The California Gold Rush

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Who Were the 49’ers?
The 49’ers were much more than just a San Francisco football team. They were the movement of men who moved west seeking their fortune in the goldfields of California. It was the actual residents of California who made the first strikes beginning in 1848. The 49’ers were those who came later in search of anything that might be left. california gold rush

The next group of treasure seekers were men from the area surrounding California. This makes sense, as it was in these regions where word of the gold first spread to. The first major emigration to the gold region of California came from Oregon, via a trail that rains directly from the Beaver State to the Golden State. These “48’ers” as they were called were among the most prosperous of prospectors, able to gather thousands of dollars worth of gold every day. Even the average prospector was making 10 to 15 times what laborers were making back on the East Coast.

The 49’ers themselves were mostly, but not entirely, from America. People were coming from as far away as the antipodes to hunt for gold. Latin America, Mexico in particular, provided much of the manpower that would attempt to find a fortune in California. The European Revolutions of 1848 likewise provided a steady stream of adventurers looking to strike it rich, primarily from France, but also from Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

All told, it’s estimated that 90,000 souls arrived in California in 1849 alone, half of them taking an overland route and half of them coming by sea. It is further estimated that a relatively scant 40,000 to 50,000 of these were Americans, the rest coming from abroad. Fewer than 4,000 of these were of African descent, most from the United States, but also some from Cuba and Brazil. The arrival of some 20,000 Chinese immigrants seeking gold led to both the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Foreign Miners Tax. And while there were some women, their numbers were hardly significant — a scant 700 or so women went west to the California goldfields, most of these wives and prostitutes.
Lawlessness and Property Rights

The problem with a weak rule of law and a lot of gold sitting around is that property rights quickly become difficult and complicated to enforce. This is a theme that runs throughout all of the gold rushes and the California Gold Rush is no exception. This was not helped by the strange, nebulous relationship of what would later become the State of California to the United States.

At the time of the Gold Rush, California was not a part of the United States at all, it was simply under the control of the United States military thanks to the Mexican-American War. Indeed, California was never a territory in the way other Western states were. It went from a military-occupied area with a “provisional government” in 1846 to a state in 1850 with no status as a territory in between.

All of this means that there was never any degree of civil control or traditional rule of law during the period of the California Gold Rush. No legislature, no executive, and no judiciary existed until California became a state in 1850. This result of this meant that the actual law as it was applied was a curious mixture of Mexican law, American values, and whatever you could get away with.

Possession was ten-tenths of the law. Any gold that you could carry away, you kept, regardless of what the law said or whether or not someone else might have held title to the land. Even the end of the war didn’t do much to alleviate this situation. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War, recognized Mexican land grants as valid. However, this was a very small portion of the land ceded to the United States. The remaining land was considered “public land.” Thus, anyone was allowed to mine for gold on it — and oftentimes “anyone” did.

The miners eventually came up with a system that more or less worked. Gold claims were only good as in as much as they were actively being worked. This allowed prospectors to “claim jump,” or work an area to find out if it was worth continuing to work before jumping on to the next spot. Oftentimes, prospectors would go to an area that another prospector had already worked on, piggybacking off of their labor and hoping to have more luck than the last guy.
The California Gold Rush and Technology

Silicon Valley isn’t the first time that California has led innovation and technology in the United States. The California Gold Rush led to a giant boom in mining technology, the effects of which are still with us today.

Early 49’ers were able to use panning for gold and placer mining to get rich. This is because there were such rich deposits of gold in the state that there was a lot of low-hanging fruit as it were. But this is not a reliable method of extracting large amounts of gold from a region. It only allows for very easy pickings. And once people saw the riches that could easily be panned out of rivers in California, they wanted to see what they could get if they dug a little deeper.

Modern hydraulic mining was first developed in California specifically for this purpose around 1853. By the mid-1880s, about 11 million ounces (340 tons) of gold (or about $19.8 billion in September 2020 prices) had been recovered by this new hydraulic mining process. Dredging for gold was likewise invented in California after the initial Gold Rush had died down. Hard rock mining also saw massive innovations as the search for gold in California became more and more challenging.

It’s not a stretch to say that, without the California Gold Rush, there might not have been a massive move to California during the 19th Century. Indeed, to this day, California might remain a rural backwater more known for growing oranges and almonds than anything else if there were no gold there. This underscores just how important gold is to the history of American Westward Expansion.

It was the California Gold Rush that made San Francisco the first West Coast city to crack the top ten in terms of population in the 1870 census, a place where it remained until the 1900 census, rising as high as the eighth-largest city in the United States. The mark of the California Gold Rush can still be seen on the Golden State, with references to it virtually everywhere, including the famous Golden Gate Bridge.

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