Essay On California Gold Rush

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The California Gold Rush affected the state of California in many ways, let alone the entire country. It changed the idea of success for all the people of the nation. Before the Gold Rush, most Americans did not even think about becoming wealthy; they thought more about holding just enough land to get them by in life. Land owners and farmers wanted to keep their families independence from working for wages, so when the Gold Rush fever sparked up, people could not resist. Why work so hard with plowing fields when you could be rich and set for life? More than half of the people with that mindset ended up with less than what they started with. The history changing event of 1848-1852, known as the California Gold Rush Era, caused many things to happen including: mass migrations, increase in wealth ( however ) numerous amounts of people came out poor, new laws and conflicts involving …show more content…
The first speck of gold was spotted in the American River near Coloma, California, on the morning of January 24, 1848, by James Wilson Marshall who was building a water powered sawmill for John Sutter at the time. Wilson noticed several bits of yellow mineral near the unfinished mill. “ It made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold.“, ( www.history.com/topics/gold-rush-of-1849 ), Sutter stated when he spotted the gold. Marshall was a carpenter and a handyman, so to test if the gold was “ fool’s gold “, which shatters when struck by something hard, he “ tried it between two rocks and found that it could be beaten into a different shape but not broken “ (www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3270). He showed it to the men he was working with and said that by God, he believed he found a gold mine. Although Marshall’s discovery was what started the Gold Rush Era, it wasn’t what ignited the spark in the Gold Rush

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