In January 1848, James Marshall was overseeing the building of a saw mill for his boss, when he saw an odd rock glinting in the upturned earth.
He was not sure whether it was gold or not and did not want to get people’s aspirations up. So Marshall attempted to break the yellow rock with a hammer. It did not crack, but it did dent. just like gold would. The woman who was cooking meals for the saw mill construction crew, tried another test by boiling the rock in lye.
They boiled it all day, but it did not change colour. So, they passed the rock over to the mill’s owner, Mr. John Sutter, who also carried out a few tests. Eventually, everyone agreed that this rock was indeed gold.
It seems that the Sierra Nevada Mountains hid huge hordes of gold, but that over tens of thousands of years, erosion had loosened up gold nuggets and the mountain streams flushed them down to the bottom of the mountains. Sutter’s property was situated between two rivers and so was likely to generate great wealth.
Sutter had ideas to build an agricultural empire on his 39,000 acres of land, so he asked his employees to keep stum about the find. However, as is to be anticipated, word leaked out. In due course news of the gold strike reached the small town of San Francisco.
There, a newspaper publisher shouted around the streets: “Gold from the American River!” and within three days of the news arriving, 400 of the 600 inhabitants had set out for Sutter’s land. It was a groundswell and by the end of the year, gold prospectors had traveled to California from as far afield as Mexico and Chile.
When word of the gold strike reached the east coast, President Polk confirmed the finding. It was December 1848 and ‘The Gold Rush’ became a national and even a worldwide phenomenon. The gold prospectors of 1849 and later years became known as forty-niners.
What has to be borne in mind is though, that most people, who came from Canada, Mexico and the eastern United States came by wagon train, as there were not locomotive! This meant a arduous journey of between six and nine months
Nevertheless, at least 32,000 people actually walked to California in 1849, and about 44,000 more got there in 1850. Others, such as South Americans, faced an arduous journey by sea. They suffered storms, shipwrecks, hunger and thirst, disease, and overcrowding and after all that, some still had to face mule rides through jungles and deserts! Still, in under a year, about 40,000 people arrived in San Francisco from abroad.
The new arrivals caused a dramatic change in California’s population, because in 1848, California had had about 100,000 residents, most of whom were Native Americans, but within two years, the state population more than doubled but the variety of backgrounds increased tens of fold.
Some people found gold and made a fortune in the Californian riverbeds, but most people did not become wealthy in the Gold Rush. When gold was found, the cache was usually cleared quickly. James Marshall had little success as a miner, and he died on the breadline. John Sutter, who had once owned 39,000 acres, left California in heavy debt after prospectors trampled his land.
In fact, it was simpler to make money selling shovels and other provisions to the miners. Most people lost everything they had, so they stayed to work the vast expanse called California or to set up businesses. By 1856, San Francisco had a very multi-ethnic population of over 50,000 people and California had become the most exhilarating state in the country.
Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with Celtic knot rings. If you have an interest in gold rings, please go to our website now at White Gold Claddagh Ring