The Gold Rush’s Hazy Grays

John W. Marshall inadvertently made — and changed — history on January 24, 1848, when the carpenter found bits of gold at entrepreneur John Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. The men tried to keep the find a secret, but it proved impossible. Within three months the news had spread to San Francisco, then to New York in August, and by December President James Polk excitedly bragged about California’s gold mines now under American control. “Recent discoveries render it probable that these mines are more extensive and valuable than was anticipated,” Polk said in his State of the Union that year. California, he said, was the anchor for a new America: “[The land] holds at this day, in point of value and importance, to the rest of the Union the same relation that Louisiana did when that fine territory was acquired from France forty-five years ago.”

California was no longer simple ranch land. It was no longer the scene of the Mexican-American War and the doomed Donner Party. California was now the hottest, most optimistic place in the world, and everyone wanted a piece. By the end of 1849, an estimated 300,000 49ers, also called Argonauts, arrived, all hoping to get rich quick. And it wasn’t just Americans vying for the gold in them there hills. Prospectors came from around the world, including England, France, Turkey and China, from whence about 20,000 people arrived in three years.

Yes, a few lucky people did find fortune, though few of them were speculators. Like most miners, Marshall and Sutter were pushed out by industrial outfits will the machinery needed to dig deep for large finds, and both men died penniless. The people who made the most money were actually those who stayed out of the fields all together: men like John Studebaker, whose covered wagon business eventually evolved into an auto empire, and Levi Strauss, a German immigrant who started his iconic denim company by selling miners sturdy fabrics for pants that could withstand 16 hours digging in the dirt. (The manufacturing of jeans would come until later, around 1870.)

But the Gold Rush brought darkness, too. The arrival of foreigners sparked xenophobia and bigotry, and white vigilantes regularly attacked and sometimes lynched Latinos and Chinese people. And Native Americans who had lived in the area for 14,000 years were routed out, most of them dying in the process. There’s no official numbers, but estimates put the death toll around 100,000 between 1850 and 1890.

The Gold Rush had more than social and economic effects, though. There was a psychological impact felt around the world: millions now longed for the so-called California Dream, a dream of easy riches. Historian H.W. Brands put it well in his 2002 book “The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream”: Gold rush fantasies eclipsed the old “Poor Richard” American dream of a slow rise to the top; riches could now be made in an instant. “The new dream was the dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck... [This dream] became a prominent part of the American psyche.”

Some see this wishful thinking as the root of laziness and entitlement. To others, it’s the genesis of something large and wonderful: an international drive to push the limits. It’s the same rhetorical engine that helped make California home to some of the United States’ most imaginative and lucrative businesses: Hollywood, aerospace companies like Hughes Aircraft and Northrop, and Silicon Valley, incubator for so much innovation.

About 15,000 non-natives lived in California in 1848. Today 39 million call the Golden State home, many of them there chasing dreams first unearthed in the Gold Rush. Few will strike it rich, but at least they’ll get a golden tan in the process.