Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

La Fanciulla del West
The Girl of the Golden West

The Gold Rush: California Transformed

James J. Rawls

The discovery of gold in California was an epoch-making event. News of the discovery attracted to California hundreds of thousands of gold-seekers from across the country and around the world. Their coming transformed not only the economic history of California, but much of its social, cultural, and political history as well.

The World Rushed In
James Wilson Marshall, a moody and eccentric master carpenter, found "some kind of mettle" in the waters of the American River on January 24, 1848. The "mettle," of course, proved to be gold. As news of Marshall's discovery began to spread, Californians rushed to the site. These eager "forty-eighters" were seized by a gold fever that soon swept the nation and the world.

Hundreds of thousands of newcomers rushed to California from around the world. Those who came from the eastern United States traveled by various sea routes or across the overland trail. Jim Beckwourth of Beckwourth Pass was one of the many frontier scouts who helped guide immigrants through the Sierra Nevada. Gold seekers flooded into San Francisco and other boom towns throughout the interior. Forces were unleashed, for good and ill, that would transform California forever into a Golden State.

Forty-Eighters
The first published accounts of the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill appeared in San Francisco's two weekly newspapers in March 1848. The news caused little excitement…at first.

An enterprising young merchant named Sam Brannan soon saw the possibilities of making a profit from whipping up some gold fever. He stocked his store at Sutter's Fort with merchandise that he thought would be in demand by gold seekers. Then, on May 12, he came to San Francisco, waved a bottle of gold dust in one hand and his hat in the other, and shouted "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!"

Brannan's carefully staged announcement had the desired effect. San Franciscans rushed to the American River-some stopping along the way at Brannan's store-to look for gold. The San Francisco Californian ceased publication on May 29, complaining that "the whole country, from San Francisco to Los Angeles and from the sea shore to the base of the Sierra Nevada, resounds with the sordid cry of 'Gold! Gold!! Gold!!!' while the field is left half planted, the house half built, and everything neglected but the manufacture of shovels and pickaxes."

During the summer of 1848, the gold fever spread to Hawaii, Oregon and Utah, and in the fall to Mexico, Peru, and Chile. Altogether about 6,000 "forty-eighters" rushed to the gold fields.

Boom Towns
Hundreds of towns sprang to life in California during the gold rush. Wherever gold was discovered, mining camps appeared almost overnight. Some disappeared just as quickly, once the easily available gold was gone. Often located near rutted wagon roads or free-flowing streams, the towns and camps served as supply centers as well as places where miners could gather for entertainment.

The largest towns in the interior were Sacramento and Stockton. Sacramento served as the gateway to the central and northern mines, while Stockton was the supply center for settlements in the southern mining regions.

The greatest boom town of all was San Francisco. Its population swelled from just 600 in 1848 to 25,000 in 1849. San Francisco was the port of entry for all seaborne Argonauts and for supplies arriving from around the world. It also served as the center for California banking, manufacturing, and other economic activities.

New Yorker Bayard Taylor arrived in San Francisco in September 1849. This is what he saw and heard: "Hundreds of tents and houses…scattered all over the heights, and along the shore for over a mile. A furious wind was blowing through a gap in the hills, filling the streets with clouds of dust. On every side stood buildings of all kinds, begun or half-finished, and the greater part of them mere canvas sheds, open in front and covered with all kinds of signs in all languages. Great quantities of goods were piled in the open air, for want of a place to store them. The streets were full of people, hurrying to and fro, and of divers and bizarre a character as the houses…One knows not whether he is awake or in some wonderful dream."

Life in the Diggings
Gold-rush California was a tumultuous place. Mark Twain aptly called it "a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society!"

In their relentless pursuit of wealth, the Argonauts used a variety of mining methods. Some of their methods, such as hydraulicking, left ugly scars upon the land.

To introduce law and order into this chaotic society, Californians formed mining districts and drafted mining codes. In the cities, they formed vigilance committees. One enterprising Argonaut published a fanciful set of rules, The Miner's Ten Commandments.

Many of the most successful gold-rush Californians were merchants who sold supplies to the miners. Mining the miners often proved to be a more lucrative enterprise than simply mining the gold. Sadly, many of the miners themselves failed to realize their dreams of wealth. Gold-rush songs such as "The Lousy Miner" are poignant reminders of the miners' loneliness and disappointment.

One of the finest eye witness accounts of the gold rush is a set of letters written by Dame Shirley, the pen name of Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe. Dame Shirley realistically portrayed the hardships of life in the diggings, conditions that often were forgotten by those in later years who engaged in remembering the gold rush.

Law and Order
As the world rushed in to California, the gold seekers found themselves in a land beyond the reach of any established law. They ignored the tribal governments of the California Indians and had little respect for the past practices of Mexican rule. The mining regions remained largely unaffected by the actions of American military governors and officials of the newly formed state government.

Concerned about regulating and securing their mining claims, the miners took matters into their own hands. They formed more than 500 self-governing mining districts. Within each district was an elected recorder, variously called an arbitrator or chairman, whose duties were to keep a record of all claims in the district and to settle disputes over contested claims.

Each district adopted its own unique mining codes. The codes defined such things as the maximum size of claims, the process of filing them, the necessity for continually working them, and what constituted the abandonment of a claim.

The mining districts were democratic bodies, but many also were discriminatory. They commonly excluded African Americans, Asians, and Latinos. The miners also banded together to administer vigilante justice, banishing or lynching those whom they suspected of wrongdoing.

Mining the Miners
Many of the most successful Californians during the gold rush were enterprising merchants who sold supplies to the miners. Rather than mining gold, the merchants prospered by "mining the miners."

A Bavarian-born dry goods merchant arrived in California in 1853 with a load of canvas he hoped to sell to the miners for tents. But this merchant soon found a better use for his canvas, making pants for the miners. The merchant's name was Levi Strauss, creator of those trousers known around the world as "Levi's."

Railroad barons Mark Hopkins and Collis P. Huntington got their start as hardware merchants in the gold-rush town of Placerville. One of their neighbors, John M. Studebaker, did a brisk business building and selling wheelbarrows for the miners. Later he and his brothers became the world's leading manufacturers of wagons and buggies. Eventually they went on to build automobiles, and from 1902 until 1963 the streets and highways of America were graced with sleek new Studebakers.

Another up-and-coming gold-rush merchant was a butcher from New York named Philip Danforth Armour. He made a small fortune cutting meat in Placerville and then went back to Chicago where he and his family became multi-millionaires running the largest meat-packing business in the world.

"The Lousy Miner"
Historian Oscar Lewis has estimated that fewer than one out of twenty California gold seekers returned home richer than when they left. They expressed their frustration in the names of ramshackle mining camps like Poverty Hill, Skunk Gulch, and Hell's Delight.

Loneliness and despair also were recurring themes in gold-rush ballads such as "The Unhappy Miner," "I'm Sad and Lonely Here," "I Often Think of Writing Home," and "The Miner's Lament." One of the most poignant ballads was "The Lousy Miner," first published in John A. Stone's Original California Songster (1855). The opening stanza begins:

It's four long years since I reached this land,
In search among the rocks and sand;
And yet I'm poor when the truth is told,
I'm a lousy miner,
I'm a lousy miner in search of shining gold.

The final refrain is one of bitter disappointment:

Oh, land of gold, you did me deceive,
And I intend in thee my bones to leave;
So farewell, home, now my friends grow cold,
I'm a lousy miner,
I'm a lousy miner in search of shining gold.

Remembering the Gold Rush
Like so many episodes in California history, the gold rush has been considerably romanticized by many of its later chroniclers. Memoirs and fictionalized accounts, published decades after the event, tended to view the "days of '49'" through a golden haze. Understandably, the aging Argonauts wished to put the best possible spin on their youthful exploits.

Heroic pioneers, stouthearted and triumphant, were popular images in Gold Rush anniversary celebrations. "California's Golden Jubilee" in 1898 included a procession through the streets of San Francisco witnessed by a crowd of two hundred thousand enthusiastic celebrants. The glorification was complete by 1948 when Californians observed the centennial of the gold discovery. Gordon Jenkins and his orchestra recorded a "musical narrative" that unabashedly celebrated the gold rush as part of the national legendary:

There's gold in California,
Gold out California way.
Streets are paved with it,
Fortunes are made with it,
Even golden razors
So you can get shaved with it.

The mood during the gold-rush sesquicentennial in the late 1990s was considerably different. Thomas Frye, curator of a gold-rush exhibit at The Oakland Museum of California, commented: "In 1948, everyone identified with California's golden history. Today, it is very different. Not everyone believes in the golden history." State librarian Kevin Starr agreed, noting that Californians no longer "have a coherent society where everyone can agree on what is being celebrated."

James J. Rawls is an instructor of history at Diablo Valley College and author of numerous books on California history. Reprinted courtesy of the California Historical Society.

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