California Quotes

“The value of the California crude oil produced in the decade of the 1920s was more than two and a half billion dollars. . . . the value of all the gold ever mined in the state — about two billion dollars.”
― Walton Bean, California: An Interpretive History

“It set a tone and created a state of min in which greed predominated and disorder and violence were all too frequent.”
― Walton Bean, California: An Interpretive History

“If there had been no gold discovery, Oregon would probably have been ready for admission as a state before California was. The first transcontinental railroad might have been built to Oregon. But if California's first transcontinental railroad had been built later, it might have been in the hands of a somewhat less rapacious group of men, and it might have obtained less of a stranglehold on the state's economy and politics.”
― Walton Bean, California: An Interpretive History

“During the one hundred years after the beginning of the gold rush, the output of California's gold totaled about $2 billion. All the gold produced in a century was worth less than the total value of one year's agricultural output of the state in the 1960s.”
― Walton Bean, California: An Interpretive History