On Jan. 24, 1848, a New Jersey-born millwright and carpenter, James W. Marshall, discovered gold on the South Fork of the American River in northern California. Those small shiny particles quickly triggered what would become the greatest voluntary human migration in history.
Spain utilized this mission system to entrap, Christianize and Hispanicize native peoples so they could provide a coerced labor force to sustain its distant colonies.
Years before Marshall’s fateful find, however, modest amounts of gold had been extracted from crushed ore and surface deposits by Mexican miners in southern California. In 1821, a Spanish priest at one of the coastal missions presciently remarked: “If the secret of gold in California ever gets out, the Yankees will overrun the place.”
This is an excerpt from Mark McLaughlin’s forthcoming book “Truckee & The 601, Vigilantes and Racism in 19th Century California and Nevada” due out this fall.
By the 1840s, government officials in Washington, D.C., were well aware of the abundant natural resources in the isolated, unprotected Mexican province of California, including its gold. In addition to scouting reports by U.S. merchant and naval ships that sailed the Pacific Coast, in 1843 nearly 2,000 ounces of the prized metal was shipped to the United States from mines discovered near the San Fernando Mission in southern California. In a few short years, the Americans would declare war on Mexico to obtain this undefended land of golden bounty.
READ Mark’s four-part series on the Mexican-American War
The reports of gold in 1848 came at a propitious moment. The Mexican-American War had just ended and the Yankees had prevailed. California was now a Military Protectorate, wholly owned and controlled by the United States. In a bitter twist of fate, the unwanted war had cost Mexico about one-third of her sovereign soil, including the jewel that is California, with its vast Pacific Coast, varied terrains and micro-climates, along with one of the most richly concentrated deposits of gold ever found. If you count the controversial 1845 annexation of Texas, Mexico’s loss of land to aggressive and imperialistic acquisition policies by the United States reached 54 percent.
The news of the American River gold strike promptly reached the fog-bound seaport of San Francisco. From there word spread quickly through trade and shipping connections to the Hawaiian Islands, Asia, China, South America, Europe and the United States’ eastern seaboard. At first, claims of gold were greeted with skepticism, but for poor farmers, unskilled laborers and factory workers who were working for $1 a day or less, it represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get rich — or at least a chance to make enough money to return home and dramatically improve one’s family life.
Finally, in his December 1848 State of the Union speech, President James K Polk confirmed that the rumors of gold in California were true. Polk’s announcement precipitated a global rush for wealth, excitement and opportunity — especially for single young men. More than 100,000 gold seekers from around the world inundated the region. San Francisco’s population exploded from 1,000 residents in January 1848 to 25,000 in December 1849. The unrelenting exploitation devastated native peoples, the environment and irreversibly reshaped California.
Historians point to California’s Gold Rush immigration as the catalyst for violence and racism against Native Americans, Mexicans, Chileans, Blacks, Chinese and others, along with an aggressive attitude and racial superiority mindset that at times manifested itself as vigilantism. The tidal wave of humanity undoubtedly transformed California and enhanced racist attitudes among the new arrivals, but the process had been underway for nearly a century — imported by missionaries, soldiers, settlers, trappers and merchants from other countries, including Spain, Mexico and the United States.
Over thousands of years, California had a remarkably diverse group of people enter the region at different times. In the pre-contact era before Europeans first arrived, the peak Indian population has been estimated at about 310,000, consisting of 500 disparate tribal groups with various languages, dress, religion and customs. Intermarriage, trade and communication was common, despite challenging dialect issues between some tribes. It was a largely peaceful existence with little violence between tribal sub-groups. The mild climate, plentiful resources and absence of European-American-Asian exploitation sustained and protected the most densely populated area in North America, north of what is now Mexico.
Mission system explotiated natives
Spain’s last significant colonial expansion began in the early 1500s. Armed conquistadors, commissioned adventurers and Franciscan friars sailed out to conquer, explore and convert indigenous people living in the Americas. Indigenous Mexican and Californians were among the many victims of this military, religious and cultural incursion into the New World. Early Spanish explorers reported that Alta California (roughly the current state borders) showed promise, but for nearly 170 years royalty in Madrid felt the region too far and costly to colonize by sending ships, supplies and people to settle the region. In 1769, Spain’s first California mission was established by Roman Catholic Franciscans at San Diego. Twenty more mission outposts were built, primarily along the Pacific Coast. They were generally staffed by two priests and protected by a garrison of armed Spanish soldiers.
Spain utilized this mission system to entrap, Christianize and Hispanicize native peoples so they could provide a coerced labor force to sustain its distant colonies. Missions were imposing structures in primitive California. The padres lured neophytes to the mission with food, gifts and beads, a contemporary form of money. After baptism into the Catholic faith, however, once-independent Indians could be held at the mission against their will because the clergy demanded control over every aspect of their lives. If a neophyte resisted, punishments were harsh, including whippings and beatings. Indian labor was used to produce crops, as well as finished products like pottery, rope, candles, wine, leather goods and simple furniture to trade with Spanish soldiers and local settlers.
It’s been well-documented how physically violent and cruelly misguided the subjugation of Californian natives was under Spain’s colonial mission system. Early 19th Century Russian fur-trappers living at outposts established on the coast north of San Francisco did not proselytize religion to the indigenous natives and the relationship between the two was more equitable and less imperious. But more devastating than organized religion to the American Indian population was the introduction of European germs and diseases. The natives had no resistance to the new microbes: smallpox, dysentery, malaria, measles and other illnesses spread like wildfire and decimated the population. By 1848, there were only about 100,000 left out of approximately 300,000 at pre-European contact.
Tragically, for California Indians the struggle for survival grew more dire with the arrival of the first Forty-Niners in 1849, followed by subsequent mass migration over the next decade. The California Indian Wars between the United States and native people can only be called genocide; by the end of the 19th Century there were barely 15,000 native Californians left. A rare bright spot is that today California has the largest population of Native Americans out of any state in the country with about 723,000.
