US gold rush changed the way Americans think

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

On August 19, 1848, the American newspaper The New York Herald reported that gold had been discovered in California. This news sparked the famous gold rush: thousands of people rushed west to search for the precious metal.

However, the reserves of readily available gold quickly dried up - only a few out of tens of thousands of prospectors managed to get rich. Nevertheless, the events of the mid-19th century in the minds of Americans are tantamount to episodes of the Civil War, historians say. For them, the romanticized short-term pursuit of gold has become one of the foundations of the cultural heritage of the United States.

California before gold

As a historical region, California includes an elongated peninsula on the Pacific coast of North America and the adjacent coastal regions of the western edge of the continent. The southern part of California (the peninsula itself) today belongs to Mexico, and the northern part to the United States.

The first Europeans reached these places in the 16th century. The Spanish conquistadors who defeated the Aztec empire raved about the search for new super-rich states, but in California they met only poor Indian tribes who obtained their food by hunting, gathering and slash-and-burn agriculture. Not finding palaces and temples, the colonialists for a long time lost all interest in this area.

It was only at the end of the 17th century that the first Jesuit mission appeared in southern California. The Order remained the only real European force in these areas for nearly a hundred years. Towards the end of the 18th century, the Spanish colonial authorities sent a series of expeditions to Northern California and established several settlements there, in particular San Francisco. However, in general, these places remained practically unexploited by the Europeans.

At the beginning of the 19th century, representatives of a Russian-American company from Alaska made several expeditions to California. In 1812, they negotiated with the Indians to transfer land north of San Francisco and founded Fort Ross on it.

The Spaniards were not happy with this initiative, but the Russians emphasized that the lands in Northern California do not officially belong to Spain and therefore the Indians are free to dispose of them at their own discretion. Spain did not want to enter into conflict with the Russian Empire, so it tried to exert only diplomatic pressure on its new neighbors.

In the 1830s, the Russian envoy Ferdinand Wrangel agreed with the leadership of the newly formed Mexican state on the recognition of Northern California as part of Russia in exchange for the official recognition of the Mexican statehood by St. Petersburg. In view of the fact that Mexico was already independent, Russia lost absolutely nothing. However, the deal was not destined to take place for other reasons - due to the lack of support of Nicholas I.

The inhabitants of the Russian colony in California quickly found a common language with all neighboring Indian tribes and practically did not conflict with them. At Fort Ross, there were rich farms, livestock breeding developed, ships were built. The colony leadership suggested that the Russian authorities begin to resettle the freed serfs to it, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs opposed it. After the decrease in the sea otter population and the start of food purchases for Alaska from the Hudson's Bay Company, the interest of the Russian authorities in California has completely died out. As a result, the colony was sold in 1841 to the American John Sutter for only 42 857 rubles. Moreover, according to some reports, Sutter never paid for it to the end.

After the Russians left, Northern California was nominally fully incorporated into Mexico. Sutter announced that he intended to declare his part of the Pacific coast a French protectorate, but did not manage to - in 1846, US troops invaded California. The Americans carried out mass arrests of the local population and organized the proclamation of the California Republic. In February 1848, the United States completely annexed Upper California. This situation was finally recorded in the Guadalupe-Hidalgo peace treaty.

Golden fever

On January 24, 1848, near the sawmill of John Sutter, who acquired Fort Ross, one of his workers - James Marshall - discovered several grains of gold. Sutter tried to keep it a secret, but the Californian merchant and publisher Samuel Brennan, who learned about the find, decided to go into the gold trade and walked through the streets of San Francisco, holding over his head a vessel with golden sand mined in the vicinity.

News of this spread among the few local residents who rushed to search for the precious metal, and on August 19, the news was published in the newspaper The New York Herald. On December 5, US President James Polk publicly announced the discovery of gold in California.

From the eastern states and from abroad, thousands of fortune hunters rushed to California. This led to a sharp deterioration in American relations with the Indians of the Great Plains, whom the white colonialists practically did not touch until the middle of the 19th century. At first, the prairie warriors were outraged by the unceremonious invasion of their hunting grounds. And then - the laying of tracts and the construction of railways designed to connect the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The war that began in the middle of the century lasted about 40 years and ended with the complete defeat of the Indians and the seizure of their lands.

The population of California began to grow rapidly. If in 1848 only a few hundred people lived in San Francisco, then in 1850 the city's population reached 25 thousand, and in 1855 - 36 thousand inhabitants. In just a few years, about 300 thousand immigrants from the East Coast of the United States, as well as immigrants from Europe, Latin America and Asia, arrived in California. What was happening was called the "gold rush".

As John Sutter had anticipated, gold didn’t do him any good. His possessions were seized by newcomer adventurers, and the farms were plundered. The entrepreneur had a long litigation in Washington, but received only a pension from the government. The authorities intended to pay him compensation in the amount of $ 50 thousand at a certain stage, but they never did so. Sutter's son John August founded the city of Sacramento, but then quickly sold the land and left for Mexico, where he became a businessman and American consul. However, at the end of his life, his business did not go well, and after his death, the remnants of the Sutters' Mexican property were confiscated in the course of the next revolutionary events. John August's wife and children returned to California penniless at the end of the 19th century.

Nevertheless, the name of the Sutters lives on in the memory of Americans. Streets, schools, hospitals are named after them, as well as the city of Sutter Creek, Sutter County and the mountain range located near the Pacific coast. Samuel Brennan, who framed Sutter, got a more tangible benefit. He made millions by trading in gold, and then received the post of senator.

In the mid-1850s, readily available gold began to deplete and the fever subsided. In total, during its time, it was mined, according to some sources, almost 4 thousand tons of gold. These reserves would be worth well over $ 100 billion today.

However, only a few of the prospectors got rich. Fortunes in California in the 1850s were made mainly by those who were involved in the supply of various goods and services to workers. It was in California, during the gold rush, that the famous entrepreneur and inventor of jeans, Levi Strauss, began his clothing business.

In 1850, California was officially recognized as a state of the United States.

Cultural heritage of America

Today California is the most populous (over 39 million people) and the richest state in America, producing 13% of the US GNP.

Although the gold rush did not last long, it became an important part of the history of the state and the entire country.

“Similar“fevers”took place not only in the United States, but also in other parts of the world, for example, in Brazil, as well as in Russia, but most of all today people remember about the pursuit of gold in the United States. The fact is that in the 19th century, the Anglo-Saxon world was the engine of politics on a planetary scale, a trendsetter, so hypertrophied attention was riveted on it,”American political scientist Armen Gasparyan told RT.

According to him, the history of the California gold rush has had a strong impact on the national identity of Americans.

“The race for gold in California has become a major event. From it grew the myths about the American dream, about the first dollar earned and a million, the echoes of which are heard in popular culture today. Millions of people have grown up on this topic. In the mass consciousness of Americans, this is a phenomenon roughly equivalent to the Civil War. Over time, these myths began to be fueled by Hollywood. Other peoples have more significant cultural heritage. For example, the Germans have a Germanic epic. And for the Americans, the history of gold mining in California plays the same role,”the expert explained.

According to the director of the Roosevelt Foundation for the Study of the United States at Moscow State University. Lomonosov Yuri Rogulev, the myth of the California gold rush in the American mass consciousness is part of such a global phenomenon as the culture of the frontier.

“According to American culturologists, in the 19th century such a phenomenon as the culture of the border, the culture of the frontier was formed in the United States. And, as they believe, such moments as the propensity of Americans to self-government, the free carrying of weapons, lynching have sprung from this culture, the scientist emphasized.

As Yuri Rogulev noted, the culture of America has changed a lot over a century and a half - this is a different country, but many elements of the culture of the 19th century have survived.

“In the USA, they write and shoot westerns, play country music, referring to a kind of rural idyll in which cowboys and gold diggers built modern America. Industrialization radically changed the country, and exaggerated memories of the liberties of the time of the conquest of the Far West became something like memories of a lost paradise. People emigrated to the United States in order to find freedom and prosperity, and not to hunchback in factories and plants. And the romantic myths about the frontier, including the gold rush, became a kind of outlet for them,”the expert summed up.