The Gold Rush established California as a place for “life
in the fast lane,” said Michael Kowalewski, editor of
Gold Rush: A Literary Exploration. Kowalewski spoke at the
college March 26 about his exciting research on the California
Gold Rush years.
It has been 150 years since that most significant event in
California and the nation’s history. In 1848 a cry rang
out that uprooted homes the world over and sent ships to the
sea, wagons to the Northwest and hopes and dreams skyward. The
cry was GOLD and the California Gold Rush was on.
The Gold Rush had a profound impact on the settling of California.
Hundreds of thousands came to find gold, and many of them stayed.
“San Francisco became the great emporium of the Pacific,”
said Kowalewski.
The Gold Rush also had a tremendous impact on the culture,
he said. It spawned such words as pay dirt,
prospector, lucky strike and bonanza
that became popular during that time. Hollywood capitalized on
it by making a movie, Paint Your Wagon, starring Lee
Marvin and Clint Eastwood. Mark Twain and Bret Harte wrote about
the Gold Rush after it was over and turned it into a mythic history.
But Kowalewski and a team of researchers from the UC Berkeley
used reports, letters, journals and diaries, instead of the usual
fiction and poetry for the anthology. During his research he
found in the journal of Henry David Thoreau, that leaving families
to run off to the Gold Rush was thought to be disgraceful and
going to California was “3,000 miles closer to Hell.”
Immigrants came from everywhere, but the majority were from
New England and were young white Protestants. No one was over
35 and there were virtually no women.
The 49ers’ dreams were not always realized. Prospectors
were known to eat rats and their boots for lack of food. One
story told of miners tying a piece of pork to a string and eating
it then pulling it out of their mouth and letting another starving
miner eat it.
The adventurers had to have money to get there, and some stayed
because they failed and the stigma of failure was too great to
allow them to return home. But after the Gold Rush, 90,000 others
left California by ships to return to their homes.
The trip to California from the East Coast over water could
take up to six months, going across Panama and catching another
ship to San Francisco. Within six months of landing one out of
five died -- primarily of disease.
Kowalewski, associate professor of English and American Studies
at Carleton College in Minnesota, is a native Californian who
grew up in Redding. He has always been fascinated by the American
West, and took one thousand pages of research and condensed into
just 450 pages, so there could very well be a sequel some time
in the future.