When Do the Steelers Play the 49ers Again

The California Golden Blitz was sparked by the discovery of gold nuggets in the Sacramento Valley in early 1848 and was arguably ane of the most meaning events to shape American history during the kickoff half of the 19th century. Equally news spread of the discovery, thousands of prospective gilt miners traveled by sea or over state to San Francisco and the surrounding surface area; by the terminate of 1849, the non-native population of the California territory was some 100,000 (compared with the pre-1848 figure of less than ane,000). A total of $ii billion worth of precious metal was extracted from the area during the Gilded Rush, which peaked in 1852.   .

Discovery at Sutter's Factory

On January 24, 1848, James Wilson Marshall, a carpenter originally from New Bailiwick of jersey, institute flakes of gold in the American River at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Coloma, California. At the fourth dimension, Marshall was working to build a h2o-powered sawmill owned by John Sutter, a German-born Swiss citizen and founder of a colony of Nueva Helvetia (New Switzerland, which would later get the city of Sacramento. As Marshall later recalled of his historic discovery: "It fabricated my middle thump, for I was certain it was golden."

Days after Marshall's discovery at Sutter's Factory, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, catastrophe the Mexican-American State of war and leaving California in the easily of the U.s.. At the fourth dimension, the population of the territory consisted of half dozen,500 Californios (people of Spanish or Mexican descent); 700 foreigners (primarily Americans); and 150,000 Native Americans (barely half the number that had been there when Spanish settlers arrived in 1769). In fact, Sutter had enslaved hundreds of Native Americans and used them every bit a gratuitous source of labor and makeshift militia to defend his territory and expand his empire.

Effects of the California Gold Rush: Gold Fever

Though Marshall and Sutter tried to keep news of the discovery under wraps, word got out, and by mid-March at least 1 newspaper was reporting that big quantities of gold were being turned upwards at Sutter'due south Mill. Though the initial reaction in San Francisco was disbelief, storekeeper Sam Brannan prepare off a frenzy when he paraded through boondocks displaying a vial of gold obtained from Sutter's Creek. By mid-June, some three-quarters of the male population of San Francisco had left town for the gold mines, and the number of miners in the area reached 4,000 by Baronial.

As news spread of the fortunes beingness made in California, some of the offset migrants to arrive were those from lands accessible by boat, such as Oregon, the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii), Mexico, Chile, Peru and even Mainland china. When the news reached the E Coast, printing reports were initially skeptical. Gold fever kicked off there in earnest, nonetheless, after Dec 1848, when President James M. Polk announced the positive results of a report made by Colonel Richard Mason, California'southward military governor, in his inaugural address. As Polk wrote, "The accounts of abundance of gold are of such an extraordinary character equally would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service."

The '49ers Come to California

Throughout 1849, people effectually the United States (mostly men) borrowed coin, mortgaged their property or spent their life savings to make the arduous journey to California. In pursuit of the kind of wealth they had never dreamed of, they left their families and hometowns; in turn, women left behind took on new responsibilities such every bit running farms or businesses and caring for their children solitary. Thousands of would-be aureate miners, known equally '49ers, traveled overland across the mountains or by sea, sailing to Panama or even around Cape Horn, the southernmost betoken of South America.

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Past the finish of the year, the non-native population of California was estimated at 100,000, (every bit compared with 20,000 at the end of 1848 and around 800 in March 1848). To accommodate the needs of the '49ers, gold mining towns had sprung up all over the region, complete with shops, saloons, brothels and other businesses seeking to make their own Gold Rush fortune. The overcrowded chaos of the mining camps and towns grew ever more lawless, including rampant banditry, gambling, prostitution and violence. San Francisco, for its office, developed a bustling economy and became the central metropolis of the new borderland.

The Gold Rush undoubtedly sped upward California's access to the Union as the 31st state. In late 1849, California applied to enter the Union with a constitution that barred the Southern system of racial slavery, provoking a crisis in Congress between proponents of slavery and anti-slavery politicians. According to the Compromise of 1850, proposed past Kentucky's Senator Henry Clay, California was allowed to enter every bit a free state, while the territories of Utah and New United mexican states were left open to determine the question for themselves.

California's Mines After the Gold Rush

After 1850, the surface gold in California largely disappeared, even as miners continued to arrive. Mining had ever been difficult and dangerous labor, and striking it rich required skillful luck as much as skill and hard piece of work. Moreover, the boilerplate daily take for an independent miner working with his pick and shovel had past then sharply decreased from what it had been in 1848. As aureate became more than and more difficult to achieve, the growing industrialization of mining drove more and more than miners from independence into wage labor. The new technique of hydraulic mining, developed in 1853, brought enormous profits but destroyed much of the region's landscape.

Though golden mining continued throughout the 1850s, information technology had reached its peak by 1852, when some $81 one thousand thousand was pulled from the ground. After that year, the total take declined gradually, leveling off to effectually $45 million per year by 1857. Settlement in California continued, even so, and by the end of the decade the state'south population was 380,000.

Environmental Impact of the Gold Rush

New mining methods and the population boom in the wake of the California Gold Rush permanently contradistinct the mural of California. The technique of hydraulic mining, adult in 1853, brought enormous profits just destroyed much of the region's mural. Dams designed to supply h2o to mine sites in summer contradistinct the form of rivers away from farmland, while sediment from mines clogged others. The logging industry was born from the need to construct extensive canals and feed boilers at mines, further consuming natural resources.

Sources

Environmental Impact of the Gilded Rush. Calisphere.org.

Afterwards the Gold Rush. National Geographic.

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Source: https://www.history.com/topics/westward-expansion/gold-rush-of-1849

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