On January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall discovered gold at a mill where a group of men erecting for John A. Sutter south of the American river. Even though Sutter tried to keep it se-cret until he could secure and protect his vast estates from Mexican land grants, California’s newspaper already revealed his findings only two months later in March. First news reached the east coast in August by the New York Herald, next month the word from the United States Counsel in Monterrey, Thomas O. Larkin, was alarmed by the impact of the event. De-cember, 1848, the eleventh president of the United States, James K. Polk, told congress of the discovery. That was when the United States and the whole world realized that the earli-er reports were really true
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As the young man approached the American river, Marshall had pulled out four or five shiny pebbles. He tried hammering the pebbles and changed its shape but it did not break it. His discovery brought prospects, im-migrants, and new technology to what would become known as the Golden State and had fostered an entrepreneurial spirit that persists today (Elder 1).
The effect of it was out of this world, it had triggered a stampede of miners from all over the world going to Califor-nia to find instant wealth. What had made the California gold rush social and a literal event was not just because of the four hundred million dollars in gold which was extracted by miners from 1848-1855. It was the atmosphere or swagger, heightened expectations of finding gold, and boomtown hokum that characterized tens of thousands of “Argonauts” who poured into a remote Pacific maritime province recently wrested from Mexico in the Mexican American War. (Kowalewski …show more content…
Many of the Americans living on the eastern seacoast elected to travel to California by sea. Sixty-one ships left the Atlantic seaports for a voyage of six months around Cape Horn within a month of the President releasing the message (“California Gold Rush” 1). The Forty-Niners were first seen on El Camino Real in Au-gust when a party of people had reached San Diego over the Gi-la route. Almost then thousand sunburned gold pilgrims had reached San Diego and Los Angeles from the southwestern de-sert, often by foot as their animals would get stolen from the Yuma Indians. Southbound travelers were stopped companies ea-ger for the “golden news.” (Riesenberg 114) (Riesenberg
As the young man approached the American river, Marshall had pulled out four or five shiny pebbles. He tried hammering the pebbles and changed its shape but it did not break it. His discovery brought prospects, im-migrants, and new technology to what would become known as the Golden State and had fostered an entrepreneurial spirit that persists today (Elder 1).
The effect of it was out of this world, it had triggered a stampede of miners from all over the world going to Califor-nia to find instant wealth. What had made the California gold rush social and a literal event was not just because of the four hundred million dollars in gold which was extracted by miners from 1848-1855. It was the atmosphere or swagger, heightened expectations of finding gold, and boomtown hokum that characterized tens of thousands of “Argonauts” who poured into a remote Pacific maritime province recently wrested from Mexico in the Mexican American War. (Kowalewski …show more content…
Many of the Americans living on the eastern seacoast elected to travel to California by sea. Sixty-one ships left the Atlantic seaports for a voyage of six months around Cape Horn within a month of the President releasing the message (“California Gold Rush” 1). The Forty-Niners were first seen on El Camino Real in Au-gust when a party of people had reached San Diego over the Gi-la route. Almost then thousand sunburned gold pilgrims had reached San Diego and Los Angeles from the southwestern de-sert, often by foot as their animals would get stolen from the Yuma Indians. Southbound travelers were stopped companies ea-ger for the “golden news.” (Riesenberg 114) (Riesenberg