The History of The Gold Rush
On an icy cold morning early in 1848, James Wilson Marshall, a carpenter from New Jersey, picked up a few nuggets of gold from the American River at the site of a sawmill he was building for John Sutter near Coloma. By August, the hills above the river were strewn with wood huts and tents as the first of 4,000 miners lured by the gold discovery scrambled to strike it rich. Prospectors, from the East sailed around Cape Horn. Some hiked across the Isthmus of Panama, and by 1849, about 40,000 came to San Franciso by sea alone. Nearly $2,000,000,000 in gold was taken from the earth before mining became dormant.