1
00:00:01,800 --> 00:00:06,920
Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey

2
00:00:06,960 --> 00:00:12,039
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here. You'd think that finding gold

3
00:00:12,119 --> 00:00:15,080
Speaker 1: on your property would mean the end of all your troubles,

4
00:00:15,800 --> 00:00:19,159
Speaker 1: But for one John Sutter, it was just about the

5
00:00:19,200 --> 00:00:23,360
Speaker 1: worst thing that could have happened. In the eighteen hundreds.

6
00:00:23,440 --> 00:00:26,079
Speaker 1: Cutter was an entrepreneur and owned a large tract of

7
00:00:26,160 --> 00:00:30,280
Speaker 1: land in California. He hired a carpenter named James Marshall

8
00:00:30,400 --> 00:00:33,040
Speaker 1: to build a water wheel for a mill on his property.

9
00:00:34,040 --> 00:00:38,360
Speaker 1: Then in Marshall discovered flakes of gold in the river.

10
00:00:39,880 --> 00:00:42,360
Speaker 1: Although the two men tried to keep the findest secret,

11
00:00:42,600 --> 00:00:47,560
Speaker 1: they failed miserably, especially after an enterprising gentleman named Sam

12
00:00:47,600 --> 00:00:51,000
Speaker 1: Brennan paraded around with a vial of gold and announced

13
00:00:51,040 --> 00:00:55,720
Speaker 1: the whereabouts of the new discovery. He himself didn't go prospecting.

14
00:00:56,120 --> 00:00:58,240
Speaker 1: He knew of a smarter way to make his fortune.

15
00:00:58,440 --> 00:01:03,720
Speaker 1: As we'll see in just four years. By eighteen fifty two,

16
00:01:03,960 --> 00:01:07,880
Speaker 1: Sutter would be bankrupt, his property overrun, and his livestock

17
00:01:08,000 --> 00:01:13,320
Speaker 1: stolen by avaricious prospectors. It's hard to exaggerate the enormity

18
00:01:13,360 --> 00:01:16,640
Speaker 1: of the Gold rusha's impact on California. In a few

19
00:01:16,680 --> 00:01:20,880
Speaker 1: short years, it transformed from a sparsely populated, newly acquired

20
00:01:21,000 --> 00:01:23,960
Speaker 1: territory of the United States to a fully formed state

21
00:01:24,000 --> 00:01:27,839
Speaker 1: with a thriving economy. Between eighteen forty eight and eighteen

22
00:01:27,880 --> 00:01:31,480
Speaker 1: forty nine alone, the influx of settlers exploded from just

23
00:01:31,600 --> 00:01:37,440
Speaker 1: four hundred to ninety thousand. To accommodate the flood of

24
00:01:37,520 --> 00:01:40,319
Speaker 1: forty niners, as these would be gold miners, came to

25
00:01:40,360 --> 00:01:45,959
Speaker 1: be called a gold mining town sprung up all over. Shops, saloons, brothels,

26
00:01:46,040 --> 00:01:48,600
Speaker 1: and other businesses set up to serve the forty niners

27
00:01:48,720 --> 00:01:51,880
Speaker 1: and make some money of their own. Chaos and sorter

28
00:01:52,040 --> 00:01:56,320
Speaker 1: were common, as we're gambling in violence. San Francisco became

29
00:01:56,320 --> 00:02:01,040
Speaker 1: the center of this booming new economy. For the indigenous

30
00:02:01,040 --> 00:02:04,560
Speaker 1: peoples who lived there, it was an unmitigated disaster. The

31
00:02:04,640 --> 00:02:08,000
Speaker 1: thousands of new immigrants pushed the native populations off their land,

32
00:02:08,240 --> 00:02:12,120
Speaker 1: depriving them of their hunting grounds. Violent confrontations broke out,

33
00:02:12,360 --> 00:02:15,239
Speaker 1: and the newcomers slaughtered as many as sixteen thousand of

34
00:02:15,320 --> 00:02:19,920
Speaker 1: California's first people's in what amounted to state sanctioned genocide.

35
00:02:20,639 --> 00:02:23,760
Speaker 1: The vast majority of the early gold rush immigrants were men,

36
00:02:24,200 --> 00:02:27,400
Speaker 1: or at least they appeared to be. There are numerous

37
00:02:27,400 --> 00:02:31,680
Speaker 1: recorded instances in which women dressed as men. For the

38
00:02:31,760 --> 00:02:34,080
Speaker 1: article this episode is based on. Has to Fork spoke

39
00:02:34,120 --> 00:02:37,519
Speaker 1: by email with Claire Sears, an associate professor of sociology

40
00:02:37,560 --> 00:02:41,760
Speaker 1: at San Francisco State University. As she said, this phenomenon

41
00:02:41,880 --> 00:02:44,560
Speaker 1: was so common in gold rush California that when a

42
00:02:44,560 --> 00:02:48,520
Speaker 1: newspaper photographer advertised for a lad to help him, he

43
00:02:48,639 --> 00:02:51,800
Speaker 1: was compelled to specify that no young women in disguise

44
00:02:52,000 --> 00:02:57,440
Speaker 1: need apply. Many of these prospectors did well at first.

45
00:02:58,120 --> 00:03:00,359
Speaker 1: There was a lot of gold to be found. There

46
00:03:00,360 --> 00:03:02,520
Speaker 1: are estimates that over the course of the gold rush,

47
00:03:02,880 --> 00:03:05,920
Speaker 1: some one thousand, seven hundred and fifty pounds that's about

48
00:03:05,960 --> 00:03:11,000
Speaker 1: seven kilos of this buttery metal were unearthed. But a

49
00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:13,040
Speaker 1: few people were able to hold on to their new

50
00:03:13,040 --> 00:03:17,120
Speaker 1: found wealth. Life in a boom town was notoriously expensive,

51
00:03:17,520 --> 00:03:20,000
Speaker 1: and there were so many ways to lose what you

52
00:03:20,000 --> 00:03:26,520
Speaker 1: had found, alcohol, brothels and gambling being the chief enticements. Still,

53
00:03:26,560 --> 00:03:29,480
Speaker 1: there were a few characters who got rich and stayed

54
00:03:29,520 --> 00:03:33,280
Speaker 1: that way. One of them was George Hurst, the father

55
00:03:33,360 --> 00:03:36,840
Speaker 1: of publishing magnate William Randolph Hurst, and by the time

56
00:03:36,840 --> 00:03:40,840
Speaker 1: he died, George Hurst was worth nineteen million dollars, which

57
00:03:40,880 --> 00:03:43,800
Speaker 1: is a considerable fortune today, and was worth the equivalent

58
00:03:43,800 --> 00:03:46,480
Speaker 1: of over half a billion in today's money at that time.

59
00:03:47,840 --> 00:03:51,640
Speaker 1: But interestingly, Hurst didn't prospect for gold when he arrived

60
00:03:51,640 --> 00:03:56,160
Speaker 1: in California. Instead, he mined courts. Building on his earnings,

61
00:03:56,200 --> 00:03:59,000
Speaker 1: he went on to invest in silver mines across the country,

62
00:03:59,320 --> 00:04:05,000
Speaker 1: amassing of vast fortune and ending up a U. S. Senator. Meanwhile,

63
00:04:05,200 --> 00:04:09,200
Speaker 1: one Jean Baptiste Charbonneau probably didn't strike it rich, but

64
00:04:09,360 --> 00:04:12,200
Speaker 1: he must have made enough to afford the exorbitant cost

65
00:04:12,240 --> 00:04:15,360
Speaker 1: of living in gold crazed California because he stuck it

66
00:04:15,360 --> 00:04:17,960
Speaker 1: out for years and ended up running a hotel there.

67
00:04:18,920 --> 00:04:22,280
Speaker 1: Charbonneau was an intriguing figure in part because he was

68
00:04:22,320 --> 00:04:24,800
Speaker 1: the son of the famous Chicago weea and a Frenchman

69
00:04:24,800 --> 00:04:28,159
Speaker 1: by the name of Toussaint Charbonneau. As an infant, he

70
00:04:28,279 --> 00:04:30,560
Speaker 1: was with his parents on the Lewis and Clark expedition,

71
00:04:30,920 --> 00:04:33,560
Speaker 1: and after his mother's death, he was adopted by Clark.

72
00:04:34,800 --> 00:04:37,880
Speaker 1: One of Charbonneau's fellow prospectors ended up running the hotel

73
00:04:37,920 --> 00:04:41,760
Speaker 1: with him. The man's name was Jim Beckworth. And his

74
00:04:41,839 --> 00:04:45,400
Speaker 1: story is at least as intriguing. Also, he's the only

75
00:04:45,480 --> 00:04:48,640
Speaker 1: black person to have published an autobiography in those days

76
00:04:48,640 --> 00:04:52,480
Speaker 1: in the American West. He did tend to exaggerate a bit.

77
00:04:52,760 --> 00:04:55,320
Speaker 1: He was known for spinning a good yarn, But his

78
00:04:55,400 --> 00:05:00,000
Speaker 1: story goes like this. Born into slavery, Backworth was free

79
00:05:00,080 --> 00:05:03,120
Speaker 1: by his master, who was also his father, and headed west,

80
00:05:03,200 --> 00:05:06,760
Speaker 1: where he became a successful fur trapper, living with the

81
00:05:06,839 --> 00:05:09,320
Speaker 1: chron nation for years. He married the daughter of a

82
00:05:09,400 --> 00:05:12,279
Speaker 1: chief and fought with them, rising to the level of

83
00:05:12,320 --> 00:05:15,520
Speaker 1: war chief. He may have discovered what's now known as

84
00:05:15,520 --> 00:05:18,840
Speaker 1: the Beckworth passed through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and he

85
00:05:18,839 --> 00:05:21,720
Speaker 1: helped establish a Native American trail that's now known as

86
00:05:21,720 --> 00:05:25,600
Speaker 1: the Beckworth Trail, which thousands followed on their way to California.

87
00:05:27,200 --> 00:05:29,719
Speaker 1: But the people who really made money on the California

88
00:05:29,760 --> 00:05:34,760
Speaker 1: gold Rush were merchants. Take Levi Strouse. When he heard

89
00:05:34,880 --> 00:05:37,760
Speaker 1: news of the California gold Rush, he headed to San Francisco,

90
00:05:38,000 --> 00:05:40,920
Speaker 1: where he established his wholesale dry goods business in eighteen

91
00:05:40,960 --> 00:05:45,440
Speaker 1: fifty three. Then in eighteen seventy two, Strauss partnered with

92
00:05:45,480 --> 00:05:48,400
Speaker 1: one of his customers, a tailor from Reno Nevada by

93
00:05:48,400 --> 00:05:51,560
Speaker 1: the name of Jacob Davis, who was designing heavy cotton

94
00:05:51,560 --> 00:05:54,320
Speaker 1: work pants with rivets hammered in the corner pockets to

95
00:05:54,400 --> 00:05:58,880
Speaker 1: make them more durable. Levi Straussing Company couldn't sell enough

96
00:05:58,960 --> 00:06:02,640
Speaker 1: of their waiste high overalls to the miners, lumberjacks and farmers,

97
00:06:03,240 --> 00:06:07,320
Speaker 1: and well you know the rest of the story. And

98
00:06:07,480 --> 00:06:10,279
Speaker 1: remember Sam Brennan from the beginning of this episode, the

99
00:06:10,320 --> 00:06:12,920
Speaker 1: one who basically kicked off the gold rush by parading

100
00:06:12,920 --> 00:06:16,880
Speaker 1: around with that vial of precious metal. Rather than staking

101
00:06:16,920 --> 00:06:20,200
Speaker 1: acclaim on the gold, Brandon bought up all the equipment

102
00:06:20,200 --> 00:06:23,279
Speaker 1: that prospectors would need, and then when the rush began,

103
00:06:23,680 --> 00:06:27,200
Speaker 1: resold the merchandise at a steep mark up. His store

104
00:06:27,320 --> 00:06:30,640
Speaker 1: made enormous profits, selling as much as five thousand dollars

105
00:06:30,640 --> 00:06:33,919
Speaker 1: in goods per day to miners. That's some one and

106
00:06:33,920 --> 00:06:37,400
Speaker 1: fifty five thousand a day in today's money. He became

107
00:06:37,480 --> 00:06:45,800
Speaker 1: California's first millionaire. Today's episode is based on the article

108
00:06:45,960 --> 00:06:48,520
Speaker 1: who Really Struck It Rich during the California Gold Rush

109
00:06:48,560 --> 00:06:50,960
Speaker 1: on how stuff Works dot com written by a Scene Koran.

110
00:06:51,760 --> 00:06:54,080
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio in partnership

111
00:06:54,080 --> 00:06:55,880
Speaker 1: with How Stuff Works. Dot com and its produced by

112
00:06:55,880 --> 00:06:59,159
Speaker 1: Tyler Clang. Four more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the

113
00:06:59,160 --> 00:07:02,000
Speaker 1: iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to

114
00:07:02,000 --> 00:07:14,160
Speaker 1: your favorite shows. H