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Activities: Context Activities Competing Claims: The California Gold Rush  Back to Context Activities
On January 24, 1848, gold was discovered in California at Sutter's Mill in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The find sparked a national and international craze as people from all over the world were seized by "gold fever" and headed to California to "strike it rich." Known as "Forty-niners" or "Argonauts" after the adventurers in Greek mythology who hunted the Golden Fleece, the immigrants contributed to an unprecedented population explosion in the American West. Over the course of a few months San Francisco was transformed from a village of 459 people to a city with more than 20,000 residents. The Gold Rush immigrants were overwhelmingly male, but beyond their sex they did not have much in common: the mines drew white Americans from the East Coast and the South, African Americans (both slaves and freemen), Europeans, South Americans, Australians, and Mexicans. In California, these diverse groups encountered the Hispanic and Native American populations that already inhabited the area. The many nations, colors, classes, and creeds represented in the gold fields made nineteenth-century California a place where access to resources, distributions of power, and notions of social order were debated and contested. Adding to the instability, few of the Gold Rush immigrants were interested in permanently settling in California; instead, they intended to amass a fortune quickly and then return home. In reality, few people found the riches that the legends, stories, and promotional brochures promised. To the miners' disappointment, the streets of California were not paved in gold. Mining was dirty, frustrating, tiring work. Individual "placer" miners used picks to chip gold from rock deposits and pans and "sluice boxes" to sift gold from the dirt and gravel of riverbeds. Most miners lived in primitive, makeshift camps where diseases such as cholera and scurvy were rampant and mob violence was common. Many men found that their mining work produced only what Louise Clappe, in her descriptions of life in the mining camps, called "wages"--enough to live on from day to day but not enough to save. Commodities in the boomtowns were extremely expensive since high demand and scarce resources allowed merchants to charge steep "gold rush prices." Gambling halls, saloons, and brothels set up shop around the mining camps, selling alcohol and entertainment to the miners in their leisure time. A cycle of boom and bust ensured that many miners left California as poor as they had been when they arrived. People who had the foresight to set up businesses outfitting the miners and supplying them with necessities made more stable fortunes. Companies in the East sold camp equipment, mining tools, and guidebooks to men planning to head to the gold fields. Merchants and entrepreneurs followed the miners to areas where strikes had been made and set up boarding houses, grocery stores, saloons, brothels, and other service businesses. Chinese immigrants, who often faced systematic discrimination and harassment in the mines, sometimes opened washhouses providing laundry services for miners. According to the Museum of the City of San Francisco, by 1876 there were 151,000 Chinese in the United States, of whom 116,000 were in the state of California. Their experiences did not go unrecorded: as literary critic Xiao-huang Yin recounts in Chinese American Literature since the 1850s, early Chinese immigrants recorded their experiences in numerous forms, ranging from newspaper stories, to autobiographical texts, to writings on the walls of Angel Island by detainees (Angel Island was a point of entry for many Asian American immigrants), to educational writings by students and scholars who came to America to complete their studies. These early testimonials provide an important counterpoint to other writings from the gold camps, writings that were often negative in their portrayals of Chinese immigrants. This alternative vision of life in early California becomes the setting for twentieth-century author Maxine Hong Kingston's novel China Men (1980). The rags-to-riches stories of Mexican women making fortunes selling tortillas and white women turning enormous profits selling biscuits also speak to the extraordinary business opportunities in the mining camps. Many of these businesses were short-lived--boomtowns tended to disappear almost as quickly as they sprang up--but some entrepreneurs turned sizeable profits and were able to follow the miners to the next strike. Sometimes, the cultural and racial diversity of the gold fields led to harmonious and mutually beneficial interaction: miners successfully shared tents, food, domestic labor, and economic partnerships with people of other ethnicities and language groups. But tension, conflict, and hostility could also characterize intercultural encounters in the mining camps. Because few mining towns had established police forces or stable systems of justice, miners could often get away with using violence and intimidation to harass their competition and force rival "placers" from their claims. Eventually, official United States policy formalized discrimination toward non-American miners with the passage of the Foreign Miners' Tax Laws of 1850 and 1852. Levying a steep licensing tax on all non-citizen miners, the Foreign Miners' Tax was aimed first at French- and Spanish-speaking miners and eventually at Chinese immigrants to the gold fields. The tax laws were controversial, drawing protests from both the affected miners and the merchants and entrepreneurs who made a living by supplying those miners. John Rollin Ridge's account of Joaquin Murieta chronicles the abuses and harassment suffered by Mexican miners--harassment that seemed particularly unjust since many Latinos had settled in the California territory long before Anglos arrived. Murieta is forced off his mining claim and his farm by unfair land laws and strong-arm tactics. After enduring a variety of other outrages, he is driven to a life of crime to avenge the injustices he and his fellow Mexicans have suffered. Ridge's novel thus mounts a subversive critique of official American policy toward the many non-Anglo miners who lived in California in the nineteenth century. Eventually, gold became scarcer, European Americans solidified their dominance in California, and corporate, industrialized mining replaced the labor of the individual "placer" miners. New strikes in Nevada, Colorado, the Dakotas, and Montana briefly revived "gold fever" at various points later in the nineteenth century, but the peak of the dynamic, diverse, vibrant culture that characterized the California Gold Rush communities had passed by the mid-1850s. Questions
[1303] Francis Samuel Marryat, The Winter of 1849 (1855), courtesy of Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. This illustration of residents trying to navigate San Francisco's flooded streets shows how rapidly growing boom towns and cities on the West Coast suffered from poor planning and local weather conditions during periods of expansion. [3721] Anonymous, Panning at the Junction of the Eldorado and Bonanza Creeks, Klondike (c. 1900), courtesy of the Denver Public Library. Although gold miners were primarily men, some women, like those pictured here, took part. Contrary to what most expected, mining was dirty, tiring work that led only a few to wealth. [3725] Anonymous, Hanging of Gilbert and Rosengrants at Leadville (1881), courtesy of the Denver Public Library. Frontier justice was often swift and public. Here, residents of Leadville, Colorado, turn out in large numbers to watch the hanging of two men in 1881. [5228] Anonymous, Montgomery Street, San Francisco, 1852 (n.d.), courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-55762]. Rapid, primarily white immigration during the Gold Rush brought California to statehood in 1850, as a "free state" that forbade slavery. Yet, demand for land and forced labor caused a genocidal-scale population decline among California Indians. [5240] Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona manuscript page (c. 1883), courtesy of Colorado College, Tutt Library Special Collections. Helen Hunt Jackson wrote Ramona hoping to call attention to the mistreatment of California's Indians, much as Harriet Beecher Stowe had to the plight of slaves with Uncle Tom's Cabin. [5841] Currier and Ives, Gold Mining in California (c. 1871), courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZC2-1755]. This Currier & Ives lithograph presents a romantic and sanitized portrayal of life in the gold fields. In actuality, the mining process exacted an incredible toll on both miners and the surrounding environment. [7407] Anonymous, Portsmouth Square, San Francisco, California (c. 1851), courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZC4-7422]. In July 1846, just two months after the start of the U.S.-Mexican War, John B. Montgomery, captain of the U.S.S. Portsmouth, raised the American flag in San Francisco for the first time. Days later the U.S. army took all of Upper California, though the war raged on for two more years. It was the first and by far the easiest victory for the United States. [8597] State of California, Chinese Immigration (1877), courtesy of Vincent Voice Library, Michigan State University. The California Chinese Exclusion Act of 1877 was the result of growing anti-Chinese sentiment and a shaky labor market. Chinese workers came to the region in large numbers during the 1850s, drawn by the prospect of work from the Gold Rush and railroads. Many white laborers resented the Chinese taking jobs in an overcrowded market. |
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