Much like the current pandemic, the California Gold Rush started at a specific epicenter and spread across the world. We’re all familiar with the term “Forty-Niners” which originated with the hordes of people flocking to California in 1849 to seek their fortunes in the gold fields. I’ve described in previous […]
I’ve written before about viewing exhibits at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. I was there again shortly before Christmas, this time to see a temporary exhibit of daguerreotypes taken of miners and locations associated with the California Gold Rush. Since this was the subject of my novel, […]
One of the issues I have dealt with in my novel about the California Gold Rush is long-distance communications in the West between 1848 and 1850. I have characters living in Oregon, others in California, and they have relatives in Missouri and Massachusetts. The only way people could communicate over […]
The novel I’m currently writing alludes to race relations between whites and Native Americans, Hispanics, and African Americans during the California Gold Rush years. However, I do not touch on the Chinese influx into California. Why not? Because my novel takes place in 1848-1850, before the large wave of Asian […]
One of the topics I’ve had to research for my work-in-progress is the mining laws of California at the time of the Gold Rush. Essentially, there were no laws. In January 1848, when gold was discovered, California was under the control of the U.S. Army, which had taken California from […]
In my research into the California Gold Rush, I’ve read about prospectors who struck it rich and returned to their homes wealthy men, about others who made a fortune and then spent it, and about still other men who never made a dime. And I started wondering how much it […]
The Great Migration of 1843 was the first significant group of emigrants to head west. That year between 700 and 1,000 emigrants left for Oregon, mostly families seeking free land. In 1843, it was still uncertain whether the United States or Great Britain would govern the Oregon Territory, but it […]
The vast majority of miners during the California Gold Rush were men. The census of 1850 showed that only 8 percent of the population in California was female. In fact, women were so scarce in the mining regions that a young man in Nevada City wrote, Got nearer to a […]
As I wrote last month, the early California gold miners began with placer mining, simply picking the nuggets off the ground or from streams, with hands and pans and knives. Soon, however, they wanted to sift through more dirt faster to increase the profitability of their prospecting. One of the earliest […]
Most of us who have studied American history are aware of the Forty-Niners—those intrepid souls who in 1849 left their homes to seek their fortunes in the California Gold Rush. But the Gold Rush actually began in early 1848, when gold was found at Sutter’s Mill. Over the last two […]
