Life Down a California Goldmine

Don Wildman (0:05)

It is a cold, dank day in 1849 After months on the trail, we finally arrived at one of the many mining camps along the American River, here in the foothills of Sierra Nevada.

The long journey overland from St. Louis to California has been grueling and dangerous. But it's been worth it, because here we'll stake our claim. Here, we'll strike it rich.

Word is, this particular camp has been around here for months, but it's already packed. Tents and ramshackle shelters crowd together, alongside makeshift laundries and canvas stores selling tools and provisions to the new arrivals. The smell of fried bacon and boiling coffee mingles with the stink of refuse and human waste. As prospectors move through the camp, some of them don't look that good, and no wonder. Just a few months in, dysentery has already taken several men. But there's an energy here, too. A spirited tension, you can feel it, see it in the faces. Everyone is eager to find gold, and everyone is watching everyone else. Sooner or later, that hope is bound to curdle into greed. And with thousands more making their journey west, you gotta wonder, how much gold can this stretch of river hold? Will there really be enough for us all?

Hello all, I'm Don Wildman, and this is American History Hit. Glad to be with you. Today, we're digging into the grit and glimmer of the California gold rush in the famous 49ers. What was it like to arrive in a wilderness suddenly transformed into a sprawling patchwork of mining camps? What a day-to-day life looked like along the American River. How much gold did they find? And how likely was it that those hopeful new arrivals would actually strike it rich? For this, we're joined by a returning guest, Stephen Aron, President and CEO of the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA. His books include The American West, A Very Short Introduction, and Peace and Friendship, An Alternative History of the American West. He's previously joined us for an episode on the Oregon Trail. As part of my conversation with Stephen today, we used the word Indian when discussing Native Americans in California, as this was a historical language used at the time.

Stephen, welcome back.

Stephen Aron (2:37)

It's a pleasure to be back.

Actually, it's a pleasure to get to talk about the Gold Rush, because it's closely aligned with the episode we did before on the Oregon Trail. In some ways, they are twins.

Don Wildman (2:48)

Yeah. It's one of those tales of American history that's become so mythologized.

There's even an NFL franchise named for the people who lived through it. That's about a myth as you get. But before we get into those 49ers, let's set the scene. January 24th, 1848, California Gold is first discovered by James Marshall at Sutter's Mill in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, which is about 100 miles east of San Francisco, right?

Stephen Aron (3:15)

Yep.

Don Wildman (3:15)

As it happens, this was just days before Mexico signs the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ends the Mexican-American War, ceding California to the United States. It's always a question for me, Stephen. Was it simply a coincidence that gold was discovered just as America acquired California?

Stephen Aron (3:33)

There were certainly some Americans who thought it more than coincidental, who saw it as the workings of manifest destiny. That is, this was almost divinely ordained that the United States would come to take over territory, that it had long coveted, but that the moment that it actually completes its acquisition, completes its conquest, is almost simultaneous with the moment the gold is discovered there.

Don Wildman (3:57)

Yeah, and it never gets quite past that, which is remarkable to me. It really does seem like it's a coincidence. Even under Mexican rule, California had attracted lots of newcomers from the East and elsewhere, as you're saying, but it was hardly an empty wilderness. There were about 150,000 indigenous people already living there, of course, alongside much smaller populations of Spanish speaking, Californios, they were called, right?

Stephen Aron (4:21)

So yeah, I think, in your introduction, you spoke about California as a wilderness, which it was. But I think we want to be careful not to let wilderness connote an empty or a virgin land, the phrase that sometimes Americans attach to wilderness. Because there were, as you've just stated, lots of people living there, 150,000 Native peoples, which made it one of the most densely peopled portions of Native North America. Now, one should be careful here to say, though, that that population itself was down from about 300,000 75 years earlier at the onset of Spanish colonization into what was there, Alta California.