Short History Of... - The California Gold Rush

Episode Date: August 29, 2021

On January 24th, 1848, a carpenter from Coloma plunges a hand into the American River and pulls out gold. This discovery triggers an explosion of findings, as people flock to the region seeking fortune and reinvention. But what were the chances of striking gold? What obstacles did would-be prospectors encounter along the way? And did the rush to the American West ever really end? This is a Short History of the California Gold Rush. Written by Luke Kuhns. With thanks to Dr. Malcolm Rohrbough, Professor of History at the University of Iowa and author of Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's January the 24th, 1848. Construction is underway on Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California, on the American River. It's a paradise of rolling green and brown hills and lush, sprawling woodlands. It's a bucolic scene, the likes of which you'd find in any picture book of the American West. Homesteads, good, honest labour, the great outdoors.

Except today, one man's labour will herald a discovery that will totally change this part of the world, taking his life off in a very different direction. James Marshall, the carpenter in charge of the mill, takes a moment to test the race, the channel that carries the water that drives the mill. Water rushes through the mechanism. All appears to be in working order.

Now it's just the wheel left to complete. Once that's done, the mill will be ready. Marshall stops. Something catches his eye in the stream bed. Peppered in with the rocks and pebbles are shimmery objects. His calloused hand plunges into the cold water, and he scoops the gravel up. He cleans mud off the yellow gleaming nuggets. Marshall rushes into his cabin and tests his discovery. He hammers

it with a rock. The mineral isn't brittle. That means it's not iron. Then, at Marshall's behest, Jenny Wimmer, the wife of one of the mill workers, boils the nuggets in lye and scrubs them with soap. Marshall knows that if they erode in the wash, the game is up. But they don't. Rinsing off the soap, the small pieces remain perfectly intact, still glistening in the light.

His suspicions confirmed, Marshall sets out to tell his boss, General John Sutter, what he's discovered. On horseback in the pouring rain, Marshall covers the 45 miles from the sawmill to Sutter's fort. It's dark when he arrives. Wet and dripping from the heavy rainfall, Marshall bursts into John Sutter's office, a rag in his hand. Sutter, a large commanding man with a thick white moustache, startles at the soaking figure in his doorway. He rockets to his feet from behind

his desk. Marshall hands Sutter the rag. Inside it are nuggets of gold. Privately, Sutter and Marshall discuss their next steps. They agree to a partnership and to keep the discovery a secret as they begin preparations for harvesting the gold. Little do they realize it's already too late. Marshall may have happened on the gold all by himself, but he's leaned on the expertise of others to verify his discovery. Those tests he conducted to make sure it really was gold, he had plenty of help there. The woman who boiled the nuggets in lye, for example.

So while Marshall has hardly been shouting from the rooftops, the mill workers at Coloma are already talking. The cat is out of the bag. Word will spread like wildfire. Soon, the hunt for gold will enrapture the state, then the country, and next, the world. Gold. The allure of it is ancient.

Since 3600 BC, it's been used by the Egyptians, the Lydians in Asia Minor, the ancient Chinese state of Chu, and across Europe and the Americas to denote wealth, power, and beauty. On the periodic table, gold stands in contrast to silver and never corrodes like copper. James Marshall's discovery in Coloma, California, triggered an explosion of findings. From 1848 to 1855, hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world flooded the American Wild West, seeking the Californian dream of El Dorado. With fantasies of rags to riches, the rush for gold, it is said, set the public mind on the highway to insanity. This is the story of pioneering people, driven by their hopes, desires, greed and lust for gold. These are the successes and failures, gains and losses, and their lives and deaths as they seek reinvention. I'm Paul McGann and this is a short history of the California Gold Rush. It's been six weeks since James Marshall's discovery.

A tanned man in dusty clothes and a Stetson enters the local general store, owned by Samuel Brannan. On rickety wooden shelves are tinned peas, corn, beans, peaches, and jarred and jammed fruit. Behind the counter are cigarettes, pipe tobacco, bullets and booze. The dusty man points to a bottle of whiskey. The young shopkeeper sits it on the counter. The man throws down three pieces of gold as payment. The shopkeeper can hardly believe his eyes. He begs the man to tell him where the gold came from. He does. Sutter's Mill. It was inevitable that news of Marshall's discovery would spread. At a certain point, you can't keep that kind of information to yourself. Why bother finding gold if you can't

use it to buy things and improve your quality of life? The cruel irony of discovering this precious metal is that you want to keep it secret at the same time as you need to make it public for it to mean anything at all. That said, the secret is spreading far quicker than either James Marshall or his boss, General John Sutter, want. quicker than either James Marshall or his boss, General John Sutter, want. Word finds its way from the young shopkeeper to Samuel Brannan, the owner of the store. Brannan moved to California from New York in 1846 with 250 fellow Mormons. He's a popular, respectable businessman. When he first arrived in California, he had landed in the then-Mexican port of Yerba Buena. The port was renamed San Francisco in January 1847. Within a month of his arrival,

Brannan had put several flags in the ground. He established the California Star newspaper and the first school in this new American town. When he broke the fateful news to Brannan, the shopkeeper had also passed over the gold used to purchase the whiskey. Brannan's eyes had lit up. He knows there is a window of opportunity, one that will soon close. With the gold in hand, Brannan confronts John Sutter about the discovery. At first, Sutter stammers, hesitant to disclose the truth. But Brannan pushes. Sutter relents, and confirms Marshall's find at the sawmill. It wasn't Samuel Brannan's discovery. But,

as we shall hear in due course, with the rumors confirmed, this dark-haired, handsome tycoon is set to become one of the wealthiest men in California. Malcolm J. Rorbo, a gold rush expert, is professor of history at the University of Iowa and author of Days of Gold. Gold is something you can't keep quiet. And so word quickly leaked out. And when word leaked out, it had the effect of setting on foot a rush of people up to the American River and its tributaries. And this rush accelerated and became essentially a flood. San Francisco's population in 1848 was 1,000 people. In 1852, it was 20,000 people.

In 1855, it was 40,000 people. And this exemplifies what happened in California. At Sutter's Mill, before anyone can stop him, the Bolshey Brannan takes the liberty of filling a bottle with gold from the American River. While Marshall and Sutter are at pains to keep the gold under wraps, Brannan wants to do the complete opposite. Arriving in San Francisco by ferry, Brannan, on the busy dock, waves the bottle and shouts, Gold! Gold from the American River!

Then he breaks the news in his newspaper. Brannan's success won't be in mining gold itself. His scheme is for something rather different. His dramatic announcement on the San Fran dock is a stroke of genius. His dramatic announcement on the San Fran dock is a stroke of genius. It's a hub where people from all over California and the West at large pass through, travellers, traders, pioneers. With public interest more than piqued, Brannan makes his next move.

Scouring California, he buys up every pan, pick and shovel he can and sends them to his shop in Sutter's Fort. As hundreds of gold seekers descend upon the area around Sutter's Mill within months, Brannan sells $36,000 in mining equipment. In today's money, that is equivalent to over $1 million. Soon, other merchants like Brannan feel the boom. Soon there is so much gold around that it becomes the primary currency in California, displacing the dollar bills and Spanish coins in circulation. Nuggets of gold are passed from drinkers to saloon keepers and from patrons to store attendants in exchange for whiskey and tobacco.

Then the saloon keepers and store attendants pass the gold on to their suppliers in exchange for goods, and so on. Despite Brannan's extraordinary success, such merchants, those clinging on to the coattails of the gold rush, are still taking on board a lot of risk. The fundamental laws of supply and demand still pertain. Many traders find themselves buffeted this way and that by the fluctuations of this new, chaotic market. The people who made fortunes in the gold rush were merchants who sold things to the miners

and who took the profits and invested in San Francisco real estate. That's where the big fortunes were made. But nonetheless, the merchandising business was very, very risky because you're selling standard stuff and there's a market at a certain level. This morning at 10 o'clock, a ship arrives in San Francisco Harbor and it's filled with picks and shovels. Suddenly the market for picks and shovels falls because there are just too many. And this meant that the whole business of making money in business in San Francisco was profitable. It was also very risky. Nevertheless, for Brannan himself, the risk more than pays off. He sets up two more shops

to accommodate the demand and begins purchasing real estate. Eventually, he becomes California's first millionaire. But as Samuel Brannan's wealth swells, the same cannot be said for the mill owner, General John Sutter. It's been just a few short months since Marshall's find. Now Sutter, forlorn and shocked, walks to his abandoned tannery. Leather is unfinished in the vats, rendering raw hides valueless. The workers have abandoned their posts and gone searching for gold instead, as have the labourers from Sutter's unfinished sawmill on the American River and his incomplete flowering

mill in Brighton. The gold mania has taken everything and everyone from him. John Sutter has fallen victim to a subtle yet vital technicality. You may well wonder how he's failed to become fabulously wealthy. Surely the gold was discovered at his mill, therefore it's his gold. And if there's more precious metal where that came from, surely that belongs to Sutter too. Alas, that is not the case.

While Sutter owns the mill, crucially he does not own the land around it. Technically, no one does. The gold rush has come at precisely the wrong moment for the General. at precisely the wrong moment for the general. By contrast, the timing is perfect for the chances now descending on the region from all corners of California. This is a region in a state of flux. The Mexican-American War has been raging since April 1846. The United States has been seeking to expand southwest,

first into Texas, now into California. That has brought the nation into conflict with their southerly neighbour. On January 24, 1848, when the first fateful discovery at Sutter's Mill is made, California is still technically part of Mexico. But in practical terms, it's under US military occupation. It's a totally grey area. No one quite knows whose laws,

whose systems of property rights or of land ownership apply, Mexico's or America's. The picture gets even more murky. Just nine days after Marshall's discovery, on February 2nd, the Mexican-American War officially ends and California becomes a possession of the United States. But a possession is not a formal territory, and it certainly isn't a full state of the Union. It's not clear quite what it means. It's precisely because of this ambiguity

that the gold rush has erupted into life so spectacularly. The complex legal backdrop has created a total free-for-all. Men and women with no wealth or property suddenly have the chance of making it big. If they possess the physical strength to work the land and the determination to defend it, they have a shot at the Californian dream. There is as yet no effective, formal legal system in place in California to regulate claims to land. If you get there first and stake a claim, literally by marking out the boundaries with wooden stakes, then it's pretty much yours, if you can hold it.

There is a general understanding that people will bear the old Mexican mining laws in mind. Your claim only holds if you mark it out clearly, and if you are actively engaged in working the land. You can't make a claim, then put your feet up. If there's no gold to be found at a particular site, you can abandon it and make a new claim elsewhere. If you enter into a dispute with someone over a claim, it's beholden on you to make your case personally and, quite possibly, using violence. There are no cops to call on, no judge to hear your case.

If you're lucky, there might be a band of local prospectors who can act as arbitrators. But chances are, you're on your own. This is the Wild West, after all. Law enforcement, in no small part, is the purview of vigilantes. In this context, Sutter, desperate to make up for his losses, attempts to claim ownership of the Coloma land adjacent to his mill. This fails. It's already full of prospectors who've staked it for themselves

and are busy trawling through the riverbed. Next, Sutter tries to charge a commission for gold found on his land. But he's not fooling anyone. Your land? Says who? He only manages to coax a handful of newcomers into paying. Such a situation goes from bad to worse. Tension rises in his wheat fields. The Native Americans and sandwich islanders, known as Kanakas, who work his land, want to join the tanners and the mill workers in going in search of gold instead. In a last-ditch attempt to keep the labourers on his payroll, Sutter sends them to mine for gold under his employment. But just a few weeks into their

mission, their camp has become overcrowded by a constant influx of gold seekers, hoping to hop on the bandwagon. Then his men don't produce enough gold to make the work financially viable. Totally exasperated, Sutter abandons the dig. The discovery of gold has made the fortunes of many. It has ruined him. James Marshall, the carpenter who actually discovered the gold in the first place, is no better off. He is forced to sell his timber and mill rights to stay afloat.

He is yet to make money off his discovery. Unlike Sutter, who now seems resigned to his fate, Marshall becomes aggressive. He haggles with the Coloma prospectors, demanding that they pay him. They don't listen. But Marshall is relentless. He continues to pester the gold seekers for payment. Frustration and hostility escalate. One warm night, a band of prospectors and their men storm Marshall's camp with guns and shovels in their hands. They've had enough of his self-aggrandizement.

Marshall flees for his life, driven off the site where he made the discovery that's now lining everyone else's pockets. In a feeble attempt to remain relevant, Marshall resorts to quackery. He claims to possess supernatural powers that allow him to locate the richest gold deposits. He does manage to sucker in some desperate gullible prospectors, but when Marshall withholds the supposed locations of rich deposits, the disgruntled miners threaten to lynch him. Once more he flees for his life, this time totally ruined. In his memoirs, Marshall writes, I was soon forced to again leave Coloma for want of food.

My property was swept from me, and no one would give me employment. I've had to carry my pack of thirty or forty pounds over the mountains, living on China rice alone. If I sought employment, I was refused on the reasoning that I had discovered the gold mines and should be the one to employ them. Thus, I wandered for more than four years. California has been gripped by a mania. But outside the region, the gold fever hasn't yet consumed the country. Gold claims aren't taken seriously by the national press or by people back east. Many, including Congress, believe the reports are a hoax.

This changes on December 5, 1848. Twenty days before Christmas. Snow covers Washington, D.C. The temperature outside is five degrees Fahrenheit. In the Capitol building, it's not much warmer. Inside the House of Representatives,

the cold is of little concern as Congress listens attentively to the clerk who reads President James Polk's State of the Union address. Reluctant to credit the reports in general circulation as to the quantity of gold, the officer commanding our forces in California

visited the Mineral District in July last. When he visited, there were about 4,000 persons engaged in collecting gold. Ships arriving on the coast are deserted by their crews, and their voyages suspended for want of sailors. Our commanding officer there entertains apprehensions that soldiers cannot be kept in the public service without a large increase of pay. Desertions in his command have become frequent. It is deemed of vast importance that a branch of the mint of the United States be authorized to be established at your present session in California. Congress sits on the edge of its seats. California. Congress sits on the edge of its seats. The claims are authentic, after all.

The gold is real. But Polk's address gets at something else. The president feels vindicated in his decision to battle Mexico for control of the Southwest. More to the point, he was sticking his finger in the eye of all of the people who'd opposed the Mexican War on the grounds that it was just another military adventure. He said, look, what's being discovered in California minds of the Americans that this is divine intervention because God wanted the Americans to discover gold. For President Polk and the American people, this is a sign of manifest destiny. This is a sign of manifest destiny. By addressing the matter head-on, the president has really, truly lit the touch paper. The gold rush is no longer some quirky regional phenomenon. It will soon grip an entire nation.

What happens next has not been seen before or since. It's the largest migration in American history. The masses who arrive in California by land and ocean in 1849 are nicknamed the 49ers. By the mid-1850s, 300,000 will migrate to California in search of gold. The response to the gold rush has to be seen in the context of American life at mid-century and how difficult it was for so many families on the land or so many families who had small businesses.

I mean, this was an economic world that was a world of favors owned from one farm to another. It was an economic world of small IOUs written out. Nearly 80,000 people attempt the journey to California over land. Most of these are farmers with no more than grade school education. What you were doing is that you were remaking the trajectory of your family. Your family grew up accustomed to a lifetime of labor on the farm. Suddenly, you or representatives of your family would go to California, and in a period of months, four, five, six months, maybe as long as a year,

you would remake the future of the family. Farm laborers in the mid-19th century made a dollar a day. They worked from sunrise to sunset. Skilled people who worked in shops or the primitive factories at the time made a dollar and a quarter. Some of them made a dollar and a half. Well, it was reliably reported, and I emphasize reliably, that in 1848, 49 49 and into 50, miners in the gold fields in California made $20 a day. The math is compelling. This is a new kind of opportunity. For some, dropping everything to mine will be their undoing.

But they are willing to bet everything on it. doing, but they are willing to bet everything on it. Those sifting through rivers, hacking into rocks or scorching the hillsides with dynamite have a maniacal glint in their eyes. They're imbued with an extraordinary fervour. Just one more rock, one more riverbank, one more hillside. They are singularly focused on an image of pure ecstasy, on that moment of finally, finally striking gold. For those lucky few, their limited means and impoverished backgrounds will, in a single second, evaporate. President Polk's confirmation has seemingly made it clear

that out west, laying in riverbeds, buried beneath the placer, there are boundless riches ready for the taking by anyone brave enough to seek them. But California is a long, long way from the major population centres on the east coast, and not everyone will survive the journey. It's early 1849. In a small farm town in Connecticut, the locals gather for a celebratory send-off. The local reverend leads the prayers with a group of 60 men who are about to make the five-month journey out west.

Across the eastern United States, there are countless groups such as this, preparing to make the voyage of a lifetime. Their wagons are stocked with supplies, tools, and feed for their cattle. Many of them are armed with rifles and pistols, even small cannons. These farmers-turned-treasure hunters fear one thing on their journeys. Attacks by Native Americans. It's night, somewhere between Indiana and Missouri. Five men sit around a campfire in the wilderness with bowls of baked beans, sweetened by molasses

and spiked with bourbon. One camper sets his bowl aside and begins to clean his rifle. Suddenly, one of the five men is shot and dies instantly. They expected that they were going to be attacked on a regular basis by Indians, and in truth, this did not happen. Most of them never even saw an Indian. Still, on any group of 60 who went overland, there were casualties. The first group of amazing casualties were people who were shot in firearms accidents. They were shot in firearms accidents because they

were heavily armed. They walked around with these weapons loaded. And every once in a while they went off. And when they went off, somebody got shot. And when there were no doctors or medical people out there, these were fatal. Elsewhere, along the trail from Independence, Missouri, to Wyoming, two men sit at the front of a wagon, drenched. They've traveled for over a month. They're tired, hungry, in desperate want of a bath, and low in spirits. Along the trail are countless graves. Some are no more than a day or two old.

Eventually, the graves, and the men digging them them seem as common as the grass and the trees. One gold seeker from Wyoming says, from independence to here is a graveyard. They pass a stationary wagon. A young man no older than 21 lies in the back. His sweaty head rests on the stack of itchy cattle feed sacks. Flies, gnats and mosquitoes buzz around. Kneeling beside him is his father, who waves away the pests and helps his son sip water.

Three days out of independence, the young man had fallen ill. At first, no one in the company thought much of it. Now he's dehydrated. His skin is cold, eyes sunken. He can't keep his food down. He suffers profuse diarrhea. His father watches in agony as his son's health deteriorates. It's pitch black.

The group are deep in the wilderness, hundreds of miles from a village, a town, from a doctor. By morning the young man is dead. He is the latest victim of cholera. It's said that between 6,000 to 12,000 people die of this disease before they even reach California. The cholera had entered the country in New Orleans and came up the Mississippi River. And it branched then up to the Ohio and to the Missouri. And so cholera was in the staging towns for the immigration, principally independent Missouri. And so when people left, some of them were already seriously ill

and they were going to die within a couple of weeks on the plains from cholera. The overland migrators have other challenges in addition to firearm and cholera risks, especially once they pass the 100th Meridian, which runs through Denver, Colorado. There's a desert that has to be crossed in which there's no water for the animals. And so at the very end of this long trip, when the animals are exhausted, the people are exhausted, they confront this desert.

At a certain point in August or September, some groups in Sacramento start sending out rescue parties to help these people. So the overland migration, I would say, is on the long axis of success, but the dangers of it arise in areas that people never could have imagined. Despite the casualties, gold seekers will continue to flood California. The numbers traveling are so great that every group that falls by the wayside, plenty more make it to the other side of the desert. But this boom will not last forever.

As soon as 1850, in fact, the influx of people will actually see land and gold claims start to shrink, while tension, crime and costs rise. Gold seekers do not just come from the United States. They arrive from Central and South America, Europe and Asia. Very quickly, conflict builds between different communities. Very quickly, conflict builds between different communities. In Southern California, Mexican and Peruvian miners prosper. Many of them have mined previously and are well skilled.

This brings hostility and discrimination against non-English speaking foreigners. There was a large scale Mexican immigration to the southern mines. They were closer than any other group. There were also some of these people, people who'd mined before. And so in the southern mines, much of what was known about mining was learned from this Mexican group who came up. There was also a substantial Peruvian group, people from Peru, who came up, also mined in the southern mines. Population got denser. It didn't take much observation to realize that the Mexicans and Peruvians had a lot of rich minds. And these were foreigners who didn't speak English.

Bear in mind, there was a treaty now. This was California. This was an American place. It's true, most of the people around in the summer and fall of 1848 were still Spanish-speaking. And so, beginning in 1849, there was a rising hostility to foreigners, particularly foreign nationals who had rich claims. And there were many examples of Mexicans being violently, violently expelled from mining claims. People from Peru also being violently expelled from mining claims. And in March of 1850, the first California legislature met and it immediately passed a foreign miners tax.

The foreign miners tax was $20 a month for every foreign miner defined as somebody who didn't speak English. $20 a month was a prohibitive number. As a result of this taxation, nearly 15,000 Mexican miners leave. What the US government didn't anticipate is the adverse reaction this tax would generate amongst merchants. But there was opposition to the foreign miners tax and the opposition was basically from merchants. Merchants were selling goods to these foreign miners who were paying in gold, gold that they were mining. And when they expelled the foreign miners from the southern mines, a lot of these merchants were in deep financial trouble. And they took their objections

to the legislature. And so they passed a revision of the foreign miners tax and the revision of the foreign miners tax was something like $5 a month. Another consequence of mass migration is squatting. Squatters arrive and build cabins, and make gold claims wherever they can, without acknowledging the codes of conduct that prevail. The formal legal system may be seriously underdeveloped, but there are still accepted and frowned upon ways of behaving. Legal battles break out between squatters and landowners. The new courts that are being created now have the power to issue charges and eviction notices. This leads to a brief but deadly uprising in Sacramento

in August 1850. Squatter sympathiser Dr. Charles L. Robinson rallies other like-minded men. Angered by the city's stifling of new immigration, they storm downtown Sacramento. Mayor Hardlin Bigelow orders the squatters to stand down and drop their arms. They do not. Downtown Sacramento erupts into chaos. By the end of the riot, leader Dr. Charles Robinson and Mayor Bigelow are wounded. Five are dead, including two civilians. The Squatters' Riot of 1850 is the climax of these disputes.

As the dust settles and the local government grows in strength, it becomes apparent Squatters will either need to pay or leave. By September 1850, the enormous increase in population creates urgency for a civil government. Amongst all of America's possessions, this is a special case. And so, California is fast-tracked for statehood. These people pour into California, and so Congress makes California a state, shortcutting this whole long apparatus to become a territory and then become a state, which takes a period of years. By the sense of 1850, California has 100,000 people in it. It's made a state of the

Union. And from this point on, it has the state government and it has the apparatus of government. On September the 9th, 1850, in Washington, D.C., Congress admits California as a free state and member of the Union in the Compromise of 1850. For the miners who got here and found gold before 1850, this is great news. The claims they staked can now be formalised, their property rights protected by the nascent legal system. But for many watching these developments from afar,

the advent of statehood marks the beginning of the end, at least of the initial gold mania. Over the next three years, the rush will start to wane. But this decline will inspire new ways to mine for gold, and new devious tactics to swindle hopeful latecomers. It's 1851. A group of California miners are in low spirits. For weeks, their claim hasn't produced more than a couple of dollars of gold.

At the same time, a claim next to theirs, owned by Chinese miners, produces as much as $50 a day. The failed miners attempt to negotiate the sale of their land to the Chinese neighbors, insisting the plot is full of gold. But the Chinese, understandably, want to inspect the land first. Believing their own claim to be a bad one, the failed miners craft a ploy to fool the prospective buyers. They pack gold flakes into a rifle. Then they capture and kill a gopher snake, which they hide on their claim. When the Chinese miners arrive with their picks and shovels and start to test the land, an English-speaking miner feigns surprise as he spots the gopher snake. One of the men aims his rifle, packed with gold flakes, at the snake.

The Chinese miners observe the gold flakes that have supposedly erupted from the earth as a result of the blast. Believing the land to be good, they purchase the salted claim from the failed miners, who, two days later,

begin work on a new dig. The irony is that this supposedly bad claim actually turns out to be full of gold. In fact, it will prove one of the richest claims in the West. And it will make the Chinese miners very wealthy indeed. But not everyone is that lucky. The later arrivals in 1851, 1852, most of the time they had to buy a claim. There was no places to go out and stake a claim anymore. They had to buy a claim.

And so this lent itself to a certain kind of gray area about how you describe the claim. And of course, you could, somebody comes around, once you buy a claim, you immediately pull out some samples of gold and say, well, this is what I got yesterday. You can see that this is a really valuable claim. We'd want a couple of hundred dollars for it.

Well, this might be what it got out in the last month. I mean, who's to say differently? With the appearance of ever smaller claims and the rise in value of claims, claims were sold. There was a ready market for claims in all of these gold camps. And the whole question of honesty in describing the claims was probably not at a very high level.

After all, if these were valuable claims, people wouldn't be selling them. They would be standing there working them or whatever. So it was a real't be selling them. They would be standing there working them or whatever. So it was a real buyer beware exercise. This is the Wild West after all. Lawlessness is rampant. In San Francisco, the murder rate is 49 per 100,000 people. And across the gold mines, camps are robbed and salvaged gold is stolen.

The civil government and localised law enforcement may be growing, but they're still too small and too new to control the masses. This leads to a rise in vigilantism. By June of 1851, Samuel Brannan has made a fortune off real estate and his chain of convenience stores.

He's come a long way since the discovery back at Sutter's Mill. Brannan has more than capitalized on that moment. Now keen to protect his gains, he helps to form the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance to combat rising crime in the state of California. Between June and September 1851, in defiance of the city government and the new police force, Brannan's committee patrols the streets, deports immigrants, convicts criminals,

and sentences four men to be hanged. Things come to a head in August. Two Australians, Samuel Whittaker and Robert McKenzie, are locked in the San Francisco jailhouse. They are associates of two other men recently hanged by the Committee of Vigilance after being accused of burglary and murder. The police have managed to keep Whittaker and McKenzie out of the hands of the committee, until today. The August sun beats down as the Sunday morning church services

begin. Unwilling to allow proper legal action to run its course, with the Lord's Day as a distraction, the committee members strike. They storm the jailhouse. They overrun the prison and overpower the police officers. Keys to the cells are acquired. The doors unlocked. Whittaker and Mackenzie are taken into the committee's custody. Their hands are bound. Then they are led to the gallows. Side by side, each man has a noose tied around his neck. The crowd is thirsty for blood. The committee wastes no time. Both men, whom they accuse vaguely of various heinous crimes,

are hanged before the authorities can stop it. The San Francisco Committee of Vigilance has become too big, too powerful. In September, the city authorities will finally insist on its dissolution. It's 1853 in Nevada City, California. Mining claims have dried up, and the local landscape has been obliterated by years of excessive mining. One miner comments that the minefields look like a lunar landscape. Another says it seems like they've been visited by hundreds of moles. Since the start of the rush, the most common method to mine gold has been panning the place of deposits, where valuable minerals accumulate after separating from a rock source.

Mined ore is put into a large pan filled with water, which the miner agitates. Even expert prospectors only come away with around one cubic yard of material every ten hours. Small-scale placer mining has exhausted the once rich deposits. If more gold is to be found in this new phase of the rush, a new method will be required. Like other placer miners, Edward Matteson understands that the more gravel processed, the more gold will be found. His sites are set on the gravel hills. Adopting an ancient Roman technique, Matteson devises a new way to mine dense gravel deposits with water. Matteson jets water using a hydraulic

pump through a hose made of canvas and capped with a nozzle. The stream blasts the hillsides. The high-pressured water cuts through with ease. Between 1853 and the mid-1880s, hydraulic mining will produce 11 million ounces of gold, worth around $170 million. It's an extraordinary sum. However, the application of Matheson's method will only exacerbate the deleterious effects of mining on the land. More and more mining companies begin to adopt hydraulic mining. And this large-scale method soon threatens the health and safety of local farms. Debris and excess sediment begin to block waterways.

As millions of tons of earth and water feed into rivers in the Sacramento Valley, cities and towns are devastated by man-made flooding. As a result, hydraulic mining cripples the growing agricultural industry. At a certain point, agriculture becomes important in California. And it becomes important pretty early because all these people have to be fed. And for a while, you can import stuff in cans. But basically, there's a huge profit to be made in early California agriculture. Well, agriculture grows in parallel with hydraulic mining.

And hydraulic mining is polluting all the watercourses. So opposition develops the hydraulic mining from agricultural interests. And as agriculture grows, its influence in the legislature in Sacramento grows, and finally, the agricultural interests get hydraulic mining outlawed. the agricultural interests get hydraulic mining outlawed. In 1884, the two-year court case, Woodruff v. North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company, favors the local farmers.

The resulting judgment outlaws hydraulic mining. Presiding Judge Lorenzo Sawyer's verdict is considered the first major environmental law in California. The effects of hydraulic mining are still visible today at Malakoff State Historic Park in Nevada County, California. By 1854, the rush has largely declined. Gold has become increasingly elusive. declined, gold has become increasingly elusive. For the most part, large mining companies have taken over from individual prospectors. But with gold yields diminishing, stocks in these mining companies plummet. By 1855, mining is now a wage-labour job. As for the men at the forefront of the gold rush, the men who set this whole train in

motion, John Sutter eventually receives compensation from the Californian government for losses incurred as a result of the rush. He gets a pension of $250 a month. Despite his best efforts to seek further reparations from the US government, he's unsuccessful. As for Samuel Brannan, the gold rush itself and the years following it make him one of the wealthiest men in California. But this lucky streak wavers. In 1872, his wife divorces him, taking half of his wealth. His property and railway investments fail soon after.

He dies on May 14, 1889, broke. But what about today? Some scholars say the gold rush never ended. The allure of gold consumed the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands across the globe. The gold seekers chased dreams of fortune, new life and reinvention. Some who arrived in California changed their names and never went home. Not all found the success they desired, and for some, the journey alone cost them their lives. desired. And for some, the journey alone cost them their lives. Others, through hard work, toil, and plenty of luck, achieved enormous wealth and power. The spirit that drove people to California, chasing the Californian dream, swept the nation.

Many believe it is from the dirt in California that the American dream was born. The California gold rush essentially was a new idea that burst on the scene, had an enormous response, changed the lives of many people, some of them better, some of them worse. And this is going on in California now. I mean, it is a place of enormous innovation in many, many areas. But there's this same kind of pioneering mentality that goes along with it, that this is a place where fueled by ideas, the ideas catch on and people make enormous sums literally overnight or alternatively, investors lose enormous sums literally overnight. And it's not to say that this kind of world doesn't exist elsewhere and it doesn't exist elsewhere in this country, but it certainly exists in heightened form in California. in California.

It must also be said that the effects of the gold rush reached far beyond America. It was an event that had truly global ramifications, most noticeably, perhaps, in economic terms. By the mid-1850s, the rush to find gold may have faded, but the population of California will only grow and grow. Products from all over the world now have a massive new market to cater for. Goods from farms as far afield as Australia and Chile, clothing and materials from China and Great Britain, all find their way to California. There's even a copycat Australian gold rush, as

prospectors seek to recreate the Californian experiment down under. In 1863, partly off the back of gold mining profits, construction begins on the western section of the first transcontinental railroad. Before long, travel within the continental United States will have been changed beyond recognition. There are other ways too that the gold rush revolutionizes American life, long after the initial peak is passed. Most prospectors are men. In their traditional role as breadwinners, men are more likely

than women to strike out for a new life in the mines of the West. This creates a disproportionately large male population in the mining communities. As a result, ideas about masculinity become much more fluid. With fewer women around, some men fulfil traditionally female roles in the community. At the same time, some minors assumed to be male in life are found to be women in disguise after death. There are some extremely sinister impacts too, of the rush to the West. While American citizens of European descent stake claims and put up fences,

this often involves kicking indigenous or Mexican communities off the land. California will join the Union as a non-slave state. But informal acts of enslavement among mining communities continue to be widespread. The Native American population plummets as a result of killings, disease, and organized displacement. The conquest of California, as it has become known, was a time of immense opportunity for some, and a time of total disenfranchisement and even mass murder for others. Today, California remains known as the place for risks and reinventions. From Hollywood to Silicon Valley, the allure of the Californian dream that started with the Gold Rush has persisted for over 170 years and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.

In the next episode of Short History Of, we'll bring you a short history of Pompeii and the Vesuvius eruption. The sky became dark like night. The cloud had covered the sun. Can you imagine the sense of panic that these people are feeling? This was a hellscape. That's next time on Short History Of.