In January 1848, James Marshall was inspecting the building of a saw mill for his employer, when he saw an odd rock glinting in the upturned soil.
He was not certain whether it was gold or not and did not want to get people's hopes up. So Marshall attempted to break the yellow rock with a hammer. It did not crack, but it did dent. just like gold would. The woman who was cooking meals for the saw mill construction crew, tried another test by boiling the rock in lye.
They boiled it all day, but it did not change colour. So, they handed the rock over to the mill's owner, Mr. John Sutter, who also conducted a few tests. In the end, everyone agreed that this rock was indeed gold.
It seems that the Sierra Nevada Mountains hid huge hordes of gold, but that over tens of thousands of years, erosion had loosened up gold nuggets and the mountain streams washed them down to the bottom of the mountains. Sutter's property was situated between two rivers and so was likely to generate great wealth.
Sutter had plans to build an agricultural empire on his 39,000 acres of land, so he asked his employees to keep quiet about the strike. However, as is to be anticipated, word leaked out. In due course news of the gold find reached the small town of San Francisco.
There, a newspaper publisher shouted around the streets: "Gold from the American River!" and within three days of the news arriving, 400 of the 600 settlers had set out for Sutter's land. It was a groundswell and by the end of the year, gold prospectors had traveled to California from as far afield as Mexico and Chile.
When word of the gold strike got to the east coast, President Polk confirmed the finding. It was December 1848 and 'The Gold Rush' became a national and even a global event. The gold miners of 1849 and later years became known as forty-niners.
What has to be remembered is though, that most people, who came from Canada, Mexico and the eastern United States came by wagon train, as there were not locomotive! This meant a arduous journey of between six and nine months
Nonetheless, at least 32,000 people actually walked to California in 1849, and about 44,000 more got there in 1850. Others, such as South Americans, faced an arduous journey by sea. They suffered storms, shipwrecks, hunger and thirst, disease, and overcrowding and after all that, some still had to undergo mule rides through jungles and deserts! Still, in less than a year, about 40,000 people arrived in San Francisco from overseas.
The new arrivals caused a dramatic change in California's population, because in 1848, California had had about 100,000 residents, most of whom were Native Americans, but within two years, the state populace more than doubled but the variety of backgrounds increased tens of times.
Some prospectors found gold and made a lot of money in the Californian riverbeds, but most people did not become rich in the Gold Rush. When gold was found, the cache was usually cleared quickly. James Marshall had little success as a miner, and he died impoverished. John Sutter, who had once owned 39,000 acres, left California in serious debt after prospectors flattened his land.
In deed, it was simpler to make money selling shovels and other supplies to the miners. Most people lost everything they had, so they stayed to work the vast expanse called California or to set up businesses. By 1856, San Francisco had a very multi-ethnic population of over 50,000 people and California had become the most exciting state in the nation.
