The Argonauts

ED: For today on the show, we’re going to delve into the many legacies of the gold rush. Some mythologized, some forgotten.

NATHAN: We’ll learn about the consequences of vigilante justice in a mining boom-town, explore the day-to-day lives of miners, and look at the devastating impact of the gold rush for California’s native peoples.

ED: But first, let’s step back and explore why men from all over the world were drawn to California in the first place, the gold.

HW BRANDS: They tended to call themselves Argonauts, after Jason and the Argonauts who were going after the Golden Fleece.

ED: This is historian HW Brands. He says that while many Argonauts didn’t strike it rich, there really was an enormous amount of gold in California.

HW BRANDS: You go from the discovery of gold in California in 1848 through, say the next 25 years, essentially, the world gold supply doubled in that 25 years. So if you took all the gold that had ever been dug out of the ground from the earliest pre-history until 1848, as much again was dug out in the next 25 years.

ED: But there was another enticement for fortune seekers. When gold was found, the region was in a kind of legal limbo.

HW BRANDS: California was being transferred from Mexican ownership to American ownership. California at this point had no territorial government, had no state government. It basically had no government at all. And the attitude of the federal government, the attitude of American culture at the time, was that there are these resources that are in the public domain, but we would rather they be in private hands as quickly as possible. So the government was selling off land on a regular basis as far as it related to precious metals like gold. The prevailing ethos was, it’s there for the taking, quite literally. People could become wealthy if you got there first.

ED: So what do you mean by that?

HW BRANDS: Well, it is called the gold rush precisely because people had to rush to get there. They knew that the people who got there first would have the best claims, would have the best opportunity to lay their hands on gold. If you got there more slowly, then all the good spaces would be taken, you’d be pushed to the margins.

Now the reason for this is that over tens of millions of years, gold had gradually been washing out of the Sierra batholith, this big chunk of granite that underlies the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Gold being heavier than gravel and sand, the gold would sink to the bottom of streams and collect in the bottoms behind rocks, beneath gravel, and all this stuff. So all you had to do at first was just separate out the heavy gold from the comparatively light sand and gravel. And you’d do that by scooping up a shovelful or a handful of this stuff, swirling some water around, the water would wash away the light stuff and leave the heavy gold.

And that would take you probably, well the first time you did probably take five minutes, when you got good at it, it’d take you a minute or 30 seconds, and you’d repeat, and repeat, and repeat, and repeat, and you’d do this from morning until night. And at least at first, it was open season. You get there, you get the gold, you put in your pocket, you can walk away.

ED: So were the first people who got there, did they become the richest people in California? Were they able to leverage that early access to the trough into position and wealth?

HW BRANDS: There were two models of business success in California in response to the discovery of gold. The first was, get your hands on as much gold and as many claims of gold property as you can, and it behooves you to keep it secret as long as you could until you got as much of the gold cornered as possible. The other model was, don’t worry so much about mining the gold, instead mine the miners. And there was another guy named Sam Brannen who had a general store in the vicinity of the goldfields, and that’s exactly what he did. And he was the one, in fact, who publicized the discovery of gold in California. So he heard that there was gold up in the mountains and he managed to get his hands on enough to fill up a small jar. And he went to San Francisco, which was a very sleepy village at the time, but there were a lot of ships that would stop in to re-provision. And he started running around the streets of the village yelling, gold, gold on the American River.

And his thinking was, everybody who comes to California goes off to the mines is going to have to buy shovels, are going to have to buy bread, they’re going to have to buy boots and all this stuff, and that’s the way I will make my money.

ED: So let’s say that I’m an Argonaut going out to the gold fields of California, how much money would a miner have spent? How much was required to sustain yourself while you were trying to strike it rich?

HW BRANDS: If you were mining gold, panning gold and you made $10 a day, that was a good day. But, you would probably have to pay at least half of that to support yourself. Because flour was expensive, and boots were expensive, and everything was expensive. So when you put numbers on it, a 10-pound bag of flour cost $1.25. That’s not going to sound very daunting because a 10-pound bag of flour today costs $5. Except that $1.25 was the weekly salary of a manual laborer in New York. So Sam Brannen, the merchant who sold stuff to the miners, he very shortly was the wealthiest man in California. So in answer to the question, did the people who came to California, did they get rich? Some of them did. And become wealthy was a comparative concept. Most of them were thinking, I’m going to go to California for a season and earn enough money to buy the farm that I wanted. Or I’ll earn enough money to be able to get married. Or I’ll earn enough money to start the business. They didn’t want to become insanely wealthy, they just wanted to get a jump on life.

ED: So the gold rush would have ended by when, would you say Bill?

HW BRANDS: So, by the end of the 1850s, it was no longer the case that a single individual without capital could get a start in the gold industry. Because by then, it had become industrialized, it had become corporatized. The gold was first discovered in active streams. Eventually, those good stream-beds were pretty well picked over, and so you could make much money doing that. And so the good holdings, in many cases, now were underground mines. These were put together by corporations, by banks, by speculators with lots of money. And so if you are going to become a miner, you almost always were a paid employee of an industrial corporation and you were working underground. You wouldn’t see the daylight, it wasn’t anything like what the first miners went through. You might as well be working in a steel factory back in Pittsburgh, except you were in California, and you’re deep underground.

ED: It sounds even more dangerous than a steel mine or a steel mill.

HW BRANDS: Yeah it certainly was. And one of the striking things about California is the way it accelerates American history. So the Industrial Revolution in the east unfolded over 50 years. In California, it unfolded over about six or eight years.

ED: So, obviously, the California Gold Rush had an enormous impact on the United States. What were its other consequences?

HW BRANDS: I think California changes American attitudes toward what constitutes success and what are the prerequisites of success. Before California, I think in terms of the Benjamin Franklin Puritan model of success. And that is you have to exhibit the right kind of attitudes, traits of character. And your success, or more precisely, if you fail, there’s probably something wrong with you. You better look inside and see how you can get right with your soul, with your creator.

People go to California and they discover that model doesn’t apply at all. Because two minors who are standing waist-deep in a rushing stream, freezing, the sun’s beating down on them, and one guy reaches down and picks up a rock. And the guy who is 20 feet away and the next claim of reaches down and picks up a gold nugget. And the guy who picked up the rock doesn’t beat his breast and hang his head and say, what did I do wrong? He said, I’ve got to go find a different claim.

And so the California model was that you try and you fail, and you try again, and you fail, and you try again, and you fail, but eventually you keep trying long enough, you’ll succeed. And this became the model for the modern Silicon Valley phenomenon and the venture-capital industry is based on this model. Where you invest in 10 different ideas and nine of them turn out to be busts, but the 10th one pans out and you’ll make a fortune.

ED: HW Brands is historian at the University of Texas-Austin. His book on this subject is the “Age of Gold, the California Gold Rush and the New American Dream.” We also heard from James Delgado, author of “Gold Rush Port, the Maritime Archeology of San Francisco’s Waterfront.”