Who Really Profited from the Gold Rush?

A few people did strike it rich in the American Gold Rush of the 1800s -- but none of them were looking for gold. Learn more in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://history.howstuffworks.com/american-history/gold-rush.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey
brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here. You'd think that finding gold
on your property would mean the end of all your troubles,
But for one John Sutter, it was just about the
worst thing that could have happened. In the eighteen hundreds.

(00:23):
Cutter was an entrepreneur and owned a large tract of
land in California. He hired a carpenter named James Marshall
to build a water wheel for a mill on his property.
Then in Marshall discovered flakes of gold in the river.
Although the two men tried to keep the findest secret,
they failed miserably, especially after an enterprising gentleman named Sam

(00:47):
Brennan paraded around with a vial of gold and announced
the whereabouts of the new discovery. He himself didn't go prospecting.
He knew of a smarter way to make his fortune.
As we'll see in just four years. By eighteen fifty two,
Sutter would be bankrupt, his property overrun, and his livestock

(01:08):
stolen by avaricious prospectors. It's hard to exaggerate the enormity
of the Gold rusha's impact on California. In a few
short years, it transformed from a sparsely populated, newly acquired
territory of the United States to a fully formed state
with a thriving economy. Between eighteen forty eight and eighteen
forty nine alone, the influx of settlers exploded from just

(01:31):
four hundred to ninety thousand. To accommodate the flood of
forty niners, as these would be gold miners, came to
be called a gold mining town sprung up all over. Shops, saloons, brothels,
and other businesses set up to serve the forty niners
and make some money of their own. Chaos and sorter

(01:52):
were common, as we're gambling in violence. San Francisco became
the center of this booming new economy. For the indigenous
peoples who lived there, it was an unmitigated disaster. The
thousands of new immigrants pushed the native populations off their land,
depriving them of their hunting grounds. Violent confrontations broke out,

(02:12):
and the newcomers slaughtered as many as sixteen thousand of
California's first people's in what amounted to state sanctioned genocide.
The vast majority of the early gold rush immigrants were men,
or at least they appeared to be. There are numerous
recorded instances in which women dressed as men. For the
article this episode is based on. Has to Fork spoke

(02:34):
by email with Claire Sears, an associate professor of sociology
at San Francisco State University. As she said, this phenomenon
was so common in gold rush California that when a
newspaper photographer advertised for a lad to help him, he
was compelled to specify that no young women in disguise
need apply. Many of these prospectors did well at first.

(02:58):
There was a lot of gold to be found. There
are estimates that over the course of the gold rush,
some one thousand, seven hundred and fifty pounds that's about
seven kilos of this buttery metal were unearthed. But a
few people were able to hold on to their new
found wealth. Life in a boom town was notoriously expensive,
and there were so many ways to lose what you

(03:20):
had found, alcohol, brothels and gambling being the chief enticements. Still,
there were a few characters who got rich and stayed
that way. One of them was George Hurst, the father
of publishing magnate William Randolph Hurst, and by the time
he died, George Hurst was worth nineteen million dollars, which

(03:40):
is a considerable fortune today, and was worth the equivalent
of over half a billion in today's money at that time.
But interestingly, Hurst didn't prospect for gold when he arrived
in California. Instead, he mined courts. Building on his earnings,
he went on to invest in silver mines across the country,
amassing of vast fortune and ending up a U. S. Senator. Meanwhile,

(04:05):
one Jean Baptiste Charbonneau probably didn't strike it rich, but
he must have made enough to afford the exorbitant cost
of living in gold crazed California because he stuck it
out for years and ended up running a hotel there.
Charbonneau was an intriguing figure in part because he was
the son of the famous Chicago weea and a Frenchman
by the name of Toussaint Charbonneau. As an infant, he

(04:28):
was with his parents on the Lewis and Clark expedition,
and after his mother's death, he was adopted by Clark.
One of Charbonneau's fellow prospectors ended up running the hotel
with him. The man's name was Jim Beckworth. And his
story is at least as intriguing. Also, he's the only
black person to have published an autobiography in those days

(04:48):
in the American West. He did tend to exaggerate a bit.
He was known for spinning a good yarn, But his
story goes like this. Born into slavery, Backworth was free
by his master, who was also his father, and headed west,
where he became a successful fur trapper, living with the
chron nation for years. He married the daughter of a

(05:09):
chief and fought with them, rising to the level of
war chief. He may have discovered what's now known as
the Beckworth passed through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and he
helped establish a Native American trail that's now known as
the Beckworth Trail, which thousands followed on their way to California.
But the people who really made money on the California

(05:29):
gold Rush were merchants. Take Levi Strouse. When he heard
news of the California gold Rush, he headed to San Francisco,
where he established his wholesale dry goods business in eighteen
fifty three. Then in eighteen seventy two, Strauss partnered with
one of his customers, a tailor from Reno Nevada by
the name of Jacob Davis, who was designing heavy cotton

(05:51):
work pants with rivets hammered in the corner pockets to
make them more durable. Levi Straussing Company couldn't sell enough
of their waiste high overalls to the miners, lumberjacks and farmers,
and well you know the rest of the story. And
remember Sam Brennan from the beginning of this episode, the
one who basically kicked off the gold rush by parading

(06:12):
around with that vial of precious metal. Rather than staking
acclaim on the gold, Brandon bought up all the equipment
that prospectors would need, and then when the rush began,
resold the merchandise at a steep mark up. His store
made enormous profits, selling as much as five thousand dollars
in goods per day to miners. That's some one and

(06:33):
fifty five thousand a day in today's money. He became
California's first millionaire. Today's episode is based on the article
who Really Struck It Rich during the California Gold Rush
on how stuff Works dot com written by a Scene Koran.
Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio in partnership

(06:54):
with How Stuff Works. Dot com and its produced by
Tyler Clang. Four more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the
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