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![]() Introduction
On the morning on January 24th, 1848, a man named James Marshall walked along the banks of the American River in California, to check on the progress of a mill he was building.
By 1848, the United States claimed virtually all of the West. The Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas and Oregon, and the war with Mexico had stretched the nation's boundaries all the way to the Pacific. But the West was American in name only. Few people east of the Mississippi were anxious to venture into its forbidding interior. It still seemed too distant, too mysterious, too dangerous.
Suddenly, gold-seekers rushed in from every corner of the globe: Chinese peasants, pursuing tales of a "gold mountain" across the ocean, Mexican farmers and clerks from London, tailors from Eastern Europe and South American aristocrats fallen on hard times. The thin stream of American emigrants crossing the continent became a torrent -- thousands upon thousands of optimistic but inexperienced prospectors, willing to leave their homes and families, and set out on the long trail for California, hoping to strike it rich and return in glory. Because of gold, a once-sleepy village on a magnificent bay would change overnight into a thriving, international city -- where storekeepers, speculators and scoundrels all dreamed of becoming instant millionaires. Because of gold, Spanish-speaking families who had lived in California for three quarters of a century, would suddenly find themselves surrounded by strangers -- and robbed of their land. And because of gold, California's Indians would be overwhelmed, enslaved -- and then slaughtered. The Gold Rush "revolutionized America," wrote one man who had seen it all. "It was the beginning of our national madness, our insanity of greed." It had taken half a century for the United States to encompass the vast spaces of the West. Now, the lust for gold would animate the nation to begin to fill them up.
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