The Gold Rush That Built a City

In January 1848, a carpenter called James Marshall was building a sawmill on a river in northern California when he saw something shining in the water. He picked it up and looked at it closely. It was gold. Marshall and his boss, John Sutter, tried to keep the discovery a secret, but news like that travels fast.

At that time, San Francisco was a small village with fewer than a thousand people. Just a few months later, it was almost empty. Shopkeepers had closed their shops, sailors had left their ships and even soldiers had disappeared. They had all gone to the hills to look for gold.

By 1849, the news had reached the rest of the world. Tens of thousands of people arrived from the eastern United States, Mexico, Chile, Peru, China, Europe and Australia. They became known as the "forty-niners". Most of them had never seen a gold mine before, and many had sold everything they owned to pay for the journey.

The trip was long and dangerous. Some people crossed the continent in wagons, a journey that took months. Others sailed all the way around South America. When they arrived in San Francisco, the harbor was full of ships that had been abandoned by their crews. Some of these ships were later turned into hotels, shops and even a prison.

Very few of the miners got rich. Life in the camps was hard and expensive: an egg could cost a dollar, which was a lot of money then. The people who made the most money were often the ones who sold things to the miners: food, tools, clothes and places to sleep. One young merchant who arrived a few years later, Levi Strauss, sold cloth and later became famous for his jeans.

By 1850, when California became a state, San Francisco had grown into a busy city of more than twenty thousand people. The gold rush was over in a few years, but the city never stopped growing.