Fields of Gold

Let's be real. If word got out that gold nuggets were washing up on Californian riverbanks and all you needed was a pick, a shovel, and a ticket to get there, the weight of the U.S. population crowded in the Golden State might just tip it into the Pacific like a seesaw.

In 1848, a fellow named James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter's Mill, in present-day Coloma, California near Sacramento. His lips weren't sealed, so the secret got out. With the help of a boisterous and growing media crew, newspapers advertised the country's newfound gold like crazy.

The California Gold Rush was a mad dash of hundreds of thousands of fortune-seekers who came to prospect in the Sierra foothills following that discovery. 

Until the Gold Rush, in the early nineteenth century, Americans were living in a largely rural society. The American Dream at that time was the chance to live free.

But not to live as if everything were free.

Rather than enterprise and speculation, industriousness, prudence, and frugality were the former keys to a man's success, "competency," maintaining that competency, and passing it on to his children.

But wouldn't personal freedom go great with some moolah, too? 

Heck. Yes.

When word got out that with a lucky smack at a rock, you could instantly uncover more wealth than you'd ever had, the idea of the American Dream underwent a makeover. 

All Gold Everything

Imagine the stories of striking it rich just by plunking a sifter into a river, jiggling the dirt, and discovering a few delicious gold nuggets.

Most Americans before 1849 dreamed not of opulence, but merely of holding enough land to maintain their families' independence from the need to work for wages. The very definition of the American Dream transformed overnight into the possibility of changing your destiny.

The lure of instant riches proved irresistible. Why spend a lifetime plowing the fields when a lucky strike could set up a man for life?

But despite the hype, California was quickly drained of its gold and the wealth dried up. To bypass the pot-of-gold-luck mentality, hydraulic mining was invented, which yielded an insane $100 million worth of gold (that's $7.5 billion today, FYI). But hydraulic mining meant shooting water at rocky landscapes to get it moving before running that water-sediment slurry through sifting devices.

That meant serious erosion and tons of water/gravel/sand streams clogging up and confusing Cali's water systems. 

Sound familiar? Californian's still have a fraught relationship with water. 

But Is It So Bad to Be a Gold-Digger?

Today, the 49-ers (not the football-playing kind) get a lot of judgment for their Earth-destructing methods, saloon-infested towns, and wife-and-children-ditching decisions.

But we can't say we wouldn't have done the same thing. The spirit of the 49-ers lives on today—like the possibility of winning the Powerball or a clutch IPO on the stock exchange, the possibility of coming up lucky was enough to make any crazy frontiersman just a little bit crazier.

No wonder the concept of getting rich quick is alive and sorta-well in the West today.

While most settlers didn't profit off the Gold Rush, it did solidify America's presence in the new state of California and gave more fuel to its desire for global domination—er, manifest destiny.

And while there were plenty of young, white males digging for gold, the Gold Rush enabled the growth of diversity in the population of California, especially compared to other parts of the country.

Don't get too excited because diversity was absolutely a package deal with discord.

But nonetheless, free Blacks migrated to the booming Golden State for work, thousands of Chinese immigrated between 1849 and 1854, and Mexicans joined in the hopes of striking it rich. Even European immigrants extended their trek to the West, including German-Jewish immigrant Levi Strauss, who got his start selling sturdy jeans to miners. 

Gold Rush fever became the new American Dream. Who among us wouldn't heed the siren call of "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River?"