is it becomes a Pacific power

because it's the gateway to the world. And you get to California, your chances of making it big. So it has a continuing flow of entrepreneurs and people who want to work hard and make it. So it's a real vibrant, more vibrant than most of the rest of the United States. And when the rest of the United States has, one might say, recessions, California doesn't experience this. It's a place, it's the golden state, you go there, you can transform your life, and California transforms that whole Pacific Coast area. Those who get lucky, those who don't destitute and abandon, and we'll come to that in a moment. But it never stopped, did it, this economic process of right through to Hollywood and Silicon Valley?

Well, it didn't stop, partly because it began as sparsely populated, as Frank said. So there's a lot of territory. And because the territory began, mostly was held by the defeated Mexicans and those useless Native Americans who one didn't want to take any account of, you had territory. And so therefore, there was a continuous, land, continuing labour, virtuous circle. Let's look at one of the downsides of this, Jacqueline Faisiegel.

There was territory. It had been, as you said earlier, well cultivated and kept in balance by the Native Americans. The environmental consequences of the Gold Rush put the caribosh on a lot of that. The environmental consequences were devastating for Native Americans. Well, they lost all their land, and that was institutionalized by the state of California in a series of laws after they had set themselves up. they were essentially the land was taken deliberately

they were sold into slavery there were massacres and the landscape was obviously destroyed by the mining process I think something like the 12 million tonnes of earth were dug out in order to get the gold and of course that all got dumped in the riverbeds

and so slowly the landscape which looked so idyllic and beautiful and wonderful was being destroyed and whole mountain sides have been blasted out by this hydraulic mining. So the long-term consequences, not just for then but for now, and one of the things Frank mentioned was the mercury, the mercury that was used in order to extract the gold. Something like 100,000 tonnes of mercury were mined

and taken up into the Sierra Nevada in order to get the gold at. And that, of course, ended up in the riverbeds. And it didn't disappear. It's there now, which is why, if people start dredging in those rivers, it releases the mercury again. So the gold rush left behind, if you like, a devastated landscape.

There's a historical geographer at Berkeley who said that the gold rush was like an international stag party that came in and just trashed California. Can we just stay with the Native Americans one more moment? This was almost, he's been told by one of you,

a sort of genocide, approaching genocide. I don't know which one of you put. study your notes. I think it is genocide. It was yours. It's genocide by the UN definition from the 1940s, which is basically the deliberate attempt to undermine or destroy people, their culture, by deliberate acts. And they were sold into slavery and so on. Yes, and there was legislation. They passed this law called the Act of Governance and Protection of Indians, which was the exact opposite. And it was under that law that the disenfranchised natives, they made it legal to take their land. If they were basically, loitering around anywhere that was selling alcohol, then they could be put in jail, and then they could be auctioned to go into servitude, and something like 6,000 of them. What was that bill called again?

The bill that is called the Act for the Governance and Protection of Indians. It's passed in 1850. Immediately they become a state. Well, it's always right, isn't it? Could I just add that, in fact, one of the California governor, in 1851 or 1852,

said there's a clash of nations here and the Indians should be exterminated. And in fact, a hundred million dollars was spent on vigilante groups. They were encouraging, if ever there was an Indian that committed a crime because the justice system was so weak, money was paid for vigilante groups to go out and destroy them. Frankly, I mean, mostly in California here, but the money from the gold built the great railroads

with a lot of British investment at that time in the great railroads, and so that linked the two sides of this amazing nation and so on. So can you give us some idea of the effect that the gold had on the American economy, the North American economy? Sure. I mean, it transforms the economy, not just California. California, to some extent, becomes the engine of the American economy, as Kathy suggested. But within a generation in 1869, the transcontinental railroad is completed. And the railroad is necessary to kind of link California with the rest of the United States. and just the building of the railroad in terms of the production of iron and steel and so on

becomes a major engine for the economy and once the railroad is completed and California is thoroughly integrated into the economy we get a national market we get a truly integrated market and the result is that the United States booms in the second half of the 20th century to the extent that it overtakes Britain

as the world's leading industrial power and the largest economy by 1900. Little regulation about busting in the mountain or diverting rivers. No, I mean... If I think they're on, wouldn't have been going with it. No, they're not worried about health and safety

either when they're sending Chinese labors who might have come to work in the mines to blow up mountains with nitroglissurant to build this railroad. And the result is that the United States becomes wealthier than before, far wealthier than it had been in 1800

by 1900. But there's a greater stratification of wealth. It's the gilded age, as Mark Twain calls it. it's gilded in the sense that it's soaked in gold, but it's also a bit fake as well. And the social consequences of this economic growth are considerable. Cathy Burke, can I move even further. It had an effect on the global economy, this, didn't it? So, California, a few rivers across America and now around the globe.

The only comparison can be is the 16th century when the Spanish silver came out of the mines of Peru and so forth and hit Europe. And that caused a great inflation. What this did was to do in a sense the same around the world. And this was a good thing because the economies of countries in a sense were dependent on how much gold there was. And all of a sudden there's masses of gold, which means that people can be paid more, and that means you can supply more. And because people are leaving to go out to California, various countries like Britain and Sweden, had to pass laws to make it better for people to say. stay home. Australia, all of Europe, except for Russia

and Japan. China, for example, all benefited. It was a great multiplier. You come out of California $300 million in the first six years and this is distributed around the gold. People sent money home, people took money home and it just essentially caused, it turned the world,

one might say, from a world in depression or in stasis to a one that actually transformed economic lives. It certainly transformed Britain. They were a manufacturing country. No one could buy their goods

because there wasn't the money. And they needed food. It transformed the British economy so they could actually sell goods and with this money they could buy food and invest as in railways in America and Argentina. Are there any other consequences, Jacqueline you want to bring in? Well, I think it changed the whole idea

of what America was, the hope and the possibility which has always been part of the American. and outlook. You talked about the city on the hill and the Puritans and then they thought they had the best democratic system in the world. And the American dream, which had been built into the Declaration of Independence

by saying, everybody has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That was very much, when put forward by Benjamin Franklin in his poor Richard's stories, that was very much to do with working hard and living a virtuous life. And suddenly with California, it wasn't quite the same values. It was to do with get rich, quick, be a chance,

you know, go out there. So somehow the American dream had become much more go-getting than it had been before, and it had lost all that element of the Puritanism that you mentioned earlier on. I referred to this briefly earlier, but even more briefly, Frank. If you could tell you, do you see Hollywood in Silicon Valley

as being a natural progression? Absolutely, particularly Silicon Valley. I mean, Silicon Valley, of course, gets its start in part because of Stanford University, so there's direct connection there. Who sells? You know, started selling shovel. has founded a university with his wealth.

But there's the acquisitiveness that Jacqueline's talked about. I think there's a direct correlation. And the association that you can go to California, remake yourself, is a direct legacy of the Gold Rush, I think. Well, thank you all very much for pounding so much in. That was terrific. Kathleen Burke, Jacqueline Fierce Eagle, and Frank Cleana. Next week, I'll be talking about Sappho,

the poet born in 7th century of Greece in Lesbos. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now With a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests Of course, Girl of the Golden West What is? Girl in the Golden West, yeah Alapuccine a golden girl And Clementine was you going to sing

No, but you did it do it I'm singing now Why do you sing it? She's been practicing in the movie Give us it, give us it, give us it first Come In a canyon In a cavern

Excavating for a mine lived a minor, 49er, and his daughter, Clementine. You, Melvin, can sing the refrain, can't you? Oh, my darling, oh, my darling, Clementine. Outlost and gone forever. Dreadful sorry. Dreadful sorry, Clementine. You've just been recorded doing that.

Fame beckons, just wait for the phone calls. My public will not like the body of my voice. Love it. Now, did we miss out anything very important, which we usually do? What about you, Frank? No, I think we covered most of it. I think the infusion of gold helped the Union win the Civil War as well. That would have been a correlation of the section of a bit.

It also started the whole notion of racism because, I mean, that was the presence of the, well, what I mean is enacted, that was the presence of the Chinese that allowed, well, the Chinese prostitute, but also just the presence of the Chinese and the way they were treated and how everybody came to hate them at the beginning they'd welcomed them and then you get that all being fanned by Dennis Kierney

Kierney in the and so you get a Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 so that's the first time America's actually closed its doors to any particular group and I think that was pretty significant I don't think that would have happened if all those Chinese people hadn't flooded in at one moment what we get I mean as one historian said

the West is America only more so and I think that's certainly true for California. So it didn't create racism in America. Of course not. But what we get is it's like a steroid injection for America. So whatever trends are already in place. Yeah, you didn't get that in. I didn't.

Whatever kind of trends are in place seem to just get this boost of energy. And the position of women, partly. I mean, on the one hand, you've got all the Chinese female slaves brought over to service all the Chinese. 20,000 Chinese came over in 1851, in fact. But also the position of women, because there were so few of them, one thing that I didn't realize specifically was that it was far easier to get a divorce in California than any place else.

And two counties, San Mateo and something else, had more divorces per population than any place in the world. And they also... Why is that? Why so easy? Jacqueline, this is your... Women have social capital. Women had social capital and they also had economic capital

because written into that constitution with all its faults was the right to own property which was extraordinary at that time so women whether they were wise same as Anglo-Sax in England in the 7th and 8th centuries If they were widows It comes around They were widows

So I think it was Those Western states women were in very short supply I think it's nice too That the gold rush hasn't finished Because apparently after the crash of 2008 when the price of gold nearly hit $1,500 an ounce, people went back up into the San Gabriel hills above Los Angeles, and they were panning for gold.

Not the young people have been through previously, but the older people who lost their jobs. And people, because if you found a tiny little flake or nugget, you were rich. There's still gold up there. Yeah. Well, here, Simon. You'd like tea. You'd like coffee.

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