Some 300,000 people surged into California in the months and years after news of a gold strike at Sutter’s Mill in what would become Coloma (Culloma), California, in January 1848. They came from every point of the compass, desperate to strike it rich.
The University of the Pacific’s “Gold Rush Life” collection is made up of diaries, correspondence, and other primary sources documents. These present us with a doorway into the lives of some of those who came to be called Forty-Niners. Such documents may be as close to the experience of some of the participants as we’ll ever get, and they make for absolutely fascinating reading and research.
Some came by land, across the California Trail and California Road. Others came by sea: a ship out of Boston or New York could take months to journey around Cape Horn to San Francisco. Portages across the isthmus of Panama could shorten that, if there was a boat waiting on the Pacific side—all this was more than half a century before the Panama Canal existed.
Pennsylvanian David Gillis, for one, began his journey to the promise of gold in early February 1852. It took him until August to get in San Francisco. In his shipboard diary, he chronicled the frequently miserable circumstances of the trip. He was sick with colds and mumps. Fights broke out over water; at one point they were more than two months without landfall. And his fellow passengers died with some frequency. Here are only some of the instances he jotted down:
Two more young men of Georgia died last night and cast overboard this morning one of a fever one of dysentery Some more are very sick […] A young man died of fever in the Steerage at 8PM he was from New Orleans […] Dyed last night with measles a man by the name of Reed of Georgia […] Died a young man from NY name White disease measles & phthisic.
Phthisic, better known today as tuberculosis, was commonly carried to California thanks to the weakened immune systems of the gold-seekers.
Another Easterner, John E. Fletcher, had made the hazardous trip west a couple years earlier. In June 1850, he wrote to his wife in Massachusetts from “Little Deer Creek 2 miles from Nevada City,” noting
[i]t is a hard case to get a fortune out of California, for everyone who goes home with his pile there are six who find their graves here. Five acquaintances of mine have died here since I landed at San Fransisco. I try not to get discouraged…
This was a time when transcontinental mail could take months for a letter to cross and a response to come back. In the same enclosure, Fletcher continued “I see men every day making their fortunes, but I see five times as many more working twice as hard to keep from starving.”
In more than two dozen letters to his brother William, Augustin Hibbard described the scene. Of Sacramento, he wrote in September 1850 that it was just
six or eight houses built of wood. Twenty or thirty more of frames [covered] with canvass and tents [innumerably]. We remained here a week, suffering much from the heat, the thermometer standing in the middle of the day, at 115 in the shade.
There are now more than 2.6 million living people in the Greater Sacramento area.
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An English immigrant to Wisconsin in 1845, Reverend Matthew Dinsdale went on to California in 1849 to preach on Sundays and dig for gold the rest of the week. His 1850 letter to a fellow minister back in Wisconsin is, you will pardon the expression, an absolute gold mine of experience, perspective, and data.
“It is true that gold is here found and in great abundance,” he wrote. However,
on this subject I want to write correctly and therefore must be on my guard to prevent the misinterpretation of terms for to speak of it as existing in abundance you might perhaps infer that I have much of it, or that all who dig for it get much, or that it is easily obtained, neither of which is the case. […] If I have not heard the language of regret, I have seen palpable evidence of it, in the countenance, the deportment and the persuit [sic]. There have been long periods of suffering experienced by some that all the gold of the country could not compensate for. After the dangers of the journey are over, and they are not few or trifling, a wandering life has to be commenced. A man can hardley [sic] tell one day where he will be the next.
Dinsdale confessed that he had “had seen the elephant,” a then-current expression meaning one has gained great experience—at great cost. About one foray into the snowy mountains, he wrote, “Suffice to say that we almost killed both ourselves and animals and made less than two dollars in a month.” While describing the dangers of “hostile Indians,” he also admitted “I must however say on behalf of the Indians that much provocation has been given them.”
There were some lucky strikes in the gold fields, but the most Dinsdale reported making in a single day was $37.25. This may best be measured by the prices he documented in his letter: milk at $1 a quart; boots from $12–$20; “Coffee I am now told sells in Sac City for $75 a lb”; a “scythe and sneath” (blade and handle) went for $75. Dinsdale’s party’s included two mules; one cost $150, the other $180.
The majority of Forty-Niners didn’t pan out. More than a few died miserable deaths far from home. The most reliable way to make money in the gold fields was to service them. Shipping companies and merchants and wholesalers made out like bandits. Speaking of bandits, Leland Stanford famously jumpstarted his profits from miners into even greater swindles as a railroad baron, California Governor, and US Senator. It was no Sourdough, another nickname for hopeful miners, who could afford to establish a university named in honor of his dead son.
The philosophical Dinsdale summed it up, writing that
[o]n the whole I am well satisfied that I came here and at present would rather be in California than anywhere else in the world. I cannot advise anyone to come, nor do I tell anyone to stay away. […] Tho I may venture to say that those who do come, ought not to do so with the expectation of getting rich; lest they be disappointed.
The resulting population influx and ecological ruin of the Gold Rush had profound effects. Mexican territory until 1848, California was admitted into the United States as a free state as part of the Compromise of 1850. Enslavement in the new state nevertheless continued for some years. And, as a commentator noted as early as 1859, there was a “relentless war of extermination” waged against the state’s indigenous peoples by the white in-comers. Massacre, enslavement, rape, kidnapping of women and children, combined with starvation and disease, more than decimated native nations. All this was condoned when not encouraged or even led by local and state officials, who funded murderous militias. Today, this period is known as the California Genocide—officially recognized by California’s governor in 2019.
“Whilst pursuing the avocation of Miners & Packers peaceably” claimed Patrick Ford in 1853, after he and his party were attacked by Klamath Indians. The raiders killed three of Ford’s party and made off with over $6,000-worth of equipment, as listed in Ford’s claim to the Superintendent of Indian Affairs and “through him to the Congress of the United States of America.”
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The resolution of Ford’s claim for redress from federal authorities is unknown, but it nicely illustrates the assumed entitlement—and assumed innocence—of the Gold Rush invaders. And it’s a good reminder that these written, English-language documents in the Gold Rush Life collection are only part of the story (n.b. not all items in the collections are fully transcribed—welcome to the challenge of reading nineteenth-century handwriting—but look under “More” in the individual “Item Details” for those that do have transcriptions).
For too long, the Forty-Niners were the only story, and thus the only history of the period and the place. But “American history” is finally expanding to include Native Americans into the origin story of California and the larger origin story of the United States and Canada, from which they were long exiled. As historian Ned Blackhawk writes in The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History, “It was their garden homelands, after all, that birthed America.”
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