California Gold Rush Research Paper

The California gold rush began in 1848 when James Marshall discovered tiny flakes of gold in the American River in Coloma, California while constructing a water-powered sawmill for John Shutter. Although the two men tried to keep their discovery a secret, news of their finding quickly spread and soon men from across the region were flocking to Shutter’s mill in hopes of discovering their own treasure. One of these such men was Samuel Brannan, a businessman and newspaper-owner from San Francisco. He had heard talk of gold in the north and decided to check it out for himself. Upon arriving in Coloma, he quickly discovered that there was more gold than even the rumors suggested. He took some of the the precious metal back to San Francis with him, …show more content…
By the fall of 1848, the first wave miners from outside of the Sacramento Valley had started to appear. This group arrived by boat and was comprised of men from Oregon, Hawaii, Mexico, Chile, Peru and even China. Although rumors of fortune has reached the eastern seaboard by now, people were skeptical. During his State of the Union address in December of 1848, President Polk announced the positive results of a report made by the governor of California, Colonel Richard Mason. The report, which details the Colonel’s month long journey throughout the gold region, emphasizes both the abundance of gold and the ease of attaining it. As he says at the end of his report, “There is more gold in the country drained by the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers than will pay the cost of the present war with Mexico a hundred times over. No capital is required to obtain this gold, as the laboring man wants nothing but his pick and shovel and tin pan.” The President’s message of prosperity quelled any doubts the people had about leaving everything behind in hopes of getting rich out West. Soon thousands of would-be gold miners, known as forty-niners, began making their way to California. They traveled overland across the mountains or by sea, sailing around Cape Horn or hiking across the Isthmus of Panama. Within the year eighty thousand miners had arrived at the California goldfields. By 1853 their numbers had grown to

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