Gold, Eighteen Forty-Nine and the Rush That Made a State

On the morning of January twenty-fourth, eighteen forty-eight, a carpenter named James Marshall was inspecting a millrace he was building for John Sutter on the American River, near present-day Coloma in the Sierra Nevada foothills. He saw something glittering in the water. He picked it up, bit it.

It did not shatter. He brought it to Sutter, who tested it with nitric acid. It was gold.

The news leaked despite Sutter's wishes, and then it exploded. Within a year, approximately eighty thousand people arrived in California overland, around the Horn, and across the isthmus of Panama. San Francisco went from a village of about eight hundred people in eighteen forty-eight to a city of twenty-five thousand by eighteen fifty.

The California Territory was admitted as a state on September ninth, eighteen fifty, just two years after the discovery, skipping the territorial phase almost entirely because the population had grown so fast. The Gold Rush was not only American. Miners arrived from Chile, Peru, Mexico, China, Australia, France, and Germany.

The Chinese, who called California Gam Saan, Gold Mountain, would number well over twenty thousand by eighteen fifty-two. The argonauts, as the forty-niners called themselves, found a world already populated and remade it violently and fast. For California's remaining Indigenous peoples, the gold years were a second catastrophe.

Miners dispossessed communities from their river territories. The state legislature funded expeditions against villages that resisted. Historians estimate that California's Indigenous population, already devastated by the mission era, fell from perhaps one hundred fifty thousand in eighteen forty-six to around thirty thousand by eighteen seventy.

The violence had a name even then. Governor Peter Burnett, in his January eighteen fifty-one state address, declared that a war of extermination would continue between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct.