The California Gold Rush

The California was one of the biggest gold strikes during that time. The first gold strike was in North Carolina but that one was small compared to the gold they found in California in 1848. When they found the gold they decided not to tell the public about the news. But we all know that news gets out somehow.

A man named John Marshall found little gold flakes. To me they kind of looked like cereal bits. So the person he was working with named John Sutter talked to him and they swore to secrecy between each other. Unfortunately that didn’t work out because news got out by the end of 1849. Even president Polk decided to announce it to the public. It was obvious what that was sparking. Everyone then decided to travel all the way to California no matter where they were. Everyone wanted to become wealthy. I don’t blame them because many people want that to this day. The big rush happened in 1849. It wasn’t like today where we had TV’s and cell phones where we would get the announcement right away. It took much longer to get to the whole country. The people who journeyed to California even earned the nickname Forty-niners. People even left their family to try to get the wealth. That’s because if they became wealthy then they thought they would have a better life. This gold rush helped California get established. Before the gold rush in 1848 the population was about 800 people. The next year, there was around 100,000 people there.

It wasn’t easy for everyone to travel to the other side of the country. There were three paths that they would take. Only one of them was really efficient but it wasn’t used until later into the rush. Of course there was the way to go overland through the Oregon and California Trails. The other two ways went by water. The first one went all the way around South America and then towards California. Yes you can probably guess that that was the long way to go but some did it in order to get to the final product. The last path is the most efficient. They cut through in between America and South America. That saved a lot of time.

When it was the beginning of the gold rush it was really simple to pick up a few nuggets of gold. You just had to sift through a couple layers of dirt to get a few treasures. But of course, it kept getting harder since the gold was diminishing since there was so many people looking for some. Later on, some people didn’t even get anything. Imagine going on that long journey to find out that there’s barely any of the fortune for you to find. That’s a big disappointment. For the majority of the people who found nothing, ended up resorting to lawless behavior. That wasn’t of course the right path to go down but that’s what happened back then during that time. There was a TON of gold that was retrieved during the gold rush. It was about 750,000 pounds of gold. Since there was a lot of people coming to collect that gold, it actually helped California to form into a state where a lot of people ended up staying. Settlements started to form from this successful find. In 1849 there was 100,000 people in California. If that wasn’t amazing enough, by 1860 the population was about 380,000! I’d say that’s an accomplishment for California.

So it was kind of a hit or miss with traveling all the way to California to find gold to become wealthy. You either found a couple nuggets, or nothing. But, for the people who were there in the beginning they definitely found more than the ones that came more towards the tapering end of the gold rush. I personally think to this day if something like the California Gold Rush happened, people would still rush all the way across the country to become wealthier. Of course today it would be much easier to get there because now we have planes, cars, etc.. Also, the news would get across the country within minutes because that’s how fast news spreads today.