Thousands of people, all individual, coincidentally decided to all go westward, towards the exact same spot… what exactly was their motivation, their drive to leave the family to charge westwards? The answer to that question is greed… and gold.
The California Gold rush was a result of the Mexican-American War, as the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ceded New Mexico, California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, half of Colorado, the other half of which the Americans already owned, the final corner of Wyoming, the panhandle of Oklahoma, and the corner of Kansas. This massive land grant made the cost of land shoot for zilch, so people flocked to the west to fill it quickly and cheaply as possible. One of the settlers, named Sutter, bought land in California next to Sacramento to build a milling company. One of the workers hired was named _________ and he was the first to see a nugget of gold sitting in the nearby stream. He quickly reported back to Sutter, and they both swore to secrecy. As it always does, though, the secret got out, and the news was so big that Polk talked about it in a speech. Of course, that sent everyone in the nearby cities that part of California, and because he wasn’t fast enough to hire a guard around his property, his property was overrun and stripped of gold within a few days. The nearby city of San Francisco was turned from a 30,000 population into a ghost town in a matter of days as people rushed out to seek a quick fortune. Within a year, the “mother lode” was found, and the outposts started popping up like fleas in a rug. All of this was in one year, one 1848.
The next year, thousands and thousands moved in for the kill. These newcomers were called “forty-niners” by the old-timers, the year in which they got to California. By that time, most of the gold was gone. Some struck it rich in their little plots of land, others went broke trying. As more and more people joined the hunt, the outposts started turning into towns, and towns into cities. The nearby Sacramento had gone from a population of approximately 300 to somewhere near 100,000 in one and a half years. Another year brought that up to about 380,000, which is about near the size of modern Jacksonville, Florida in only two years. As these cities sprang from dust, the men who didn’t strike it rich became bandits and drunkards, and many never returned home to tell their families how they did. The estimated income over the whole of the Gold Rush was $160,000,000 during prime time, not counting the following years.
Many historians count only the good side about this stampede for money, but there was also a bad side to it. Many times the husbands simply left their wives and children “for their good” to gain them money, and then never come back. Women and children often starved or begged and barely made it by as their husbands drank and stole, and never came back. Often the Native Americans in the area were shot or forced to relocate by the gold seekers, and immigrating Asians were forced into slavery by these same gold-seekers. So there were bas sides to the gold rush as well as the growing wealth of the American Economy.
All in all, the California Gold Rush had a major impact of the population of America. A portion of such was moved westward and thus spread out, allowing for better network of people all over the continent.
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