In January 1848, Swiss immigrant, John Sutter, was in the process of building a water-powered sawmill near present-day Sacramento, California. On January 24, the carpenter on the project, James Marshall, discovered flecks of gold in a diverted streambed at the mill. The two men tried to keep the discovery a secret, but once word got out, men rushed to California in their hundreds of thousands, looking to make their fortune in the gold mines. This gold rush ultimately changed the demographics of the territory-turned-state of California and the economy of the United States of America.
The news of the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill reached San Francisco first, where merchant Sam Brannan marched through the town with a vial of gold. By that summer, most of the men in San Francisco had left for the mines. Men also began to arrive from places that could easily access California’s coast, including Hawaii, Mexico, and China. In 1848, the population of California consisted of approximately 7,000 Californios (people mostly of Mexican descent), 150,000 Native Americans, and 700 Americans. By the end of 1949, the non-native population had ballooned to approximately 100,000. By 1855, the number reached 300,000. During these years, the Native American population was decimated due to disease and attack by foreigners entering Native American land to mine.
Word of the gold rush didn’t reach the East Coast of the U.S. until the summer of 1848. Americans were skeptical until the end of the year when President Polk talked about it in his State of the Union address. At that point, thousands of American men left their homes, business, and farms to be run by their wives and children to seek fortune in California. In 1849, $10 million worth of gold was pulled from the California mines. The price peaked in 1852, when $81 million worth of gold was mined, and then declined until it settled at about $45 million per year. By this time, mining was no longer done on an individual basis, but as a paid job for large mining companies who had better equipment. This money was a boon to the U.S. government and certainly played a part in earning California a spot as a state in 1850.
Long term, the gold rush destroyed much of the California landscape and caused endless problems for farmers. In 1884, a law was made banning hydraulic mining, and most Californians returned to jobs in agriculture, firmly ending the era of the gold rush.
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