NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
On December 7, 1848, an ornate tea caddy arrived in Washington after an arduous three-month journey. It was filled, not with tea, but with gold discovered at John Sutter's sawmill in California. The samples were exhibited. Newsmen flocked to cover the story.
President Polk himself publicly confirmed the discovery of "extensive and valuable" mines which before were only rumored, recommending that Congress establish a territorial government and a Federal mint in the mysterious westward realm that the U. S. had recently taken from Mexico. As news spread, the California Gold Rush was under way. So was the eager promotion of a myth. "Here is El Dorado, of which Ponce de Leon and his companions so vividly dreamed, " proclaimed the Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch. "The Age of Gold" has dawned on earth, Horace Greeley wrote in the New York Tribune: "Whatever else they may lack; our children will not be destitute of gold. " Indeed, word of the first gold strikes, reaching the East, carried poetic imagery befitting the birth of a myth: "Another bag of gold from the mines and another spasm in the community. It was brought down by a sailor from Yuba River and contains 136 ounces.
It looks like the yellow scales of the dolphin passing through his rainbow hues at death. " In the weeks that followed, newspapers freely passed along reports of "lumps the size of a man's hand" - "an inexhaustible supply. " Advertisers peddled medicines, money belts, portable houses, and California Gold Grease, a $ 10 a-box concoction which was applied to the body. When the purchaser rolled down a gold-spangled hill, "gold and nothing else" would stick to his skin. In a matter of days thousands of Easterners were organizing into companies of between a dozen and 150 members to invest in supplies and transport to carry them- some along the overland trails, others by steamship and clipper via Panama - to America's real-life El Dorado. The discovery of a land of gold in the far reaches of the American West seemed amazing and yet also quite natural - the ancient dream of effortless and staggering wealth had come true, a just reward for America's already prodigious accomplishments, and perfect proof of the nation's shining future - all rolled together into a grand opportunity for new adventure and further achievement.
The Sunday before departing Boston harbor for San Francisco on the Edward Everett, the 150 men who would be on board attended a special service at which they heard the Reverend Mr. Kirk admonish them, "You are going to a strange country. Take the Bible in one hand and your New England civilization in the other and make your mark on the people and the country. "Manifest destiny" was a freshly minted catchword at the time, having been coined in 1845 in the New York Morning News. To any American at the end of the 1840 s, it could only mean a place called California - a vast territory recently wrested from Mexican possession, largely unexplored and certainly unexploited - everything that was meant by a "frontier. " The gold rush brought a life of exceptional challenge. For women, who did not mine gold by and large, it offered entrepreneurial opportunity as well. Luzena Wilson arrived with the certain instinct that "the one who did not work in ' 49 went to the wall.
It was a hand-to-hand fight with starvation at first. " With her stove installed beneath a pine tree, Luzena set herself to the hospitality trade. "I bought two boards from a precious pile belonging to a man who was building the second wooden house in town. With my own hands I chopped stakes, drove them into the ground, and set up my table. I bought provisions at a neighboring store, and when my husband came back at night he found, mid the weird light of the pine torches, twenty miners eating at my table. Each man as he rose put a dollar in my hand and said I might count him as a permanent customer. I called my hotel El Dorado. From the first day it was well patronized, and I shortly after took my husband into partnership. " In the early months in the mining camps, the euphoria of having survived life-threatening journeys, combined with the camaraderie of a still-mysterious, shared adventure, gave rise to a certain communal spirit.
Men were generous with one another, and with information - exaggerated as it most often was. During the first year of working the mines, there was relative peace between Native Americans and whites as well. Good will flourished in a land of apparent plenty: "The conviction was widespread that the mountains were a bank on which every man had a drawing account; if he came up short he need only seize his pick and pan and make a withdrawal. " But the profile soon changed. The exaggerated rumors, and the increasing number of miners competing for space, sped the work pace. Miners raced through the short summer months of prime prospecting - winter brought impossible weather - spring brought flash floods, along with the next wave of migrant gold seekers. In the space of a season, the Forty-niners turned California "from an isolated island of tranquility to a raucous emporium of business and bedlam. " One diarist describes the skewed sense of time brought by the summer of ' 49: "The longest period of time ever thought of was a month.
Money was loaned and houses were rented by the month. All engagements were made by the month. In the space of a month the whole city might be swept off by fire and a totally new one might be flourishing in its place. " Rumors flashed from one hill to the next - $ 1500 could be washed in a day on the American River - a man below Placerville found $ 2, 000 beneath a boulder - three Frenchmen removed a stump from the Coloma trail and dug out $ 5, 000 - and towns sprang up instantly. An ex-slave from Virginia named Jim Freeman and his Scottish partner, "Major" William Downie, built a log cabin on the site of fabulous diggings they discovered on the Yuba.
Within four months, it was a boom town with fifteen hotels, five thousand residents, and a name - Downieville. As towns came to life, the need for social order was overwhelming. Because everyone was too busy hunting gold to organize basic services, fires leveled towns repeatedly. Problems of water and sanitation were appalling - sickness was a constant.
In one year, cholera killed 1500 in Sacramento alone. Of the original Forty-niners who had followed the "California dream, " an estimated 30 percent died of disease, accident, or violence. Uncounted Native Americans and other non-Anglo's were casualties as well. New arrivals had no idea how hard and unhealthy prospecting would be or how small would be their reward.
The lessons of the departure sermons now resonated in the hearts of miners who were drained by one misery after another - cholera, pneumonia, wracking dysentery - exhaustion, homesickness, repeated hard luck in the claims. As the prospect of riches dimmed, suicides were reported. "It was heartrending to see stout-hearted men shedding tears over their horrible situation, not knowing what to do. " Some turned and went back where they had come from. Those with stronger constitutions kept on. Few would actually grow rich off their dream. And most of those who did were not to be found scrabbling in the hills, but in San Francisco, where they were swiftly recasting the dream within a distinctly urban framework. Bayard Taylor was twenty-four years old, a poet and a celebrated travel writer when he sailed to San Francisco with intentions of writing a book about his trip to America's El Dorado.
A gifted journalist, Taylor narrates in colorful detail the real estate explosion - the blizzard of businesses opening up - the transformation of San Francisco from a tent city into a metropolis of 15, 000 in just four months. Speed was everything. No one knew how long the hills of gold would pay, but while they did, the merchant whose stock arrived first stood to profit even more handsomely than the prospector. On first landing, Taylor recorded astonishing signs of California's distorted economy along the docks of San Francisco: Seventy-five prefabricated iron houses shipped from China - along with Chinese carpenters. Cheaper than using local materials and labor. Miners's oiled underwear departing by shiploads for the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), where it was cheaper to get it laundered.
An instant 4, 000 % profit which Taylor himself made, selling the old newspapers he had used to cushion his belongings on the trip. Real estate lots bought up by speculators a year ago at sixteen dollars - now worth $ 15, 000. Social institutions, frail to begin with, similarly often crumbled under continuing pressure. Competition and the lack of organized legal or social structures very soon combined to foment an environment of lawlessness -- claim-jumping, theft, fraud and violence - that has endured as the stereotyped Wild West. The miners were not bound by the laws of Mexico, nor as yet by those of any of the States. Almost from the first, miners had convened democratic meetings when it was necessary to settle claim disputes or work out simple mining codes, and these would eventually pave the way for more advanced forms of civic organization and cooperation.
But now, vigilante committees were gathered to solve problems and dispatch justice expediently - the simplest form of law. The objective - partly because there were no jails to hold the accused, and largely because a man's time was easily worth between $ 16 and $ 100 a day - was to return men to their job in the claims with minimum time lost. As increasing competition and decreasing resources brought worsened conditions and desperation, "law by Judge Lynch" became more frequent, and much vigilante activity focused on driving non-Anglo's from valuable mining sites. A vigilante "trial" of Indians in Coloma, near Sutter's original gold fields, brought a violent end to the multicultural coexistence that marked the first year of work in the California hills. William Perkins was one Coloma vigilante who felt remorse of conscience - and expressed it in terms of a clash of cultures. "We invade a land that is not our own, we arrogate a right through pretense of superior intelligence and the wants of civilization, and if the aborigines dispute our title we destroy them. "Non-Americans" (arbitrarily defined) were subjected to high fees and taxes, then banished from claims. Native Americans, Chinese, and Latinos - if not discouraged by these restrictions - were chased out by vigilante violence.
Native Americans who had formerly worked in the employ of whites fled into the Sierras. Antonio Coronel, who had enjoyed such good fortune earlier, was trying his luck further north when he came up against a posted notice ordering all non-citizens to leave within twenty-four hours and threatening violence to those who disobeyed. Coronel banded together with others to resist, but lasted only a few days before lynchings persuaded him to move on. He found the next camp no better. Marauding bands jumped the claims of Spanish-speaking miners or stole their supplies at will. "For me, gold mining is finished. " When Bayard Taylor surveyed the California hills, he was reminded of "a princess fallen into the hands of robbers, who cut off her fingers for the sake of the jewels she wears. " By 1852 California, having voted against slavery, was a state, and the California gold rush was over.
The Forty-niners departed, but many veteran prospectors rushed almost immediately to Australia and New Zealand, Colorado, and British Columbia, motivated all over again by the irresistible news of rich discoveries of ore in new, even more remote wildernesses Eldorado. At a heavy price, the California Gold Rush in only a few years brought accelerated development and unprecedented transformations that affected the life of the nation as a whole. California's population soared from 14, 000 to 265, 000 and its social structure and culture were permanently altered. Tens of thousands of "Argonauts" stayed on as farmers. A social infrastructure, critically lacking at first, was now established. Fire companies, mills, brickyards and foundries, railroads and stage routes were developed rapidly, as were improved communications within the new state and coast to coast.
San Francisco - five times burned to the ground, five times rebuilt - evolved a financial base and cultural sophistication that would soon rival the established cities of the East. At the same time, the myth of the California life - freer, richer, and faster - continued to attract immigrants. Bibliography: Caught, John Walton. Gold is the Cornerstone. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Holliday, J.
S. The World Rushed In, the California Gold Rush Experience. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. Paul, Rodman W. California Gold, the Beginning of Mining in the Far West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, A Bison Book, 1947.
Free research essays on topics related to: twenty four, san francisco, el dorado, california gold rush, native americans
Research essay sample on California Gold Rush El Dorado
