California Gold Rush essays

California Gold Rush essays It lasted just a decade, but the California gold rush was a gigantic adventure for a generation of fragile young men, most of them citizens of a fragile young nation. They took their name ~ the forty-niners ~ from the year that the gold rush began. In 1849 the East was dazzled by the news that across the continent, on land that was just given to the U.S. by Mexico, golden nuggets were lying around loose on the ground. Abandoning farms and apprenticeships, deserting their families, the forty-niners swarmed West by the thousands. In California, they heard that a man could make a fortune by simply digging in hills with just a little more equipment than a shovel, a tin pan and a wooden, box like thing called a cradle. If the man did not get rich from digging, who cared? For most of the forty-niners the adventure alone was enough treasure to last a lifetime.1 The gold rush all started in 1848 when James W. Marshall found gold nuggets at Sutters Mill. He rushed down to the nearest town and yelled that he had found gold. People from the near shanty towns rushed to El Derado to claim their fortune from Sutters Mill. By 1949, President Polk released this information to the rest of the country. People from all over the continent came to California in search for money. Most of the people that came to California for gold did not get what they were looking for. Most of the Argonauts (forty-niners) died on the way to California. It was a long hard journey to California. Many people left their own family on the Oregon Trail to go get their fortune from California. This caused many wives and their children to die. A typical day for the forty-niners was not very fun. There was a lot of work and people would fight a lot for other peoples tools. A lot of people would get killed that had gold with them. The people would then get their gold stolen. In the next few years people from Europe, Asia, and S...