The Gold Rush
|
James Marshall in 1884.
|
In January of 1848, a man named James Marshall discovered small gold nuggets in the American River, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The news of Marshall’s discovery spread quickly throughout California and the world. By December of that same year, the President of the United States confirmed the discovery of gold and encouraged people to travel West.
California’s population exploded as people from all over the world arrived. In 1849, 32,000 people walked to California from parts of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Forty thousand more people arrived in San Francisco Bay by ship. During the first five years of the Gold Rush, the European population in California grew from 13,000 to 300,000. San Francisco became a bustling city, and nearly a half-billion dollars worth of gold passed through during the 1850s. During this time, the Native American population plummeted.
A miner cuts away a hillside with jets of water from
a high-pressure hose. (Western History/Genealogy
Department, Denver Public Library) |
 |
While California’s economy boomed and cities like San Francisco and Sacramento blossomed, the environment took a turn for the worse. In the early 1850s, frustrated with the slow pace of panning for gold or digging it out of deep tunnels in the earth, a few miners developed a new method called hydraulic mining, which used a high-pressure stream of water to wash away hillsides. The miners could now retrieve gold in record time. By the 1860s, hydraulic mining technology had become more advanced and widely used. At many Sierra Nevada mining sites, hydraulic hoses ran 24 hours a day, using more than one million gallons of water every hour. Miners began using mercury, a deadly toxin, to remove gold from the rocks. The remaining sediment and mercury flowed downstream.
The enormous quantities of sediment washing down from the Sierra Nevada had a dramatic impact on the watershed. Within a few years, the rivers had become filled with mud, sweeping over farms and towns in the Central Valley, threatening salmon and steelhead runs. In less than 25 years, 12 billion tons of earth were blasted out of the hills and washed into California’s rivers that flow to the Bay. Along with the sediment came more than 15 million pounds of mercury, which created a toxic legacy that still plagues the San Francisco Bay today.
In 1884, after years of argument and debate between the miners of the Sierra Nevada and the farmers of the Central Valley, hydraulic mining was outlawed. This marked the end of the California Gold Rush, but the environmental damage had been done.
|
