Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here. You'd think that finding gold
Speaker 1: on your property would mean the end of all your troubles,
Speaker 1: But for one John Sutter, it was just about the
Speaker 1: worst thing that could have happened. In the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: Cutter was an entrepreneur and owned a large tract of
Speaker 1: land in California. He hired a carpenter named James Marshall
Speaker 1: to build a water wheel for a mill on his property.
Speaker 1: Then in Marshall discovered flakes of gold in the river.
Speaker 1: Although the two men tried to keep the findest secret,
Speaker 1: they failed miserably, especially after an enterprising gentleman named Sam
Speaker 1: Brennan paraded around with a vial of gold and announced
Speaker 1: the whereabouts of the new discovery. He himself didn't go prospecting.
Speaker 1: He knew of a smarter way to make his fortune.
Speaker 1: As we'll see in just four years. By eighteen fifty two,
Speaker 1: Sutter would be bankrupt, his property overrun, and his livestock
Speaker 1: stolen by avaricious prospectors. It's hard to exaggerate the enormity
Speaker 1: of the Gold rusha's impact on California. In a few
Speaker 1: short years, it transformed from a sparsely populated, newly acquired
Speaker 1: territory of the United States to a fully formed state
Speaker 1: with a thriving economy. Between eighteen forty eight and eighteen
Speaker 1: forty nine alone, the influx of settlers exploded from just
Speaker 1: four hundred to ninety thousand. To accommodate the flood of
Speaker 1: forty niners, as these would be gold miners, came to
Speaker 1: be called a gold mining town sprung up all over. Shops, saloons, brothels,
Speaker 1: and other businesses set up to serve the forty niners
Speaker 1: and make some money of their own. Chaos and sorter
Speaker 1: were common, as we're gambling in violence. San Francisco became
Speaker 1: the center of this booming new economy. For the indigenous
Speaker 1: peoples who lived there, it was an unmitigated disaster. The
Speaker 1: thousands of new immigrants pushed the native populations off their land,
Speaker 1: depriving them of their hunting grounds. Violent confrontations broke out,
Speaker 1: and the newcomers slaughtered as many as sixteen thousand of
Speaker 1: California's first people's in what amounted to state sanctioned genocide.
Speaker 1: The vast majority of the early gold rush immigrants were men,
Speaker 1: or at least they appeared to be. There are numerous
Speaker 1: recorded instances in which women dressed as men. For the
Speaker 1: article this episode is based on. Has to Fork spoke
Speaker 1: by email with Claire Sears, an associate professor of sociology
Speaker 1: at San Francisco State University. As she said, this phenomenon
Speaker 1: was so common in gold rush California that when a
Speaker 1: newspaper photographer advertised for a lad to help him, he
Speaker 1: was compelled to specify that no young women in disguise
Speaker 1: need apply. Many of these prospectors did well at first.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of gold to be found. There
Speaker 1: are estimates that over the course of the gold rush,
Speaker 1: some one thousand, seven hundred and fifty pounds that's about
Speaker 1: seven kilos of this buttery metal were unearthed. But a
Speaker 1: few people were able to hold on to their new
Speaker 1: found wealth. Life in a boom town was notoriously expensive,
Speaker 1: and there were so many ways to lose what you
Speaker 1: had found, alcohol, brothels and gambling being the chief enticements. Still,
Speaker 1: there were a few characters who got rich and stayed
Speaker 1: that way. One of them was George Hurst, the father
Speaker 1: of publishing magnate William Randolph Hurst, and by the time
Speaker 1: he died, George Hurst was worth nineteen million dollars, which
Speaker 1: is a considerable fortune today, and was worth the equivalent
Speaker 1: of over half a billion in today's money at that time.
Speaker 1: But interestingly, Hurst didn't prospect for gold when he arrived
Speaker 1: in California. Instead, he mined courts. Building on his earnings,
Speaker 1: he went on to invest in silver mines across the country,
Speaker 1: amassing of vast fortune and ending up a U. S. Senator. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: one Jean Baptiste Charbonneau probably didn't strike it rich, but
Speaker 1: he must have made enough to afford the exorbitant cost
Speaker 1: of living in gold crazed California because he stuck it
Speaker 1: out for years and ended up running a hotel there.
Speaker 1: Charbonneau was an intriguing figure in part because he was
Speaker 1: the son of the famous Chicago weea and a Frenchman
Speaker 1: by the name of Toussaint Charbonneau. As an infant, he
Speaker 1: was with his parents on the Lewis and Clark expedition,
Speaker 1: and after his mother's death, he was adopted by Clark.
Speaker 1: One of Charbonneau's fellow prospectors ended up running the hotel
Speaker 1: with him. The man's name was Jim Beckworth. And his
Speaker 1: story is at least as intriguing. Also, he's the only
Speaker 1: black person to have published an autobiography in those days
Speaker 1: in the American West. He did tend to exaggerate a bit.
Speaker 1: He was known for spinning a good yarn, But his
Speaker 1: story goes like this. Born into slavery, Backworth was free
Speaker 1: by his master, who was also his father, and headed west,
Speaker 1: where he became a successful fur trapper, living with the
Speaker 1: chron nation for years. He married the daughter of a
Speaker 1: chief and fought with them, rising to the level of
Speaker 1: war chief. He may have discovered what's now known as
Speaker 1: the Beckworth passed through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and he
Speaker 1: helped establish a Native American trail that's now known as
Speaker 1: the Beckworth Trail, which thousands followed on their way to California.
Speaker 1: But the people who really made money on the California
Speaker 1: gold Rush were merchants. Take Levi Strouse. When he heard
Speaker 1: news of the California gold Rush, he headed to San Francisco,
Speaker 1: where he established his wholesale dry goods business in eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty three. Then in eighteen seventy two, Strauss partnered with
Speaker 1: one of his customers, a tailor from Reno Nevada by
Speaker 1: the name of Jacob Davis, who was designing heavy cotton
Speaker 1: work pants with rivets hammered in the corner pockets to
Speaker 1: make them more durable. Levi Straussing Company couldn't sell enough
Speaker 1: of their waiste high overalls to the miners, lumberjacks and farmers,
Speaker 1: and well you know the rest of the story. And
Speaker 1: remember Sam Brennan from the beginning of this episode, the
Speaker 1: one who basically kicked off the gold rush by parading
Speaker 1: around with that vial of precious metal. Rather than staking
Speaker 1: acclaim on the gold, Brandon bought up all the equipment
Speaker 1: that prospectors would need, and then when the rush began,
Speaker 1: resold the merchandise at a steep mark up. His store
Speaker 1: made enormous profits, selling as much as five thousand dollars
Speaker 1: in goods per day to miners. That's some one and
Speaker 1: fifty five thousand a day in today's money. He became
Speaker 1: California's first millionaire. Today's episode is based on the article
Speaker 1: who Really Struck It Rich during the California Gold Rush
Speaker 1: on how stuff Works dot com written by a Scene Koran.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio in partnership
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