January 24, 2023 – California Gold Rush

It was on this day in 1848 that the California gold rush started when gold was first found at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, CA. While this was certainly the largest gold rush in American history, it wasn’t the first! Around 50 years before, the first American gold rush started in North Carolina, where a 17 pound gold nugget was found in Cabarrus County there. Eventually, more than 30,000 people were mining for gold in North Carolina, and for more than 30 years, all the gold coins issued by the U.S. Mint were made with North Carolina gold.
The first people to rush to the goldfields of California in the spring of 1848 were Californians themselves. Word spread slowly at first (news traveled a lot slower back then!). The first big group to arrive were several thousand Oregonians. Eventually, 300,000 people from all over the United States and abroad made their way to California to see if they could strike it rich. About half arrived by sea and half came overland. San Francisco grew from a small settlement of around 200 residents to a boomtown of about 36,000 bu 1853.
The sad reality is that only about half the gold-seekers made a modest profit. The real winners were the merchants, who made far more money than the miners. The richest man in California during the early days of the gold rush was Samuel Brannan, who opened the first supply stores in towns near the goldfields. Just as the rush was starting, he bought all the prospecting supplies in San Francisco and re-sold them at a substantial profit. Another businessman who did quite well was Levi Strauss, who started selling his denim overalls to miners in San Francisco in 1853.
The California gold rush was the largest mass migration in American history and it had substantial impacts. The sudden influx of gold reinvigorated the economy, and the huge population increase put California on the fast track to statehood, which was declared in the Compromise of 1850. However, the gold rush had severe impacts on native Californians, with whole indigenous societies attacked and forced off their lands. The gold rush turned California from a sleepy backwater to the center of global imagination. Learn more here.