During the gold rush era California became the most internationalized and culturally diverse place on Earth, and San Francisco the world’s most cosmopolitan city. Foreign emigrants outnumbered American newcomers in California in 1848. Even when that situation reversed itself a few years later, foreigners continued coming to El Dorado seeking their fortune. In November 1851, of the 452 vessels in San Francisco harbor, 242 were American-registered, 36 came from Britain, 11 from France, 10 from Germany, 5 from Chile, 3 from Sweden, 3 from Austria, 2 from Holland, and 1 from Italy. Miners from these and additional countries joined an already ethnically diverse California population in the quest for riches.
Polynesians, Americans, and Europeans living in Hawai’i were the first emigrants to come. Native Hawaiians, called “kanakas” by American Californians, sailed in scores aboard ships carrying needed foodstuffs and merchandise for miners and others. Unaccustomed to the chill of a Sierra snowfall, kanakas often sailed home to their islands in the winter months, returning to the mining camps when spring arrived.
Thousands of Latin Americans were next in the sequence of arrivals. These included Mexicans coming mainly overland from Sonora, though some voyaged from the Sea of Cortez, and seagoing Chileans and Peruvians. Of these, Mexicans were the most numerous, numbering 15,000 in 1850. Passage of a foreign miners’ license tax of $20 a month in that year led to the exodus of 10,000 of these miners to Mexico. (Protests from foreign miners and their governments helped secure the California legislature’s repeal of the tax in March 1851.) Estimates of the numbers of Chilean gold-seekers vary between 3,000 and 5,000. Information on Peruvian emigrants is not available. The Pacific Mail vessel California transported a large number of both South American groups to San Francisco.
Argonauts from Britain’s Pacific dependencies were also part of the world that rushed into California. New Zealanders learned of the California gold strike in November 1848 when an American whaler arrived carrying copies of the Honolulu Polynesian. Copies of that newspaper reached Australia a month later, resulting in thousands of its citizens boarding vessels to California. A gold strike in Australia in 1851 resulted in a reverse migration of its Argonauts from California to their homeland. Despite the return migration, Australia continued exporting needed goods to California, including jerked beef, bacon, butter, cheese, beer, medicines, woolen blankets, nails, axes, window glass, cooking utensils, and prefabricated wooden houses. By land and sea, British Columbians made their way south to El Dorado as well, working mainly the mines in the Trinity-Klamath-Shasta region.
The Chinese were the largest group of transpacific emigrants to gold rush California. Numbering 25,000 in 1852, they constituted a tenth of the non-Indian population. Eight years later nearly 35,000 Chinese lived in the Golden State. In some of the mining areas they comprised nearly a third of the population. In many of these rural areas, as in cities like San Francisco and Sacramento, they established sections called Chinatowns. These neighborhoods featured grocery stores, gambling casinos, laundries, brothels, opium dens, sleeping quarters, and eateries.
French-speaking gold-seekers arrived, mainly by sea, in increasing numbers in the early 1850s. From France they came via the Cape Horn route and from Tahiti, a French colony in Polynesia, they crossed the Pacific. Others journeyed to California from Quebec, Canada, and Louisiana, presumably by a combination of land and sea routes. By 1853 Frenchspeaking miners in California numbered between 25,000 and 30,000.
To this international multitude must be added California’s own diverse residential ethnic groups consisting of Indians, Californios, and Anglos, plus African Americans entering the state as both free persons and slaves. The story of how these groups fared in the social ferment of a new state is taken up in Chapter 5.
World History
