The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (Search and Recover Book 2)

by H.W. Brands

James Marshall’s discovery of gold at Coloma turned out to be a seminal event in history, one of those rare moments that divide human existence into before and after.

As the golden news spread beyond California to the outside world, it triggered the most astonishing mass movement of peoples since the Crusades.

John Frémont, who was in California anxiously awaiting the belligerent word. Frémont’s anxiety reflected both his personal ambition and his uneasy conscience. His ambition drove him to dream of conquering California for the United States; his conscience nagged him for having started the war already, without authorization from Washington. Frémont was one of the great enigmas of his generation. For ten years during the 1840s and 1850s he was as famous as anyone in America, a celebrity-hero whose star rose like a rocket in the West and flashed brilliantly from coast to coast.

“The whole country from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and from the seashore to the base of the Sierra Nevada, resounds to the sordid cry of gold! GOLD!! GOLD!!!” observed a local paper, the Alta California, “while the field is left half planted, the house half built, and everything neglected but the manufacture of shovels and pickaxes, and the means of transportation to the spot where one man obtained $128 of the real stuff in one day’s washing, and the average for all concerned is $20 per diem.” With this statement, the paper announced that it was suspending publication; its entire staff was going to the goldfields.

The Gold Rush marked the beginning of the end of the great buffalo herds. Tens of thousands of hunters turned loose on the plains, each determined to bag a buffalo—or two or ten—led to killing far in excess of any conceivable need. One emigrant witnessed a half-day’s devastation and commented, “I presume that not less than fifty buffalo were slaughtered that morning, whereas not three in all were used. Such a wanton destruction of buffalo, the

In the first year or so after the gold discovery, life among the Indians proceeded much as before. Indeed, the gold provided new opportunities for the Indians. William Sherman’s observation on visiting the mining region in the summer of 1848, that half the estimated four thousand miners were Indians, suggested how quickly and well they were adapting to the changing circumstances. With their willow baskets they sifted the gold from the gravel and sand as efficiently as anyone. Some worked for themselves, others for such as Sutter. Very briefly, conniving whites were able to fool some Indians regarding the value of this yellow dust—one tale told by whites was that it was used it to plaster the walls of whites’ homes—yet the Indians soon caught on to the market price of gold and got what everyone else was getting. Life in the mines was no egalitarian picnic for the Indians; whites often despised them, and cheated them whenever possible. But by and large the Indians were able to look out for themselves.

Things changed with the huge influx of 1849. More miners meant more competition for claims; in the competition the Indians were typically thrust aside. In this regard they suffered similarly to the Chileans, Mexicans, Chinese, and other foreigners.

American miners, predictably for the age of Manifest Destiny, and especially after the war that won California for the United States, believed the mines belonged to them. They saw no reason to share the spoils with the indigenous peoples any more than with those against whom the war had been fought, or with foreigners who had taken no part in the war. American miners would defend one another against jumped claims and gross fraud—probably less from any sense of injured morality than from a recognition that what was done to t...

Already he could see the changes the Gold Rush had wrought: his eastward journey, via steamship and the isthmus, took a mere 30 days, compared to the 196 days his outbound journey around Cape Horn had required in 1846–47. Sherman had a second, more personal reason for traveling east. He was going to get married. His bride was Ellen Ewing of Ohio, who also happened to be his foster sister.

THE BANK PANIC of 1855 was the most serious calamity to hit San Francisco since the great fire of 1851. Hundreds of businesses went under, erasing millions of dollars of equity. Prices collapsed; workers were idled. A sense of sullen foreboding, of promises broken and golden dreams dashed, pervaded the city. The ugly mood grew uglier when

By tying the coasts together, the Pacific railroad created the largest unified market in the world, the market that allowed the American economy to grow into the colossus it became by the beginning of the twentieth century.

With Harpending in jail, the gold got through. By the beginning of the Civil War, California’s mines had produced more than $600 million in gold. During the four years of the war, another $130 million came out of the ground.

In the grim weeks that followed, Sherman tried to whip his men into shape. When one volunteer officer from New York asserted that he had served out his term and was heading home, Sherman threatened to shoot him. The officer subsequently complained to President Lincoln, who was visiting Sherman’s camp. Lincoln, having seen the determination in Sherman’s blue eyes, told the officer he’d better listen when Sherman talked of shooting. “I believe he would do it,” Lincoln said.

He proposed to drive from Tennessee to Atlanta, and from Atlanta to the sea. “If the North can march an army right through the South, it is proof positive that the North can prevail,” he told Grant. Skeptics observed that Sherman lacked the men and provisions to hold the territory he captured. That wasn’t the point, Sherman answered. He didn’t aim to hold territory but to break the enemy’s will. “Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it,” he told Grant. “But the utter destruction of its roads, houses and people will cripple their military resources.… I can make the march, and make Georgia howl!”

Sherman marched and Georgia howled. From May 1864 to April 1865 he carved a swath of destruction that left Atlanta in cinders and the Carolinas quaking.

The war made Sherman a hero (in the North; in the South it made him a second Satan). At the grand victory review

If the modern era in American history—call it the age of gold—was born at Coloma in 1848, it reached maturity at Promontory in 1869. By then the youthful effervescence of the Gold Rush years—the race from all over the world to California, the frantic assault on the goldfields, the wild times in San Francisco and the mining camps—was fading into memory. The Forty-Niners were growing arthritic; the placermen had long since been muscled aside by the hydraulickers and quartz borers; many of the camps had closed and fallen into ruin; San Francisco was dully proper compared to the days of the vigilantes and the nights of the wall-to-wall gambling hells.

The railroads were equally adept at transporting agricultural produce, allowing the different farming districts to specialize and thereby exploit their comparative advantages—the South for cotton and tobacco, the Midwest for corn and wheat, Texas for cattle, California for fruits and vegetables—and further freeing the industrial regions to concentrate on manufacturing. The results were little short of miraculous. Between 1869 and the end of the nineteenth century, the American economy grew as no economy had ever done before and very few did after.

From a laggard in the race to industrialize, trailing Britain, Germany, and France, the United States became the leader of the pack, with a manufacturing output that, by 1900, surpassed the three European powers combined.

Iron and steel production multiplied ten times between the commencement of construction of the Pacific railroad and the beginning of the twentieth century. The production of oil—whose discovery in western Pennsylvania in 1859 sparked a rush remarkably akin to the rush for ...

SAM CLEMENS KNEW all about the sordid quest for wealth in the age of gold (although he preferred the label “Gilded Age,”

In the 1870s the earth called him to the Black Hills of Dakota. A reconnaissance expedition under Colonel George Custer had discovered gold in the Black Hills; this set off a rush to the region, which provoked resistance by the Sioux, who considered the Black Hills sacred, and who had been promised the region as part of the settlement William Sherman encouraged by threatening the utter destruction of the Sioux nation. Custer led a contingent against an Indian army headed by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull; at the Little Bighorn in June 1876, Custer met an annihilating defeat.

Yet the Sioux couldn’t keep the miners out of the Black Hills any more than the Yosemite Indians had kept miners out of the Mother Lode; and Hearst joined the rush there.

By then the term “gold rush” had long been applied to any sudden efflorescence of wealth and opportunity. There was a “gold rush” for the oil (“black gold”) of Pennsylvania in the 1860s, and of Texas after 1900 and again in the 1930s, and of Alaska in the 1970s. There was a rush for land in Oklahoma in the 1890s and in Florida in the 1920s.

The bull market of Wall Street in the 1920s and the defense industry in the 1950s were likened to gold rushes.

But in the case of Silicon Valley in the 1980s and 1990s—the case that epitomized modern American success—the parallels to the original Gold Rush were especially apt. As in the first Gold Rush, people came from all over the world to try their luck in Silicon Valley. The pace of life in the valley was as frenetic as it had been in the diggings—more frenetic, in fact, since neither night nor winter suspended work in the silicon mines. Both settings were permeated by a conviction that tremendous opportunities existed but faded fast.

But when the high-tech bubble burst in the spring of 2000, the losses were also among the largest in history.

So striking were the similarities between the Gold Rush and the Silicon Rush that it was tempting to seek a causal connection.

the highly charged atmosphere in which the two combined to produce Hewlett-Packard and Fairchild and Intel and Xerox PARC and Sun and Cisco and Netscape and Yahoo was peculiar to California; or at least the California atmosphere carried a larger charge—of hell-for-leather entrepreneurship—than the air did elsewhere. California had seen and done it all before.

WE ARE ON THE brink of the age of gold,” Horace Greeley had said in 1848.

And in this lay the ultimate meaning of the Gold Rush. The Gold Rush shaped history so profoundly because it harnessed the most basic of human desires, the desire for happiness.