California Gold Rush

The California gold rush of 1849 through 1851 was the largest and most significant of American mineral rushes. Thousands of young men made their way to California after the discovery of gold in 1848 in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Most hoped to strike it rich and return home wealthy within a few months, a hope that usually failed to materialize. But the gold rush experience of these men, and especially their immersion in the virtually all-male world of the mining camp, illuminates the tenuous quality of constructions of manliness in this period.

The news of the discovery of gold in California spread east slowly, but by late 1848 interest in the strike, spurred by newspaper publicity, had grown into a mania, and men all over the country prepared to go west. It was a difficult and dangerous journey, whether on the Overland Trail or by sea through Panama or around Cape Horn, but thousands attempted it, including men from Mexico, Europe, Australia, China, and Chile. It is almost impossible to know how many people passed through California between 1848 and 1852, when the rush began to wane, but there were certainly hundreds of thousands.

The great majority of the new arrivals in California were young men. In the 1850 census women made up only 8 percent of California's non-Indian population of 92,597, while 72 percent (66,230) were males between the ages of twenty and forty. Three-quarters of the total population were native-born white Americans, while 962 were black. In the mining regions women were even more rare: Calaveras County in 1850 had 16,537 men and 265 women. The California gold rush was thus very different from the situation in Oregon and other western states that were settled by families and had a large female population from the beginning. California in the 1850s was masculine space, and the few women who did come shared with Eliza W. Farnham, the wife of a Santa Cruz farmer, “a universal feeling of being sadly out of place” (Farnham, 155).

The main appeal of California was not just the gold, but the gold-rush experience: adventure, sightseeing, and the latitude of the masculine California world. As young men left their homes and set out across the prairie or sailed from New York harbor into the Atlantic, they left behind the familiar world (and responsibilities) of family and relations, of farm, shop, and factory. After they arrived in San Francisco, they headed up into the mountains and found mining settlements with names like Hangtown, Whiskey Creek, and Rough and Ready, where they came into contact with men from all over the globe.

Strict new standards of propriety had been adopted by most American men earlier in the nineteenth century as a result of the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening and the temperance movement. Women, whose moral virtue was deemed superior to that of men, were central to both crusades, and their scarcity in California seemed, in the minds of many men, to release them from the strictures of Protestant respectability. As troubled eastern moralists had foreseen, all too many men living on their own without women or churches proved incapable of refined behavior, and a construction of manliness that predated the period of moral reforms reappeared in gold-rush California. Heavy consumption of alcohol had once been common throughout the United States, but the temperance movement caused it to decline sharply in the 1840s. In California, however, men resumed the drinking habits of earlier generations, and with drinking came brawling and gambling. Men also went unshaven and dressed to suit only themselves. Religion withered. For many miners, the heaviest drinker, fiercest fighter, and best gambler was the most respected man. “All the restrictive influence of fair women is lost,” explained twenty-four-year-old miner Edward Ely, “and the ungoverned tempers of men run wild” (Ely, 57).

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