Historian Gerald D. Nash put it best: “The California Gold Rush precipitated a veritable economic revolution in the state, the nation, and the world. Production of precious metals
Affected price levels, labor, wages, capital investment, the expansion of business, finance, agriculture, service industries, and transportation.” Other gold strikes and rushes, with somewhat similar but shorter-lived results, occurred in other parts of the world throughout the 1800s.
California most assuredly felt the effects of this economic revolution. San Francisco replaced Honolulu as the commercial hub of the Pacific. The state became a major exporter of flour and beef to regional, Pacific Rim, and world markets. Hoses, stamp mills, steam engines, and nozzles were manufactured and exported. Levi Strauss established a jeanmanufacturing business in San Francisco to outfit miners with durable pants. The gold rush led to the start of banking in California, Wells Fargo & Company being among the most prominent firms. Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and Charles Crocker - known as the Big Four - profited from supplying miners with equipment and other merchandise; they parlayed their earnings into the founding of the Central Pacific Railroad in 1861. California mining was doubtlessly helped when British stock companies invested roughly $10 million in that extractive enterprise.
Regarding the impact on the United States, California gold exports helped create a favorable trade balance for the nation. This was possible because the state produced 59 percent of the country’s gold output from 1850 to 1900. During the rush, some $1.4 billion (or $25 billion in 1990 dollars) was unearthed from California. American shippers, like Pacific Mail and Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Accessory Transit Company, prospered from transporting Argonauts across the Central American isthmus en route to and from San Francisco.
The international reach of California’s gold rush is seen in its impact on specific countries. Hawai’i redirected its trade away from America’s Atlantic ports to San Francisco. In 1850, 469 ships from those islands entered the Golden Gate, carrying goods valued at $380,000. The rush created a labor shortage in Hawai’i that was remedied by the importation, beginning in 1852, of Chinese cane field workers. Goods from China and Japan were shipped to El Dorado, including Chinese clothing and prefabricated houses. Australian wheat, beef, coal, and dray horses were sold in California. New Zealand profited from lumber sales to the Golden State. Chile, Peru, and Brazil benefited from Cape Horn voyagers, whose California-bound vessels stopped at their ports for supplies. In December 1850, for example, 12 American ships visited Brazil’s Saint Catherine’s Island. By 1856 British exports to California exceeded $2 million annually. That nation’s economy profited greatly as wages rose faster than prices. French immigrant companies invested in California real estate, agriculture, and mining. German gold-seekers came in such numbers as to create a labor shortage in their homeland. New capital flowed into the Italian states, providing for the building of railroads and telegraph lines. In all of these nations and others as well commodity prices rose in the 1850s, in part due to California’s and Australia’s gold production. A gold strike in Peru in 1849-50, and full-scale rushes in South Africa in 1885 and the Yukon-Klondike region of Canada in 1897 were of shorter duration than the California phenomenon but, similarly, bolstered prices and fueled international economic growth.
In the gold rush era, then, California solidified its Pacific Eldorado stature and advanced as an important player in the global economy. Though prosperity was assured, whether
California could meet the challenges of statehood and the national crisis that lay ahead remained uncertain.
SUMMARY
The Mexican War and the gold rush following on its heels solidified California’s status as America’s West Coast Eldorado. As the Latin American wars for independence wound down in the early 1820s, the U. S. Navy beefed up its Pacific Squadron and included the California coast within its patrols. By the early 1840s the United States was poised to take California, as Thomas ap Catesby Jones’s premature seizure of the province in 1842 showed. When President James K. Polk found that Mexico refused to sell California, he maneuvered America’s neighbor to the south into a war that would bring the Pacific province into the Union. The resulting Mexican War was fought mostly outside of California but the region was the great prize for the victorious Americans, who formalized the cession of the province in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo of 1848.
While that treaty was being negotiated an epic gold rush was about to begin near Sacramento. California’s gold rush was basically a maritime phenomenon since so many miners and their equipment arrived by sea, and most of the gold transported elsewhere was carried in ships. Miners from throughout the Pacific Basin and much of the world made their way by sea and overland to the storied gold fields of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. William H. Aspinwall, co-founder and president of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company in 1848, which transported miners and gold, built that firm into America’s largest maritime shipper, dominating the carrying trade of the Pacific world. Reflective of the violence in the mining camps, white gold-seekers raped and killed Indian prospectors, who within a few years left the diggings. The gold rush transformed San Francisco into a leading cosmopolitan city while inflating currencies and launching businesses throughout the Pacific Basin and the world. Though similar rushes occurred in Australia, Peru, South Africa, and Canada in the 1800s, none of these had impacts as lasting as California’s.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
Why did the U. S. Pacific Squadron begin patrolling California’s coastline in the 1820s and increasingly thereafter?
Why was President James K. Polk so intent on annexing California in the mid-1840s? What role(s) did the Pacific Mail Steamship Company play in shaping California history during the gold rush era?
How numerically unbalanced were the genders in gold rush California? What were the results of this imbalance?
What were the major international impacts of California’s gold rush?
FURTHER READINGS
Charles Bateson, Gold Fleet for California: Forty-Niners from Australia and New Zealand (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1963). The strength of this work is that it combines maritime, economic, and social history into a compact narrative.
Peter J. Blodgett, Land of Golden Dreams: California in the Gold Rush Decade, 1848-1858 (San Marino, CA: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1999). This is a richly illustrated, wide-ranging, introductory account.
Robert J. Chandler and Stephen J. Potash, Gold, Silk, Pioneers & Mail: The Story of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company (San Francisco: Friends of the San Francisco Maritime Museum Library, 2007). The authors provide a useful introduction to the history of this important shipping firm.
James P. Delgado, Gold Rush Port: The Maritime Archeology of San Francisco’s Waterfront (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Based on the archeological study of shipwrecks and wharves, the author crafts an account of San Francisco’s global connections during the gold rush era.
James P. Delgado, To California by Sea: A Maritime History of the California Gold Rush (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1990). This is a highly detailed, comprehensive study of voyaging to gold rush California.
Norman A. Graebner, Empire on the Pacific: A Study in American Continental Expansion (New York: Ronald Press, 1955). The author argues that President James K. Polk’s expansionist policy derived from his determination to make America dominant in the trade of the Pacific.
Neal Harlow, California Conquered: War and Peace on the Pacific, 1846-1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). This is a highly detailed account of the California theater of the Mexican War.
John A. Hawgood, ed., First and Last Consul: Thomas Oliver Larkin and the Americanization of California, A Selection of Letters (Palo Alto, CA: Pacific Books, 1970). Larkin’s correspondence offers a glimpse into the growing American interest in California just prior to statehood.
Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). An authority examines how Indians survived the white invasion of their homelands in the 1800s, keeping much of their culture intact.
David Igler, “Alta California, the Pacific, and International Commerce before the Gold Rush,” in William Deverell and David Igler, eds., A Companion to California History (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 116-26. California’s growing importance in Pacific commerce on the eve of the American takeover is treated in this essay.
Oakah L. Jones, Jr., “The Pacific Squadron and the Conquest of California, 1846-1847,” Journal of the West (April 1966), 187-202. This article is one of very few scholarly treatments of the subject.
John H. Kemble, The Panama Route, 1848-1869 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972). This is a reprint of Kemble’s earlier classic study on an important maritime dimension of the California gold rush.
Thomas M. Leonard, James K. Polk: A Clear and Unquestionable Destiny (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001). President James K. Polk’s skillful blending of aggressiveness, tact, and vision in directing foreign policy is highlighted in this concise political biography.
Joann Levy, They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992). Using diaries and other primary writings, the author tells the stories of gold rush women with wit and verve.
Oscar Lewis, Sea Routes to the Gold Fields: The Migration by Water to California in 1849-1852 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949). While dated and short on bibliographic citations, this book is especially strong on narrating the experiences of passengers taking the Cape Horn route to San Francisco.
Aims McGuinness, Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). The author situates Panama’s role in the gold rush in a transnational context, emphasizing U. S. and Latin American nation-building.
James J. Rawls and Richard J. Orsi, eds., A Golden State: Mining and Economic Development in Gold Rush California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). This is an indispensable anthology of writings treating the technological and economic aspects of the gold rush in an international context.
Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). A social history of the gold rush, this volume draws heavily from diaries and letters.
Ralph J. Roske, “The World Impact of the California Gold Rush, 1849-1857,” Arizona and the West, 55/3 (Autumn 1963), 187-232. This is one of the few comprehensive, published monographs on the gold rush in global perspective.
John H. Schroeder, Shaping a Maritime Empire: The Commercial and Diplomatic Role of the American Navy, 1829-1861 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985). The role of the U. S. Navy as a protector of maritime trade is stressed in this work.
Kevin Starr and Richard J. Orsi, eds., Rooted in a Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold Rush California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). This anthology focuses on the migratory, ethnic, demographic, and cultural dimensions of the gold rush.
World History
