## Introduction [00:00] right so welcome back to the history and 20 podcasts everyone uh today i've got a very special guest on it's uh dr henry knight lozano who is a senior lecturer in history and director of liberal arts at the university of exeter he specializes in u.s expansion place promotion race climate and environment with the particular folks on the united states tropical and semi-tropical frontiers california florida and hawaii henry has written numerous works around this area including this 2013 publication tropics and hopes california florida and the southern of american paradise 1869 to 1929 which won the 2013 florida book award gold medal in florida non-fiction and i'll put a link in the comments below so you can buy that if you want to so thanks for joining me henry thank you um for the invitation um jester and uh yeah it's a great i mean former student of mine and great to reconnect after after many years yeah so if anyone doesn't know henry was a lecturer of mine at northumbria university when i studied there um so that's the connection that uh henry and i have so to kick things off today we're talking about the gold rush so the first sort of question henry is what was the gold rush for anyone who hasn't heard of it before so where and when did it happen ## Overview of the Gold Rush [01:18] sure so the um the california gold rush um began in in earnest in in 1848 really the very beginning of 1848 with the discovery of gold in the sierra nevada mountains in northern california by by a man named james marshall it's not the first discovery of gold in in in the united states in north america but it is in many ways the most significant because it sets off this um enormous um kind of migration of people this rush of people really from all over the world um you get people coming from the eastern united states but also from europe from all really all around the pacific rim south america pacific islands australia and in the process it it rapidly transforms california the american west but also the relationship between those places in the world that's great thank you very much so it's a quick overview of the gold rush for anyone who doesn't know that yet so the next sort of question i have is what kick-started the gold rush would you say were there numerous factors so sort of the origins behind it was it was there a multitude of factors or was it just gold was discovered one day and then boom explosion no it is um it is it is a number of factors um so you get that initial finding in in late january 1848 um and there is an effort by these guys james marshall and he works for a man named john sutter they're building a sawmill in the mountains there is an effort to try and keep this under wraps um you know try and keep it relatively secret but um you know word spreads and by later in 1848 there's the news spread to san francisco which is a relatively small town at that point um nothing like it will become through the gold rush um but basically a lot of people leave san francisco for the mountains to kind of find out is this real um but the gold rush as a kind of national and international event really transforms at the end of that year so december 1848 the president man named james polk who has been very important actually in the u.s annexing california it's an important context here which is the california was previously part of mexico the united states has effectively won this territory through war um and then purchased almost contemporary with these events james polk in his state of the union address which all presidents give says he he he's displayed some gold in the war department offices and says this is real this is not um rumor and kind of myth but this gold is real the opportunity is there and as you'd imagine this kind of stamp of authority from a figure like the president convinces a lot of people that it's worth the risk the long journey out to california um so the time and money and perhaps even you know risk of life and limb it's worth it because there's gold to be had out there um so that's why you get the term that's december 1848 that's where you get the term the 49ers like the nfl team san francisco 49ers because 1849 sees a huge influx um tens of thousands of people going out to california to try and make it rich in in the gold fields that's great thank you very much ## Effects of the Gold Rush [04:52] so that's answered my next question my next question as well which was what was president pork's reaction and i think you've you've explained that really well there so thanks for that one so uh i just had something there if it's all right yeah so polk um polk had been very keen to to annex california um partly because of its pacific uh frontage and the idea that this would link up to you know the asia and other opportunities for for the for the united states um but he sees and many others see the discovery of gold as a kind of vindication of the us um annex in california because it seems from their perspective that we've we've annexed california oh and magically we've discovered gold and there's this kind of belief that it was it was destined to happen this way um you know historically there are other factors about why they find it then i think because they're cutting down a lot of trees and they're looking the mountains but for polk it seems a sign of kind of destiny yeah all right thank you very much great so what were the economic effects of the gold rush in the california area sort of immediately afterwards in like 49 1858 and 51 etc were there any immediate economic effects or was it more of a longevity before it took to arrive yeah i mean both it has it has massive sort of short-term impacts but also long-term i mean in the short term it it creates um it i mean it floods the the local market and beyond with with gold with gold coins um which leads to a lot of investment and the kind of diversification of california's economy so while a lot of people are mining others quickly realize that actually the way to make a sustainable living here is is through the industries that miners need so for example you get folks like levi strauss who um makes hard-wearing trousers leave levi's basically that we know of today that are really in demand that you know have have sustainable pockets and things that all miners want um and other industries like that that sort of feed off the miners if you like um so it establishes is you know a kind of a multiplication of industries san francisco becomes almost overnight a very important port and trading center where everyone's kind of coming into into the gold region and longer term just one example um is it it kind of accelerates the desire the need for a transcontinental railroad because this is obviously far afield from the majority of of the population of the united states and so as california suddenly attracts all these people there is a much um you know there is a heightened need to connect up the west coast with the east and they're exploring how to build out there a railroad oh brilliant thanks very much i know you mentioned there though it sort of helped the diversification of the economy so going into sort of like diversity and stuff so with regards to race what sort of tensions erupted as a result of the gold rush so for example did white people benefit more than maybe native americans or black americans who were coming over just wondering if if we could discuss that for a bit yeah it's a really really important um question and i think it it is um it is a critical issue in in gold rush california i mean something that connects all these people both kind of native americans but also white americans and people from other parts of the world they're connected by the desire to to find gold and you know in the very early years of the gold rush you have native americans uh white americans other people you know coming into to try and find gold in the rivers um but what happens quite quickly particularly in 1849 as the numbers increase is there is greater tension competition for gold and one of the ways in which that competition uh manifests is in terms of race so particularly um native americans are targeted and become um you know in some cases there's an effort to sort of exterminate them if you like from parts of northern california um that that has degrees of kind of state-sanctioned backing the governor of california is broadly supportive of an effort to kind of remove native americans from the gold region um but also with mexico and mexicans so very recently there's been a war the mexican-american war so there's quite a lot of tension and bad blood already between americans and mexicans and a number of mexicans come into california as gold miners and are quite successful because they've experienced mining in in sonora and other places um and there's a kind of resentment that emerges against them so you get these um taxes called foreign miners taxes that are passed in california in the early 1850s which specifically target mexicans and chinese immigrants and say well you're not welcome here in these mines these are for uh white american and sometimes european they're sometimes much more sympathetic to white europeans uh who are also foreigners but they are not deemed kind of obviously non-white foreigners um so yeah it's quite a violent and certainly a febrile place where race is is one of the important dividers that that separates different mining communities ## Women in the Gold Rush [10:35] that's a really interesting point there actually because i think a lot of people think of the gold rush from what they've seen in uh whether it be like western movies or anything where people are just they're there and they're all getting on together and having a jolly old time but obviously the reality of it was very different particularly if you were a minority so that sort of leads on to my next question here which is kind of like obviously when people think of the gold rush to think of these of white european american men traveling west to california to make the fortune but there must have been obviously women along there or even families who lived in those communities so how did that social dynamic work and what were their experiences like as women and uh maybe even children yeah yeah it's a really good question and i think you raise an important point um about how the gold rush is is sort of memorialized and whose stories are told in in popular culture and to an extent for a long time in in history um and that's about race but it's also about gender i mean i think you know the dominant image of the gold rush for a long time was of was of men at work you know these kind of if you look at the visual culture that depicted it it was almost always men um out in the mines and there is a there is a truth to that i mean if you look at the the census records of california at that point it is um discounting say the native american population for a moment it is very predominantly male and there are a lot of cultural reasons why men dominated the the groups who went out to california for mining but it's important to think think about one the fact that there were women who who went out in the gold rush wives sisters daughters and independent women but also their experiences within gold rush um california because an interesting element of this is that kind of by their scarcity the fact that there were relatively few um white women in in california um they were very much in demand for um jobs and work that back east may not have paid very well things like running boarding houses um restaurants um forms of entertainment like theater so you get these women like luzena wilson who opens a boarding house in in in the mining country and she is actually able to make a lot more money doing that than she would have back east but also a lot more money than her husband is making as a gold miner um so there's this kind of interesting thing where um some women um basically are able to maximize i suppose that the opportunity because there are not many of them all there and you know you get these miners accounts saying you know i've gone a whole year and i've only seen two women in that whole time so when they do encounter a woman um you know there is this kind of um it's kind of a phenomenon that they remark upon um that said you asked about families i mean it's definitely viewed as a place where you shouldn't be raising a family you shouldn't be because it is a culture that's defined by trying to get rich quick drinking gambling and to a degree elements of violence um very kind of frontier um kind of uh community so the mindset both of men and many women is that they are there for a time a period of time and then they are going to leave and they're going to hopefully take their winnings and go back home so it takes a while for california to sort of recover if you like from that mentality and be seen as a place where you might actually want to settle um like many other parts of the american west which is seen as you know good places to settle as a family and have your piece of land california's all about the gold and all about this kind of get rich and get out mentality right oh that's really interesting so did did most people leave then after say they've worked there for six months a year whatever did they tend to leave and go back home or did they settle elsewhere on the sort of western coast of america or yeah it's it's a good question i mean it's hard to speak generally because it's such a large migration of people um but i think you see different you see different um kind of camps with that if you like so you do get a lot who leave who will some who have done well and kind of you know understand that you know they've they've sort of beaten the casino and it's time to leave um others though wait and wait in the hope that they will they will get get lucky and i mean an important thing to mention here briefly is actually the the chances of success if you like diminish partly because there's more people but also it gets harder to get at the gold so increasingly you need technology you need like um hydraulic pumps to to get at the goal that's buried in the land so that requires money and investment so it gets harder and harder for the kind of individual miner to make it so you get these very sad stories and letters home about people who are kind of hanging on hanging on in california in the hope that their luck's going to turn and then you get others who would stay there but abandon mine california is a big big state and you know there are other opportunities that that emerged there so you begin to get people turning to farming and other industries um you've come a very long way if you come out to california so sometimes the the decision is actually i'm i'm best off staying here but doing something else yeah so i guess with a lot of the sort of overseas immigrants who come over that was probably the case as well if they hadn't managed to get rich quick then they're almost stuck there so they had to make a living there somehow and imagine that experience must have been quite difficult for a lot of them given the racial tensions at the time yeah and i mean a good a good example to think about there are the chinese diaspora so many of the chinese who come over to the gold rush um in the 1850s are planning on on going back to china um many they're mostly men many of them leave their their wives and families back in china and they send they plan to or they send their their money back to china and many of them do go back across the pacific but a lot of them stay in california and despite facing quite a lot of discrimination they are banned for example from testifying in court um and things like that they they end up kind of migrating to other mining frontiers within the west and also many of them end up working on the transcontinental railroad that i mentioned earlier um so while they are kind of seen as unwanted by many white americans they actually do a lot of the hard labor uh in the west to help kind of build it up in that period all right that's excellent thanks for that so sort of the last main question i've got is what what is the legacy of the gold rush i know we talked about the short-term impacts earlier so maybe a better way of phrasing that is what was sort of the long-term impact of the gold rush in the years and decades that followed yeah i think i think we could think about this in different ways i mean the the economic impact is huge and that it establishes um california as this pacific kind of powerhouse for the united states you know we could try to imagine a different history where the gold rush doesn't happen and i think california is a very a very very different place it attracts a lot of population investment development and so on um i think it also creates a mystique for california that still exists today you know when when people talk about somewhere like silicon valley they they talk about it in the language of the the second or the new gold rush and california um you could look at hollywood or somewhere as well california develops in part through the gold rush this this mystique is somewhere where you can you can transform your life economically but also in terms of having a different kind of lifestyle a place a place that is kind of exceptional so i think it it it really is a seminal event for making california what it becomes this kind of quite distinctive place in the united states but also how we think of california around the world yeah and it still holds like like you mentioned it still holds that sort of a lure even today i think people think of like we've had obviously the golden age of hollywood but um i remember we discussed in a lecture once just about even the geography of california itself you've got like the forests in the north and there's like beaches mountains everything like that it still holds that sort of like it's a mysterious kind of uh lure towards it and i think that's that definitely could certainly could be attributed to the gold rush i think yeah absolutely so i'll i'll stop the recording there you