The California Gold Rush
Three hundred thousand people in six years, from four continents
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A gold rush is a sudden migration to a place where gold has been found, driven by the fact that anyone can pan it out of river gravel without equipment. The rush made California a state in 1850 without passing through territorial status, and it upset the balance between slave and free states immediately. For California's Indigenous people it was catastrophic: the population fell from around 150,000 to under 30,000 in twenty years, through disease, displacement and state-funded massacres — the state paid bounties. Hydraulic mining also buried whole river valleys in debris and produced, in 1884, one of the first environmental judgments in American law.
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Gold was found in a sawmill race in California, nine days before Mexico ceded the territory to the United States. Within a few years hundreds of thousands arrived from around the world — including from China, Chile and Australia. San Francisco grew from a village to a city in under two years.
Sources
- Madley, An American Genocide (2016)
- Rohrbough, Days of Gold (1997)
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