Pros And Cons Of The California Gold Rush

“I declare this to be gold,” announced John Augustus Sutter one random day in the early months of the year 1848. During the construction of a sawmill in 1848, James Marshall the carpenter in-charge of the construction made a major discovery of gold. While Sutter wanted to keep this discovery a secret, the news eventually got out, leading to what is now known as the California Gold Rush. Of course, once the news of gold spread, men swarmed to California to get a grab at the expensive metal. Soon western settlements started to pop up everywhere around the US. While all this seemed like an amazing thing to happen, it still had its negative effects. There were many pros and cons of the gold rush and western settlement, on the US as a whole, such
Once people heard the news of the discovery of gold, thousands flocked into the hills in search of riches. People left their jobs and families behind to hunt for the gold. Also known as the gold fever, the gold rush inspired probably the largest mass movement of people in world history. While that may sound good, it was not. This greed for gold turned even San Francisco into a ghost town. In Monterey, one Walter Colton even remarked, “The blacksmith dropped his hammer, the carpenter his plane, the mason his trowel, the baker his loaf, the tapster his bottle. All were off to the mines, some on horses, some in carts, some went on crutches, and one went in a litter.” The gold rush even influenced soldiers into abandoning their posts in pursuit of wealth. In their towns of Monterey and San Francisco, soldiers watched others get rich while they only earned six dollars a month on garrison duty. One soldier even said, “The struggle between right and six dollars a month and wrong and seventy-five dollars a day is rather a severe one.” Due to the gold rush, the army in northern California lost 716 men out of a total of 1,290 in the first eighteen months of the gold rush. While the gold rush was a good thing, the gold fever that accompanied it was not. On May 29, a newspaper, the Californian, even had to shut down because “the majority of our subscribers and many
While it brought about a new mode of transportation and increased the overall population of the west, it also caused the desertion of previous towns and the increase racial discrimination. Evidently, the gold rush and western settlement did not have all good effects, but it also did not have all bad effects. One good effect that came from it though was the spirit of the gold rush that did not end with the Civil War. This audacious forty-niner spirit extended well into the twentieth century and while it was not used for gold hunting, it was used to mine the rich veins of science and technology. And even today, this spirit remains, just used in different