Henry David Thoreau, for instance, was appalled by the spectacle of thousands of miners scrambling for gold. Glowing reports of riches in the Golden State were matched by dispirited letters home from impoverished or homesick miners or by disparaging criticism from outside observers.
#California gold rush started manual#
Initial exuberance about golden prospects in California was often quickly tempered by the sobering realities of cholera, sickness, bad weather, exorbitant prices, fleas, and the demands of hard, repetitive manual labor. The gold rush was assessed in divergent, even contradictory ways from the start, both by the miners themselves and by outside observers. It provided a vivid, on-the-ground response to life in frontier California, one that embodied imaginative extremes and often fluctuated between exultation and sour disillusionment. Gold rush writing included fiction, plays, diaries, essays, letters, song lyrics, and satiric squibs written by authors of various nationalities. The bibliographer Gary Kurutz has cataloged over seven hundred individual documents published in the five years from 1848 to 1853. The gold rush inspired more written documents than any other nineteenth-century historical event except the Civil War. It was the carnivalesque atmosphere of swagger, heightened expectation, and boomtown hokum that characterized the tens of thousands of young, self-styled "Argonauts" who poured into a remote Pacific maritime province recently wrested from Mexico in the Mexican-American War. What made the California gold rush a significant social-and literary-event was not simply the $400 million in gold extracted by miners between 18. The effect of the discovery was electric, triggering a stampede of miners from around the world headed to California to find instant wealth. Gold was discovered in California by the carpenter James Marshall on a fork of the American River in January 1848.
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