Golden Ticket

Joanne, Nathan, I’ve certainly learned a lot conducting those two interviews. And I’m just wondering what strikes you about the place of the Gold Rush in the broader span of American history?

NATHAN: Ed, I can’t help but think about how compressed the history of the United States is and how it gets replicated in the history of California between the 1850s and really the turn of the 20th century. I mean you have this mass migration of Europeans who are going out west, you have massive declines in indigenous populations, and the impact of the gold rush on culture, on economics, on the land of California. Again, are all happening in ways that feel very similar to the United States kind of writ long.

ED: That’s really interesting, Nathan, and I was struck in these interviews about how all these things that we think of as being a sequence are kind of piled on top of each other in California.

NATHAN: It’s true, I mean you have, just as one example, obviously the economic impact of the gold rush is going to be profound. Not just in terms of number of tons of gold that then are removed from the mountains of California, but the way that the local economies there are dramatically changed. You’ll see a dozen eggs costing you the equivalent of like $90 by today’s prices or like $3,000 for a pair of shoes in today’s money. And it’s not just stuff around the house or food items, you think about the ways in which women are coming out and they’re either working as comfort workers or domestics. And you think about even extermination of Native Americans gets monetized in this period. Where people are paying $25 for a scalp, or $5 for the part of an indigenous woman or child. It can get really macabre but the point is, everything seems to be for sale in a way that is far more dramatic than what was happening even 10 years earlier.

JOANNE: And it touches on a larger thread, not just in American history but certainly in American history. Just thinking about the Gold Rush made me think about a different kind of a rush at the end of the 18th and at the beginning of the 19th century. And that was a sort of land rush when there was this wild craze of people who wanted to buy up land. At that time, it was called land mania.

The states at the end of the revolution began selling off Western lands, and there was a craze of people rushing around trying to, essentially, find a way to make value, make money and have instant gain based on something that they hadn’t known that they could have before. Which is the same impulse as the gold rush and in that sense, what really strikes me about the gold rush and this land mania craze, is the emotion driving it. I mean you used ‘drastic,’ I think and we’ve been saying ‘extreme.’ Even the words that we’re using to talk about it really drive at value.

The idea that there’s something out there that you can have that has great value, and you can transform yourself. All you have to do is find a way to get it. The emotion that drives that takes over from whatever the logic is of seeking it in the first place. And I think a rush or a mania ends up building on itself.

ED: Listening to you folks talk, I hear echoes of the current day as well. It seems that California was not only sort of a bellwether or an accelerated American history back in the 19th century, but in some ways it still seems to be doing that today.

JOANNE: Well, certainly, I mean, if you think about the mix of big bucks and big emotion and all of the fervor and churning of energy that goes into something like Silicon Valley, even in the same location, it really makes you realize that although we’re talking about the gold rush as though it’s in the ancient past, that we’re talking about a mix of things that we’re still seeing in a different form.

NATHAN: And I would absolutely contend that California still has a lot of the attributes that one might associate with the Gold Rush period. I mean it’s one that has to do with racial and ethnic diversity, it certainly is a place that people consider to be wide open, to be a place of populism. And there’s certainly a sense, too, that California is still a land of great possibility. I mean the old adage, “go west young man” still holds true for a lot of people. You think about California as a place where movies are made and other kinds of gold I guess in those hills now today.

JOANNE: Well great possibility, and then gets us right back to great scarcity. I mean, if you think about the West Coast generally, but in particular northern California, and how hard it is now and how expensive it is now to try and actually live there, much like the 1840s and 50s. I mean, you might say that real estate is the California Gold of the 21st century.

NATHAN: I would not argue with that.

JOANNE: We heard about how the California Gold Rush was a global phenomenon, drawing Argonauts from Asia, Europe, South America, Australia and the US. So it should be no surprise that the mining camps could be pretty diverse.