california gold rush essay topics

The California Gold Rush’ History Essay

The gold rush changed the history of California. The primary purpose of the paper is to discuss the peculiarities of the gold rush and the impact it had on people’s life.

On January 24, 1848, James Marshall, built a sawmill for John Sutter on the American River in California (Friedman 34). He found the gold nugget. He told about his discovery Sutter, who tested samples and confirmed that it is almost pure gold.

John Sutter wanted to keep everything in secret; he realized that the discovery of gold would cause a stir and prevent him on his way towards developing of the agricultural settlement New Helvetia. He allowed his employees to take gold, but he asked not to inform the world regarding the discovery of precious metal. Very soon the news spread, due to a businessman and journalist Samuel Brennan.

On August 19, 1848, the newspaper The New York Herald published the first report on the discovered gold in California and the gold rush transformed to the global stage (Friedman 61). Thousands of immigrants from around the world traveled to California in search of gold. The period from 1848 till 1855 is considered to be the most famous gold rush (Maxwell-Long 81).

The majority of the residents of San Francisco gave up their jobs and moved to the American River. Thousands of people aimed to get to California; however, it was not so easy those times. There were two ways to get to California, namely by sea or be land. Those treasure seekers, who decided to come to California by sea, were called the Argonauts. They had to either go around South America (journey lasted from five to eight months) or get to the Isthmus of Panama, cross it and wait for the ship to go to the North. By land people travelled through the California trail, from Oregon or Mexico, however, it is worth noting that these roads were difficult and dangerous.

Among those who arrived in California at the end of 1848 or at the beginning of 1849, there were a couple of thousand of Americans, who came from the Northwest of the United States, many Latin Americans (including people from Mexico, Peru, and Chile), residents of Hawaii and China (Maxwell-Long 73). People from all over the world traveled to California. It is believed that by the end of 1849 in California came about ninety thousand of people, and by 1855 more than three hundred thousand.

Not so many people became rich due to the gold rush. Simple and relatively easy production of gold was possible only in the beginning of the gold rush when the precious metal could be collected with ease. Because of this fact, the revenues dropped significantly despite the discovery of additional gold fields.

Gradually, technologies of production became more sophisticated; the expensive equipment was an essential factor. By about mid-fifties of the XIX century, the prospectors who used primitive equipment realized that it is impossible to obtain the goal using old techniques. It stimulated the development of technologies that improved and advanced the production of gold. Later such technologies were used in gold rushes in Colorado, Montana, and Alaska (Maxwell-Long 101).

It is believed that many more people in California made impressive amounts of money during the gold rush, engaged in trade rather than just gold mining. Clothes, equipment, and houses were very expensive. Merchants who sold clothes were popular.

It is commonly believed that the gold rush stimulated the invention of jeans. Jeans are the part of clothes that is the most popular nowadays. It is difficult to imagine life without jeans now, and not so many people know that jeans were invented due to the gold rush. In March 1853, Levi Strauss came to California (Lusted 82). He successfully sold clothes in New York, however, was sure that California would offer new opportunities for his business.

In 1848, son of John Sutter founded Sacramento on the territory where the first Californian gold was found. Within a few years the new city became one of the economic and transportation centers in California, and in 1854, the city became the capital of the state.

Free from immigrants who aimed to become rich and were obsessed with the gold rush, the city developed rapidly. New roads, houses, churches, hotels, and shops were built with impressive speed. In the rapidly growing California legislature was convened and adopted a constitution, and on September 9, 1850, California became the thirty-first state of the USA (Lusted 25). There are still people in California who aim to find gold. However, nowadays it is related to the entertainment and hobbies.

During the period of the gold rush, more than one hundred and twenty-five million ounces of gold (nearly four thousand tons) valued at more than 50 billion of dollars was produced in California. The biggest gold nugget found in California had a weight 195 pounds (Lusted 43).

In conclusion, it should be pointed out that it was a gold rush that has transformed California from a distant and little-known region in one of the richest states in the United States, laying the foundation for its future prosperity.

Works Cited

Friedman, Mel. The California Gold Rush . New York: Children’s, 2010. Print.

Lusted, Marcia. The California Gold Rush: A History Perspectives Book . Ann Arbor: Perspectives Library, 2015. Print.

Maxwell-Long, Thomas. Daily Life during the California Gold Rush . Santa Barbara: ABC CLIO, 2014. Print.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, September 25). The California Gold Rush' History. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-california-gold-rush-history/

"The California Gold Rush' History." IvyPanda , 25 Sept. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/the-california-gold-rush-history/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'The California Gold Rush' History'. 25 September.

IvyPanda . 2020. "The California Gold Rush' History." September 25, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-california-gold-rush-history/.

1. IvyPanda . "The California Gold Rush' History." September 25, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-california-gold-rush-history/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The California Gold Rush' History." September 25, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-california-gold-rush-history/.

• The Gold Rush: History of the United States
• Ice Machines, Their History, and Types: Popular Electric Gadgets
• The Gold Rush: Process and Results
• Roosevelt's Camapign for Japanese Americans
• Harada House in Japanese American History
• Irish Immigrants in America and Their Life in 1800
• The American Declaration of Independence
• North American Labor Movement in the 1880s

If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

To log in and use all the features of Khan Academy, please enable JavaScript in your browser.

Course: US history   >   Unit 6

The gold rush.

• The Homestead Act and the exodusters
• The reservation system
• The Dawes Act
• Chinese immigrants and Mexican Americans in the age of westward expansion
• The Indian Wars and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
• The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee
• Westward expansion: economic development
• Westward expansion: social and cultural development
• The American West
• The 1848 discovery of gold in California set off a frenzied Gold Rush to the state the next year as hopeful prospectors, called “forty-niners,” poured into the state.
• This massive migration to California transformed the state’s landscape and population.
• The Gold Rush was characterized by violent clashes among settlers, miners, and Native Americans over access to the land and its natural resources.

The California Gold Rush

Life as a forty-niner, violence across the land, what do you think.

• For more on the Gold Rush, see H.W. Brands, The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (New York: Doubleday, 2002).
• For more on the history of California, see Kevin Starr, California: A History (New York: Random House, 2005).
• See Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community (California: Stanford University Press, 2002), and Gordon H. Chang, ed. Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
• For more, see Robert F. Helzer, The Destruction of the California Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974).

Want to join the conversation?

• Upvote Button navigates to signup page
• Downvote Button navigates to signup page
• Flag Button navigates to signup page

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

California Gold Rush

By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 10, 2022 | Original: April 6, 2010

The California Gold Rush was sparked by the discovery of gold nuggets in the Sacramento Valley in early 1848 and was arguably one of the most significant events to shape American history during the first half of the 19th century. As news spread of the discovery, thousands of prospective gold miners traveled by sea or over land to San Francisco and the surrounding area; by the end of 1849, the non-native population of the California territory was some 100,000 (compared with the pre-1848 figure of less than 1,000). A total of $2 billion worth of precious metal was extracted from the area during the Gold Rush, which peaked in 1852.

Sutter’s Mill

On January 24, 1848, James Wilson Marshall, a carpenter originally from New Jersey , found flakes of gold in the American River at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Coloma, California .

At the time, Marshall was working to build a water-powered sawmill owned by John Sutter, a German-born Swiss citizen and founder of a colony of Nueva Helvetia (New Switzerland, which would later become the city of Sacramento). As Marshall later recalled of his historic discovery: “It made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold.”

Did you know? Miners extracted more than 750,000 pounds of gold during the California Gold Rush.

Days after Marshall’s discovery at Sutter’s Mill, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ending the Mexican-American War and leaving California in the hands of the United States—a remarkable twist of fate with important ramifications for an America eager for westward expansion .

At the time, the population of the territory consisted of 6,500 Californios (people of Spanish or Mexican descent); 700 foreigners (primarily Americans); and 150,000 Native Americans (barely half the number that had been there when Spanish settlers arrived in 1769).

Sutter, in fact, had enslaved hundreds of Native Americans and used them as a free source of labor and makeshift militia to defend his territory and expand his empire.

Gold Fever Strikes

Though Marshall and Sutter tried to keep news of the discovery under wraps, word got out, and by mid-March at least one newspaper was reporting that large quantities of gold were being turned up at Sutter’s Mill. Though the initial reaction in San Francisco was disbelief, storekeeper Sam Brannan set off a frenzy when he paraded through town displaying a vial of gold obtained from Sutter’s Creek.

By mid-June, shops and businesses stood empty, as some three-quarters of the male population of San Francisco had abandoned the city for the gold mines, and the number of miners in the area ballooned to some 4,000 by August.

As news reports—many wildly overblown—of the easy fortunes being made in California spread worldwide, some of the first migrants to arrive were those from lands accessible by boat, such as Oregon , the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii ), Mexico , Chile, Peru and China.

Polk Spreads Gold Fever

When the news reached the East Coast, press reports were initially skeptical. Gold fever kicked off nationwide in earnest, however, after December 1848, when President James K. Polk announced the positive results of a report made by Colonel Richard Mason, California’s military governor, in his inaugural address.

As Polk wrote, “The accounts of abundance of gold are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service.”

The ’49ers Come to California

Throughout 1849, people around the United States (mostly men) with gold fever borrowed money, mortgaged their property or spent their life savings to make the arduous journey to California. In pursuit of the kind of wealth they had never dreamed of, they left their families and hometowns. In turn, women left behind took on new responsibilities such as running farms or businesses and caring for their children alone.

Thousands of would-be gold miners, known as 49ers for the year they arrived, traveled overland across the mountains or by sea, sailing to Panama or even around Cape Horn, the southernmost point of South America.

By the end of the year, the non-native population of California was estimated at 100,000, (as compared with 20,000 at the end of 1848 and around 800 in March 1848). To accommodate the needs of the 49ers, gold mining towns had sprung up all over the region, complete with shops, saloons, brothels and other businesses seeking to make their own Gold Rush fortune.

The overcrowded chaos of the mining camps and towns grew ever more lawless, including rampant banditry, gambling, alcoholism, prostitution and violence. San Francisco, for its part, developed a bustling economy and became the central metropolis of the new frontier.

Gold Rush Politics

The Gold Rush undoubtedly sped up California’s admission to the Union as the 31st state. In late 1849, California applied to enter the Union with a constitution that barred the Southern system of racial slavery , provoking a crisis in Congress between proponents of slavery and anti-slavery politicians.

According to the Compromise of 1850 , proposed by Kentucky’s Senator Henry Clay , California was allowed to enter as a free state, while the territories of Utah and New Mexico were left to decide the legal status of slavery for themselves.

California's Mines 

After 1850, the surface gold in California largely disappeared, even as miners continued to arrive. Mining had always been difficult and dangerous labor, and striking it rich required good luck as much as skill and hard work. Moreover, the average daily take for an independent miner working with his pick and shovel had by then sharply decreased from what it had been in 1848.

As gold became more and more difficult to reach, the growing industrialization of mining drove more and more miners from independence into wage labor. The new technique of hydraulic mining, developed in 1853, brought enormous profits but destroyed much of the region’s landscape.

Though gold mining continued throughout the 1850s, it had reached its peak by 1852, when some $81 million was pulled from the ground. After that year, the total take declined gradually, leveling off to around $45 million per year by 1857. Settlement in California continued, however, and by the end of the decade the state’s population was 380,000.

Impact of the Gold Rush

New mining methods and the population boom in the wake of the California Gold Rush permanently altered the landscape of California. The technique of hydraulic mining brought enormous profits but destroyed much of the region’s landscape.

Dams designed to supply water to mine sites in summer altered the course of rivers away from farmland, while sediment from mines clogged others. The logging industry in the area was born from the need to construct extensive canals and feed boilers at mines, further consuming natural resources.

In 1884, hydraulic mining was outlawed by court order, and soon agriculture became the dominant industry in California, and it remains so today. While a few mines and Gold Rush towns remain, much of the heritage of that era is preserved at places such as Bodie State Historic Park , a decaying ghost town, and at Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park , where Sutter’s Mill once stood. 

Environmental Impact of the Gold Rush. Calisphere.org . After the Gold Rush. National Geographic.

HISTORY Vault

Stream thousands of hours of acclaimed series, probing documentaries and captivating specials commercial-free in HISTORY Vault

Sign up for Inside History

Get HISTORY’s most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

Essay: 1848-1865: Gold Rush, Statehood, and the Western Movement

The discovery of gold in California in 1848 vastly accelerated changes that had been occurring since 1769. Already a meeting place for Mexicans, Russians, Americans, Europeans, and natives, the gold rush turned California into a truly global frontier where immigrants from every continent on earth now jostled. More than 300,000 gold seekers flooded California by 1850, bringing to the new American state an astonishing variety of languages, religions, and social customs. Many of these visitors had no interest in settling down in California, intending only to make their "pile" and return home with pockets full of gold. The arrival and departure of thousands of immigrants, the intensely multicultural nature of society, and the newness of American institutions made Gold Rush California a chaotic, confusing landscape for natives and newcomers alike.

Native Population Plummets

The disruptions of the Gold Rush proved devastating for California's native groups, already in demographic decline due to Spanish and Mexican intrusion. The state's native population plummeted from about 150,000 in 1848 to 30,000 just 12 years later. As foreigners methodically mined, hunted, and logged native groups' most remote hiding places, natives began raiding mining camps for subsistence. This led to cycles of violence as American miners — supported by the state government — organized war parties and sometimes slaughtered entire native groups.

The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, passed by the state legislature in 1850, denied native Californians the right to testify in court and allowed white Americans and Californios to keep natives as indentured servants. "I do not like the white man because he is a liar and a thief," Isidora Filomena de Solano, a Patwin-speaking woman from the Bay Area, told an interviewer in 1874. She echoed the sentiments of many native Californians struggling to preserve traditional ways in the midst of holocaust.

Californios Lose Power, Land, and Privilege

The imposition of American government in California reversed the fortunes of elite Californios, who slowly lost their power, authority, and land. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the US-Mexican War, had granted Californios full US citizenship and promised that their property would be "inviolably respected." But the informality of Mexican land grants made legal claims difficult when miners, squatters, and homesteaders overran Californios' lands.

Even when Californio families won legal title to their lands, many found themselves bankrupt from attorney's fees or taxes. The Peralta family lost all but 700 of their 49,000 acres in the East Bay to lawyers, taxes, squatters, and speculators. Eight Californios participated in the California constitutional convention of 1849, but over time their political power declined along with their land base.

White Americans vs. "Foreign Miners"

Californios feared losing their privileged status and being lumped in with the thousands of Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America who arrived in California during the Gold Rush. Mexicans and Chilenos were among the first foreigners to make it to California in 1848, and their proximity and mining expertise gave them an edge in the cutthroat competition of the mines.

Their early success led the California legislature to adopt a foreign miners’ license tax in 1850 aimed at "greasers," as all Latin Americans were called. When Latin American miners refused to pay the impossibly high tax ($20 per month), white Americans had an excuse to drive them out of rich mining areas. In the mining town of Sonora, Mexicans, Chileans, and Peruvians joined with French and German miners to protest the tax, only to be subdued by a hastily formed militia of white Americans.

Rumors began to spread throughout gold country about a swashbuckling Mexican bandit named Joaquín Murieta who was striking back against American injustices. The California legislature offered a huge reward and in 1853 a Texan named Harry Love produced the head of someone he insisted was Murieta. Whether Joaquín Murieta ever actually existed is unknown, but he was celebrated as a hero by many Latin Americans enraged by oppressive American policies.

Chinese Gold Seekers

Chinese gold seekers arrived in great numbers after 1851, and soon comprised about a fifth of the entire population in mining areas. Coming to the mines later than other groups, many Chinese immigrants earned a living by working claims abandoned by other miners. They also took jobs as cooks, launderers, merchants, and herbalists, hoping to return to China with a small fortune. However, low pay, discriminatory hiring practices, and the monthly foreign miners' license tax made this goal all but impossible.

In the face of intense prejudice, some Chinese Californians challenged American racism through the legal system and in the court of public opinion. Chinese community leaders petitioned Sacramento to overturn unfair laws and worked to gain the right to testify in court (finally granted in 1872). Norman Asing, a restaurant owner in San Francisco's booming Chinatown, wrote to California governor John Bigler in 1852, insisting, "We are not the degraded race you would make us."

African Americans Look for Equality and Gold

More than 2,000 African Americans traveled to California by 1852, lured by reports that the California frontier offered a rough-and-tumble egalitarianism along with its gold deposits. Like most gold seekers, they were bitterly disappointed by what they found.

California entered the United States as a free state in 1850, but the lack of government oversight allowed slavery to flourish in certain regions. The state legislature passed a fugitive slave law in 1852, making it illegal for enslaved African Americans to flee their masters within the state's supposedly free borders. All African Americans in California, born free or formerly enslaved, thereafter lived under a constant threat of arrest. They were also barred from testifying in court or sending their children to public schools.

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, an African American abolitionist who had spent years lecturing with Frederick Douglass, helped organize the First State Convention of Colored Citizens of California in 1855 to fight for suffrage and equal rights. African Americans won the right to testify in California in 1863 but the right to vote came only with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870.

Cross-Cultural Cooperation

Although discrimination and violence were rampant, Gold Rush California was also a place of cross-cultural communication and cooperation. Canadian merchant William Perkins described the mining town of Sonora in 1849: "Here were to be seen people of every nation in all varieties of costume, and speaking 50 different languages, and yet all mixing together amicably and socially." In mining camps and in the crowded streets of San Francisco, previously isolated groups came into contact for the first time. Race, language, religion, and class separated Californians but proximity forced groups to accommodate as well as compete. Multiracial even before it was a state, California would be continuously shaped by its diversity.

Bancroft Library. The California Gold Rush

Oakland Museum of California. Gold Rush!: California’s Untold Stories

PBS. The Gold Rush

The Sacramento Bee . Gold Rush Sesquicentennial

In the Library

Johnson, Susan Lee. Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.

Kowalewski, Michael, ed. Gold Rush: A Literary Exploration. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1997.

Starr, Kevin, and Richard J. Orsi, eds. Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold Rush California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Related exhibitions

Related themes, about this essay:.

"1848-1865: Gold Rush, Statehood, and the Western Movement" was written by Joshua Paddison and the University of California in 2005 as part of the California Cultures project.

Using this essay:

The text of this essay is available under a Creative Commons CC-BY license . You are free to share and adapt it however you like, provided you provide attribution as follows:

1848-1865: Gold Rush, Statehood, and the Western Movement curated by University of California, available under a ">CC BY 4.0 license . © 2011, Regents of the University of California.

Please note that this license applies only to the descriptive copy and does not apply to any and all digital items that may appear.

Home — Essay Samples — History — Californian Gold Rush — History Of California: Gold Rush

History of California: Gold Rush

• Categories: American History Californian Gold Rush

About this sample

Words: 2299 |

12 min read

Published: Apr 29, 2022

Words: 2299 | Pages: 5 | 12 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr Jacklynne

Verified writer

• Expert in: History

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

2 pages / 821 words

2 pages / 746 words

3 pages / 1308 words

2 pages / 945 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Californian Gold Rush

California became an American territory when the United States defeated Mexico in 1847. John Marshall discovered gold the next year, bringing people from all over the world to the port of San Francisco and the surrounding area. [...]

While the American Dream applied to the whole country, California and the Gold Rush breathed new life into this dream. Dreams of becoming rich, managing successful businesses and the prospect of new jobs gathered thousands of [...]

Having been a part of the Asian-American population for a little over a decade, I encountered hardships that only an Asian living in America would know. Reflecting upon those times, I wondered about the first Asians who came to [...]

The California Gold Rush of the 1849 had its positive and negative effects on westward expansion including the increase in population leading to development of California as a state, the removal of Native Americans, and both the [...]

We always wonder why bad things happen, maybe the answer is right in front of us but we’re just too blind or na?ve to see it. Most would like to think that all people know the difference between right and wrong. The problem is [...]

One of the more impactful means by which the experience of war is recreated for a civilian audience is through the illustration of the human body, with lived experience and relevant literature illustrating war as an entity so [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Central Question

Do american actions against california native americans during the gold rush meet the united nations definition of genocide, introductory essay, california indian history and genocide.

The history of California was already thousands of years old by the time Europeans came to stay in 1769. Long after the first Indigenous people made California their home, their descendants numbered in the hundreds of thousands and lived in hundreds of densely settled independent nations. Colonizing newcomers of European descent found Native Californians thriving in a world of abundance and relative peace, but the colonizers did not mean to leave California as they found it. In a relatively short period of time—just an instant in the long sweep of human history in America—they violently undid the work of generations of Native Californians.

In California, a series of colonizing societies posed threats to Indians. The Spanish forced coastal Native people to give up their land and to labor for the people who took it. Instead of working to sustain their own communities’ independence and prosperity, Native Californians worked at new industries like cattle ranching and European-style farming to support the colony. When California was part of Mexico, ranchers raided independent villages for laborers and took control of more Indian land. Colonists made it harder for Indians to make a living from the gathering, fishing, and hunting they had historically relied upon. This made the Indians poorer and less secure. Colonists had already inflicted violence, poverty, and hardship on thousands of people by the time gold was discovered in 1848. After that, when Americans arrived in large numbers and claimed California as a state, more California Indians faced even greater danger.

Americans took control of California by law and by violence. American citizens were confident that they had the right to use physical force to secure their own rights and to take Indians’ land because of their race. They knew their government would support them. In the United States in the mid-1800s, “race” was the idea that human diversity could be explained by perceived or imagined differences in peoples’ physical features and that these differences should determine one’s place in society. It was a way of determining who had power. Those whom the law treated as “white” stood to gain the full benefits of property ownership, citizenship, and political freedom (if they were male), as well as the ability to act with authority when it came to “nonwhite” people. White citizens in California saw Indians not as members of distinct and independent nations, but as a lower race of people within American society. As such, state laws empowered whites to act forcefully against Native and other nonwhite people. One of California’s first laws denied Indians equal protection under the law. That law also set up a system that allowed citizens to keep Indians as laborers without paying them, have them arrested and then put to work if they were not already employed by a white citizen, and use corporal punishment on them. By law in California, white citizens could not be convicted based on Indians’ trial testimony, which assured white citizens that their mistreatment of Indians would not be prosecuted as a crime.

Citizens also used violence to terrorize entire communities of California Indians. Groups of white citizens attacked Indian villagers to “punish” suspected thieves, to keep Indians away from citizens’ property, and to capture Indian children. The state and federal governments often paid the attackers and so encouraged more attacks. Almost from the moment they began, white citizens understood and even cheered these attacks as attempts to destroy or “exterminate” California Indians. Americans displaced California Indians from their lands and homes, denied them access to traditional life-sustaining resources, carried out mass murder against them, enacted a system of forced labor that led to the kidnapping and enslavement of Indian children, and generally subjected them to a sustained climate of terror.

Historians have written that American violence against California Indians was similar to other historical examples of organized and government-supported violence against specific groups of people. Even before the word “genocide” was defined during World War II, surviving California Indians knew that they had endured world-shattering violence at the hands of Americans. In the 1930s, the Pomo man William Benson published the first historical article by a California Indian on what scholars would later call the California Indian genocide. For his evidence, he talked to survivors of two 1850 American attacks on Pomo villages in Northern California. Benson ended his account not with the violence itself but with a survivor’s grief. After the attack, when one man realized that he was “not to see my mother and sister but to see their blood scattered over the ground like water,” he was overwhelmed and “sat down under a tree and cryed all day.”

In the years that followed, that man and other grieving survivors set to work on the difficult task of remaking the kinds of Indian communities in which Benson was later born, grew up, and lived his entire life. By the time Benson published his article, eighty years after the gold rush, California had more tribes than any other state in the country, but for every Indian person living in the state, there were nearly three hundred non-Indians. California Indians owned almost nothing of what would become the wealthiest state in the country. Survivors and their communities dealt with these legacies of nearly unimaginable destruction as they continued new chapters in the long history of California’s Indian people.

Dr. Khal Schneider

Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria California State University, Sacramento

Explore Other Pages

Map Gallery

Explore Maps of California

Source Explorer

Analyze sources and supporting images

Essays on California Gold Rush

California gold rush by colby granberg.

The great California gold rush was the largest internal migration in American history, it brought about 300,000 people to California to dig one of the most prized possessions back then, gold. The California gold rush gave California there nick name as the “Golden State”. Many of the once inhabited gold rush towns soon turned into […]

The California Gold Rush, and The Westward Expansion

Have you ever heard of the California Gold Rush, and the Westward Expansion? Well in this story you will learn about it. Also, in this story you will learn about what tools that were used in the Gold Rush. Last but not least you will learn about why men left their families to go to […]

Our editors will help you fix any mistakes and get an A+!

About The California Gold Rush

This essay is going to be about the California Gold Rush and it will involve Immigration, Facts About California, James W. Marshall, Pros & Cons About Gold, and Finally a Conclusion. I feel like this essay will inspire you to do some research on the Westward Expansion, or help you with your research on Westward […]

Propaganda and Advertising During The Time of The California Gold Rush

What did you see? Did you envision a happy era full of immigrants and Americans happily co-existing and starting a “new life?” People getting rich and living their “american dream?” Not everyone was happy with what was going on during this time period. The California Gold rush was the center of attention during the 1800’s […]

What It Is Like During The California Gold Rush

Claire Vaye Watkins provide readers with a view of what it is like during the California gold rush through her short story called, The Diggings. The Diggings tells the story of two brothers who travel to the California desert in search of gold. The elder brother Errol fosters an obsession to the point of mania […]

Negative Effects of The Gold Rush in California

The Gold Rush occurred between 1849 and 1874 in California, where over a billion dollars of gold was unearthed from the ground. There was an influx of people who hoped to benefit from this fortune which affected the economic, social and political development in California. James Marshall first discovered gold in Coloma, and initially it […]

The Imposition of Us Power and Culture

According to Isenberg’s collection of primary sources from the gold rush era (The California Gold Rush 2018), the imposition of US power and culture on a newly conquered territory in California partially influenced Californian society, prominently shown through Californians’ efforts to prohibit slaves. However, Californian society was unique compared to the other states. In Californian […]