Click picture of map to view map of the Mother Lode.

 

In the early 1840s, California was a distant outpost that only a handful of Americans had seen. The sleepy port that would become San Francisco had just a few hundred residents.

One of the wealthiest people in the region was John Sutter--an affable Swiss immigrant who came to California in 1839, intent on building his own private empire. Sutter soon built a fort, amassed 12,000 head of cattle, and took on hundreds of workers. His most prolific crop was debt. He owed money to creditors as far away as Russia. But Sutter was a man with a dream; a dream of a vast agricultural domain that he would control.

John Sutter

By the mid 1840s, more and more Americans were trickling into California by wagon and ship. Sutter welcomed the newcomers--he saw them as subjects for his self-styled kingdom. But Sutter had no idea that the trickle would become a flood--a deluge of humanity that would destroy his dream.
Sutter's undoing began 50 miles northeast of his fort on the American River. In late 1847, James Marshall and about 20 men were sent to the river by Sutter to build a sawmill--to provide lumber for Sutter's growing ranch.

 

Sutter's Mill Replica 2006, Click for full size picture.

 

The sawmill was nearly complete when a glint of something caught Marshall's eye. It was January 24th, 1848.

"I reached my hand down and picked it up; it made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold. The piece was about half the size and shape of a pea. Then I saw another."

James Marshall

After making the greatest find in the history of the West, Marshall and the other workers went back to work. But they kept stumbling upon more gold.

Still in disbelief, Marshall took samples back to Sutter's Fort. Sutter and Marshall tested the shiny metal as best they could--a tattered encyclopedia gave them clues. It was gold, they concluded--but neither man was happy about it. Sutter was building an agricultural fiefdom--he didn't want the competition that gold-seekers might bring. And Marshall had a sawmill to build--gold hunters would just get in his way. So they made a pact to keep the discovery a secret.

But it wasn't long before stories of gold filtered into the surrounding countryside. Yet there was no race to the American River. The news of Marshall's gold was just another fantastic tale--too unlikely to be believed.

The gold rush needed a booster, and Sam Brannan was the man. A San Francisco merchant, Brannan was a skilled craftsman of hype. Eventually, the gold rush would make him the richest person in California--but Sam Brannan never mined for gold.
He had a different scheme--a plan he set into motion by running through the streets of San Francisco shouting about Marshall's discovery. As proof, Brannan held up a bottle of gold dust. It was a masterstroke that would spark the rush for gold--and make Brannan rich.

Brannan keenly understood the laws of supply and demand. His wild run through San Francisco came just after he had purchased every pick axe, pan and shovel in the region. A metal pan that sold for twenty cents a few days earlier, was now available from Brannan for fifteen dollars. In just nine weeks he made thirty-six thousand dollars.

By the winter of 1848, whispers of a gold strike had drifted eastward across the country--but few easterners believed. It was an age when rumors were discounted--and government officials were revered. The gold discovery needed validation, and President James Polk delivered just that in early December, 1848:

"The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by authentic reports of officers in the public service."

President James Polk

 

Polk's confirmation reached deep into the soul of millions. His simple words were a powerful call to action. Farmers left their fields; merchants closed their shops; soldiers left their posts--and made plans for California. Newspapers fanned the fires.

"Fortune lies upon the surface of the earth as plentiful as the mud in our streets. We look for an addition within the next four years equal to at least One Thousand Million of Dollars to the gold in circulation."

Horace Greeley the of New York Tribune

 

By early 1849, gold fever was an epidemic. Discussions of gold could be heard at nearly every kitchen table in the nation. Young men explained to their wives that a year apart would be worth the hardship.

"Jane, I left you and them boys to procure a little property by the sweat of my brow so that we could have a place of our own-that I might not be a dog for other people any longer."

Miner Melvin Paden

They said their goodbyes and streamed west in unison--thousands of young adventurers with a collective dream--a year of pain in return for a lifetime of riches. They were dubbed "forty-niners" because they left home in 1849. When they would return, was another matter entirely.

Most of the world's gold is locked deep underground--embedded in hard rock. But California gold was different--easily accessible to anyone with a few simple tools and a willingness to work hard. Also unique was the political environment. California became a part of the United States just a few days after Marshall's discovery; and so the gold rush came before any meaningful government could be established. It was an unlikely intersection of anarchy and geology. Unlike anywhere else, the gold in California was easy to get and free for the taking.

It was free--and it was plentiful. Soon there was too much money in California and too little of everything else. The lessons of supply and demand were often painful. A forty-niner who earned a dollar a day back home, could make twenty-five dollars in a day of mining--but that was often just enough to buy dinner.

It wasn't just Sutter's gardens that were raided--by the end of 1849, his grand empire had collapsed completely. Sutter did not have the entrepreneurial spirit of the new Californians and he didn't have gold fever. He wanted an agricultural empire and refused to alter his vision. In the new California, Sutter was simply in the way. The 49ers literally trampled his crops and tore down his fort for the building materials. Dejected, disillusioned, he eventually left the state. The man who had the best opportunity to capitalize on the discovery of gold--never even tried.

Instead, California was filling up with a very different kind of businessman--and it was filling up fast. Camps sprouted up and evolved into ramshackle boomtowns to serve the growing population--places with accurate names like: Hangtown, Gouge Eye, Rough and Ready, and Whiskeytown. Places to avoid--were it not for the gold. Places that were wild, open, free.

The class society of the east was gone and opportunity was everywhere. It was pure freedom, and a pure free market. People who had a skill were in demand regardless of who they were. Women, for example, who couldn't earn much money back home, found their domestic skills had considerable value here.

Part of the reason they could charge so much for their talents was the fact that women were rare in the early gold rush days.


Women weren't the only ones to realize the entrepreneurial opportunities of California. People from all walks of life quickly understood that there was just as much money to be made serving the miners as there was digging for gold. A steamboat operator could earn 40,000 dollars in a single month--a chicken farmer could sell each precious egg for fifty cents.

King of the wheeling, dealing entrepreneurs was Sam Brannan. The man who pulled the trigger on the gold rush was expanding his sphere of influence--and earning unheard of profits. While miners talked of gold, Brannan shrewdly bought up carpet tacks-- every tack in California. By cornering the market, he could extort huge profits, a technique he executed flawlessly--over and over. But Brannan was only the first in a long line of entrepreneurs who made their fortunes without digging for gold.

In 1853--according to legend--a man stitched a pair of pants out of canvas; sturdy pants that later became popular with the miners--very popular. His name: Levi Strauss.
But during the gold rush, Strauss was best known for his prosperous dry good business. It wasn't until 1872 that he added a critical innovation to canvas pants, the metal rivet--a breakthrough that would change the course of American fashion.

   

Levi Strauss

 

This New York butcher decided one day to walk to California. Eventually, he opened a meat market in Placerville--and later took his profits to Milwaukee, where he set up a meat processing plant. His name was Phillip Armour, and the Armour meat packing company became one of the nation's largest.

 

Phillip Armour

 

Armour's neighbor in Placerville, was an enterprising wheelbarrow maker who dreamed of bigger things. After saving every dime for six years, he left California for his home in Indiana. There, he plowed his profits into the family wagon-making business. The man's name was John Studebaker--and the family enterprise would go on to build covered wagons for the Oregon-bound pioneers, and later--automobiles.

 

John Studebaker

 

Two businessmen also looked west and saw opportunity. Sensing the unsettled atmosphere in California--they offered what many miners desperately wanted: stability. The offered secure, honest banking, transportation, even mail delivery. They were Henry Wells and William Fargo. Their company, Wells Fargo, became a giant in the banking industry.

 

Henry Wells and William Fargo

 

The most famous celebrity of the gold rush era came to California as a complete unknown and took a job writing for the San Francisco Call. It wasn't long until his fanciful story about a frog jumping contest in nearby Calaveras County thrust him into the national spotlight. His name: Samuel Clemens--Mark Twain.
Clemens boss at the Call was also destined to become a best-selling author, Brett Harte. Unlike Clemens, Harte wrote almost exclusively about western characters--colorful stories about miners, bandits, and gamblers. His tale of an orphaned baby adopted by a group of rough miners would make him famous and rich.

 

Samuel Clemens--Mark Twain

For every famous success, there were a thousand smaller stories of people who used their wits, not their shovels-- to find a fortune. Creative entrepreneurs were everywhere--looking for a new angle--a new way to make money, more money.

In 1848 and early 49, everyone was making money--but the party didn't last forever. For most miners, it didn't last very long at all.

As the gold became more difficult to extract, profound changes in California took root. By the early 1850s, a single miner could no longer work his claim alone. He needed help and he needed technology.

 

Hydraulic Mining, Click for full size picture.

At first, miners banded together in informal companies to dam the rivers, reroute the water and expose the gold underneath. But soon even more capital-intensive measures were needed to extract the gold and the loose knit groups of miners were replaced by corporations. By the mid 1850s, most of the miners who remained were employees, a way of life they found distasteful but necessary.

The new mining corporations developed extraction techniques that were frighteningly efficient-- techniques that destroyed the rivers and caused California's first environmental disasters. Massive derricks lifted rock and sand--obliterating the formerly pristine rivers.

The worst of the large scale mining techniques came in 1853: hydraulic mining. Huge jets of water tore apart the walls of the riverbeds--jets so powerful, they could kill a man two-hundred feet away. By the 1860s it was clear that hydraulic mining was destroying the landscape, but little was done to stop it. Californians still had an attitude of exploitation--an attitude the miners had from the beginning.

It took over thirty years to ban hydraulic mining--thirty years to change California's attitude of exploitation. The rivers of northern California would never return to their pristine state. But then no part of California would be the same after the gold rush.