On January 24, 1848, a Sutter’s Mill worker saw lots and lots
of gold in a ditch. The word spread fast and that was the beginning of the
California Gold Rush. In 1849, over 80,000 people (mostly young, unmarried men)
traveled to California in search for gold. Not many people got rich because
most of them had absolutely no mining experience. The people who did have
mining experience found large amounts of gold. Only about 5% of these people
were women and children. These people were known as forty-niners. Almost
everybody stayed at camps and if you were a woman you were treated with great
respect since there was so few. From 1840-1853 over 25,000 Chinese people
traveled to California and the Americans were not happy about it. The Americans
didn’t let the Chinese become citizens and charged them with a very high
monthly tax. The Chinese weren’t the only ones facing high prices though. The
forty-niners had to pay outrageous prices due to severe inflation. The state of
California grew at an extremely high rate because of the Gold Rush. It went
from 1,000 citizens in 1848 to about 300,000 citizens in 1890.