Class News
Dan Berman ’64 writes the real story of the Gold Rush in California
March 18, 2022
In early March, The Sacramento Bee launched a series about Sacramento history called “Bee Curious.” The first story was published on March 18 and is included below. The story was about panning for gold.
Dan Berman took exception to the story and wrote an open letter to Sacramento Bee readers:
Dear Sacramento Bee readers:
Hanh Truong's “Eureka/Gold Fever” lead “Bee Curious” story on March 18 was amusing enough. But she forgot to mention that the pre-Gold Rush Native American population of nearly 150,000 crashed to just under 16,300 in 1880, according to the U.S. Census.
In 1849, Peter H. Burnett, California's first elected American governor, told the Legislature that “A war of extermination will continue between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct.”
Erin Blake notes that Shasta City and Marysville offered bounties of $5/head ($160 apiece in today's money) for Indian heads, and that some murderers would show up to collect their bounty with up to twelve heads in their horses’ pommel bags.
So when we celebrate the Gold Rush, let’s not forget who paid the highest price. For more, read An American Genocide by Benjamin Madley and/or other sources. Is it an accident that these extermination stories are rarely taught in our California schools or in others around the country?
Dan Berman, Davis, CA
Gold Fever
by Hanh Truong
[Editor’s note: This story is the first in our “Bee Curious” series, where we will answer reader inquiries about the Sacramento region.]
Casually scraping dirt from the crevices of bedrock, Laura Fierro sat by the American River near Colfax, where she could enjoy the peace, listen to the river, and search for gold. It was one of her secret spots. While digging, she found nails buried underneath the dirt, which were likely washed up in the river from old cabins in the mountains. She couldn’t believe it. “If you’re finding those in a crevice, like those little old nails, you’re looking good because that means that nail’s been sitting there for who knows how long. And it’s heavy,” said the Sacramento teacher from Orangevale, looking back a few years later. “But what’s underneath is even heavier.”
First glimpse of glimmering gold
Gold was first found in what is now the Sacramento region in the 19th century, sparking the historical Gold Rush; but more than a hundred years later, gold fever is still running rampant. Many locals from the Sacramento area, like Fierro, take part in recreational gold mining. With pans, buckets and shovels in their hands, these modern-day fortune seekers are hoping to unearth some shiny, natural treasures.
At the riverbank, in a tan hat and bright green shirt, Fierro kept digging and sifting through the dirt that she scraped from the crack of the bedrock. The 48-year-old librarian said her interests in geology, rock collecting, and California history led her to gold panning. Apart from being able to enjoy the outdoors when she’s at the river, she said, searching for gold lets her connect to the past.
Laura Fierro, of Orangevale, is secretary of the River City Prospectors, a recreational club for gold panning and prospecting. She uses her phone to inspect her pan for gold while panning in a creek Saturday at an undisclosed Placer County location where her club has a claim staked. “It always reminds me of all the people that were struggling during that time to gold pan just for their own dinner and for food and their supplies,” Fierro said. “So I always kind of have that in the back of my mind because I don’t think I’ve even made enough to buy myself a meal yet.”
Occasionally dipping her pan into the clear river water, Fierro shook out big rocks and filtered the dirt. And as she sifted the wet sediment, a bright yellow clump peeked from the black sand. “It certainly wasn’t a nugget,” she said, which usually refers to a lump of gold. Instead, it was a picker, a small piece of gold that you can pick up with your fingers. Marking it as one of the best panning days so far, Fierro posed for a picture with her speckles of gold on the north fork of the American River — some thirty miles from where the river lines Coloma, where James Marshall caught his first glimpse of glimmering gold flakes more than 170 years ago.
Gold frenzy and the rise of Sacramento
In 1848, James Marshall, a carpenter who was building a sawmill for John Sutter at the time, found gold flakes in the south fork of the American River in Coloma. And it wasn’t long until gold fever spread across the globe. “People suddenly arrived in California,” said Gage McKinney, author and mining historian from Grass Valley.
Before the Gold Rush, the California territory had about 160,000 people, many of whom were Native Americans. But the number quickly grew. According to the Library of Congress, 20,000 Chinese people were among the thousands that immigrated to California at the peak of the Gold Rush in 1852 and were met with anti-immigration sentiments in the mining camps. By 1855, more than 300,000 settlers from the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America had arrived to mine for gold.
McKinney said that enslaved people from the southern parts of the country were also brought to California to work at mines in Grass Valley. As people settled into California to find the valuable antidote to their gold frenzy, cities began cropping up. Sutter’s Embarcadero, later known as the city of Sacramento, was a trading center of supplies for miners. McKinney said Sacramento became “supply city,” as mining goods from the area were sent up to the mines in Grass Valley and Nevada City.
“Everything was in a rush”
The industrialization of gold mining took a few years, McKinney said, but it happened with amazing speed. “Everything was in a rush,” he said. “And California has been in a hurry ever since.” Initially, most of those prospecting for gold in 1849, also known as forty-niners, were from Europe. “It was either individuals or small teams of men working by hand,” said McKinney. He said they would pan the gravel by the streams and sift it until only fragments of gold remained.
By the 1850s, mining became more mechanized, as people with a lot of capital brought in heavy equipment to extract gold from the mines. Hydraulic mining was one of the popular mining techniques. It entailed blasting high-pressure water onto a cliff to wash away boulders, dirt, and gravel to reveal ounces of gold, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. These new industrial forms of mining quickly shifted the landscape of California. Docent Keith Gibbs explains how a stamp mill extracted gold from ore at Gold Bug Park and Mine in Placerville earlier this month. This stamp mill was in use from 1900 to 1936.
Physically, environmental impacts from gold mining can still be seen across the state, said Genevieve Sparks, a geologist and lecturer at California State University, Sacramento. The long-lasting effects of mining include changes in water quality, disruption to salmon redds, and mercury and heavy-metal contamination in water, Sparks said. She said that mining also disturbed Native American sacred sites, including burial grounds.
Can you still find gold in California?
Gold is still being deposited into streams, McKinney said, because the natural process that puts gold into rivers is ongoing. “So, there’s still gold to be found,” he said. According to a flyer from the California Geological Survey, most gold-deposit sites have been thoroughly inspected, at least twice — first during the Gold Rush and later during the Great Depression. “Nevertheless, a chance for success may still remain if you choose favorable areas after a careful study of their geology and mining records,” the agency said on the flyer.
While most of the gold may have been found far in the past, there are still some hopeful adventurers in the Sacramento area with pans in their hands, hoping to unearth bright yellow nuggets in the dirt.