The California Gold Rush of 1848
by Luke
Have you ever wondered how the gold rush of 1848 started? Cause I used to, but now I know enough to teach you all about it, not just how it started.
How the Gold Rush Started
In 1848, a man named John Sutter had a sawmill in the building, and James Marshall, the leader of the build team, was checking on the progress. It was going good, but when he looked down at the stream that ran it, he saw a shiny yellow thing. He picked it up to inspect it and saw that it was probably gold. There was a test he knew to see if it really was gold. He got a hammer, set the gold on a log, and smashed it. Instead of breaking it flattened into a flatter version of the same thing, proving it to be gold. He shared his discovery with Sutter and they agreed to keep it secret.
How the First Gold Miners Came
Somehow, though, people found out and in 1848 alone, 6,000 people came to California to seek gold. In 1849 90,000 people came to search for gold. These people were called forty-niners. They came from literally everywhere, even China. The first out of country people came to San Francisco on a ship called the California. The California arrived on February 28, 1849. Some of the first miners found gold, sometimes ten times what they would get working at their old home. But that’s not how most people got rich.
How Most People got Rich
Most people got rich by buying cheap tools and sell it for 10-20 times what they bought it for. Workers rarely found gold so they bought better tools for more money, giving store employees more money still, and draining miners of almost all their money. A man named Levi Strauss, a German fellow, made work pants for miners that caught on and people started calling the work pants Levi’s. Also a lady made pies for workers and made $11,000 in the first year, and back then that was worth a lot more than it is today.
Tools Needed to Mine for Gold
Most miners started out panning for gold. They would take a pan and scoop up some gravel from the bottom of a river. If there was any gold it would go to the bottom of the pan after shaking because it is heavier than most rocks. They can then take the gold out and put it somewhere safe. But then then people got more complicated ways to do it. It would take more people but it got a lot more gold. People could also use shovels or pickaxes, but they were uncommon.
Boomtowns and Ghost Towns
A boomtown is a camp that expands rapidly into a town because of gold. Boomtowns would grow so quickly that one day it will be population 1, the next 1,000. A ghost town is a town that was probably a boomtown before, but ran the gold supply down and people moved on to the next “Jackpot.” One day it would be population 20, the next 1. People always knew boomtowns would never last, but people never thought they would almost always completely go away, with the exception of Denver which is the capital of Colorado.
In conclusion, the California Gold Rush of 1848 was a really big help to populating California. Over 300,000 people moved to California in the Gold Rush. that may not seem like a lot now, but back then it was a big deal.
Bibliography
Panning Guy-
Informational Book-
O'Donnell, Kerri. The Gold Rush: a Primary Source History of the Search for Gold in California. Rosen Central Primary Source, 2002.
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