California Gold Rush

Introduction

By July 1848, the number of gold seekers in the Sacramento Valley stood at two thousand; by October, five thousand; by year's end they numbered eight thousand.

"It was a clear cold morning I shall never forget," wrote James Marshall in his diary on January 24, 1848 (as quoted in Rosalyn Schanzer's Gold Fever!). "My eye was caught with the glimpse of something shining in the bottom of the ditch. I reached my hand down and picked it up; it made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold. Then I saw another piece. Putting one of the pieces on a hard river stone, I took another and commenced hammering. It was soft and didn't break; it therefore must be gold." With these words, carpenter James Marshall recorded his discovery of the mineral that would change California from a sleepy Mexican territory into the fastest-growing state in the rapidly expanding United States of America. Within six months of Marshall's discovery, word had spread that there was gold throughout the streams and hills of central California. It wasn't long before thousands of gold-hungry prospectors poured in from all over the world in what is now known as the great California gold rush. -- "Gold Rush" : Western Expansion Almanac