BONUS: What Would You Do in a Gold Rush?

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to this bonus episode of America A History Recorded straight after our recently published episode, what was the California Gold Rush. I'm joined now by the guest from that episode, Stephen Tufnell, to discuss this a little bit more. Stephen, thank you so much for hanging on.

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:00:16

Not at all. Yeah, happy to chat even more.

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:19

Yeah, yeah, we just. I mean, we've literally just recorded the main episode and it was. Yeah, it was a great conversation.

And as someone who didn't really know much about gold rushes, I really didn't know where the conversation going to go. So that it was. Yeah, it was great. So we.

I asked you about the process of mining gold, but one thing that I've never been quite sure of is how is gold assigned value? And I guess this could apply to like, diamonds or anything else, but, like, who looked at gold and thought this is worth something?

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:00:50

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a great question. It's been. I mean, it's true that across millennia, gold has become the, like, the universal signifier of Valium.

I don't have a good answer to that beyond that.

I think it's rare and it's shiny and unless you're extracting it industrially, you come across it in only small kind of quantities and, you know, is it. The ancient Egyptians call it the breath of the gods. Right. Because it's so rare and. Yeah. So that I think a lot of the value is, it's cultural.

There's big debate in the 19th century about whether or not international currencies should be pegged to silver or to gold. And in the end, it's the bank of England that decides that gold and the gold standard will be the universal kind of value, as it were.

I mean, handily Britain owns settler dominions and colonies, especially southern Africa, it's incredibly rich in gold. And so it can kind of control, you know, it's part of how the empire of free trade works.

They can control the value of the pound through the gold standard. All of the currencies are understood in reference to it.

off the gold Standard in the: 1960

Still, investors, they resort to gold in periods of turbulence because it has an absolute and fixed kind of asset value and it's in short supply. So I think it, you know, what became, what started as a kind of cultural thing has become baked into our ideas of economic Worth.

And it's so associated with luxury as well. I guess that's part of the cultural appeal. I mean, Trump's Oval Office is covered in it, right?

Because he's trying to send a certain message about his wealth and what it means to be the most powerful man in the world.

Liam Heffernan: 00:02:44

It's interesting, the power of, like, subjectivity and, like, cultural subjectivity in assigning value to something. Maybe one for another time, but a hypothetical foyer.

anyway. If you were around in: 1848

And secondly, if you did find a whole ton of gold, what would you do with that?

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:03:13

Well, I like to think I'd be smart enough to recognize that most of the money in a gold rush is made by supplying the miners, not going mining gold.

So someone like Claude Levi Strauss, who owns a kind of dry goods store and invents the jeans, you know, he's the real kind of genius in the gold rush and people like him in reality, I think I probably would have jumped on a wagon train and gone for it. I think it's really interesting, though, I don't think of myself as a risk taker necessarily.

And I think those miners lived in a different perception of risk, though, and different culture around risk.

United States that begins in: 1837

So, yeah, I think, like most other young men, I probably would have done that, despite my. What would I have done with the gold? If I was lucky enough to find the gold, hopefully I would sell it and then invest in something more stable.

I wonder if I'd have gambled it and drunk it away like a lot of them did.

Liam Heffernan: 00:04:37

really around back in the mid-: 1800

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:04:42

Yeah, yeah, that's true. I think it's interesting. Those who get home with bounders and do take it home versus those who are addicted to the culture of Russian. Right.

There's a lot of mariners in California, and there's some great images of San Francisco Bay just full of rotten ships because the China traders have put in There and all the sailors have jumped off and gone to find gold. And there's a kind of culture of gambling and what's sometimes called crew culture of gambling, hard masculine violence that kind of is part of it.

And I think that shapes a lot of the culture of the, of the gold fields that it might be hard to avoid.

Liam Heffernan: 00:05:21

Yeah. And actually I imagine because of the huge rush to mine gold and I imagine there was, it was, it was a big steep curve. Right.

You had this massive influx of people and then as soon as the gold was all mined, they went somewhere else or, you know, abandoned California.

So I, I imagine there was a lot of like pop up towns that are now just like sat dormant because you hear a lot of like these old like wild west style ghost towns. But they're a real thing in the U.S. aren't they?

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:05:49

They are, yeah. There's quite a few.

There's some famous ones that have been turned into kind of historic parks like Sutter Creek and Columbia in California where the old, the kind of old wooden kind of streets are still there. Downtown Sacramento still has its kind of gold rush era kind of town.

It's obviously not ghost town, but yeah, it's kind of part of the National Park Service. Yeah, famously, I mean, famously.

As well known in the pandemic as this guy, Brent Underwood, who he bought one of those old mining towns called Cerro Gordo and is now turning it into a kind of private enterprise where he's, you know, going down these deep shaft mines, pulling out memorabilia, things like that.

Liam Heffernan: 00:06:31

I heard of that guy.

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:06:31

Yeah, there are famous examples there that are part of it, but there are loads of others that are in various states, I guess, of disrepair. And what's interesting is that some of them are named after like other parts on the kind of Gold rush circuit.

So there's like a Melbourne, California, Johannesburg, California, as these miners have come back from other places, but they're now these abandoned and empty. Empty places.

Liam Heffernan: 00:06:54

Yeah. Have you ever, have you ever visited an abandoned gold miner or anything like that?

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:06:59

I haven't yet. I have a terrible time as a historian of the US because I can't drive.

Entirely dependent on public transport which sort of precludes getting to those places. So no, I haven't. I'd be interested to go and see what it, what it's like.

What I find extraordinary about it is that the sort of like nostalgia about the Gold rush has its own kind of like, kind of web imprint now. I mean if you, if you're like me and end up down these kind of YouTube rabbit holes.

People go out and they mine for jeans, like old Levi's in these gold mines. There's a kind of culture of like loan prospecting online, kind of influencer culture around. Around it. And it's all based.

They're still talking in the language of these kind of gold rushes.

I think popularly we still really live in a kind of gold rush society in some ways, or certainly the United States is a kind of gold rush society, but in quite unexpected, unexpected ways in some respects. Even that culture of shows on like Discovery, Klondike Gold and Outback Gold and things like that, they're kind of drawing on those ideas, right?

Yeah, kind of pitch to the public. They seem extraordinarily responsible now and incredibly destructive. So dudes and diggers tearing up riverbanks and things.

But yeah, it's interesting how that kind of legacy lives on.

Liam Heffernan: 00:08:20

Yeah, culturally it is interesting and I think you're right in that. I think that's kind of that frontier mentality in the US still is very much alive. It just sort of manifests in other ways now.

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:08:31

Yeah, I think that truly is right. Yeah, I think the idea of the frontier, I think is probably like a late 19th century creation anyway.

like our image of what, like: 1840

But yeah, I think that still is being recreated and created this kind of ongoing process of reimagining like the frontier in the west, often as a place for like masculine self discovery or kind of radical freedom that you don't get in the city. It's kind of ongoing. I think tension between urban and rural life in the United States goes right back to the founding.

And yeah, it still still plays out today. So this kind of radical libertarianism of like, you know, the west and it being a public space that the federal government can't kind of get you in.

That sounds a bit kind of like doomsday preparation. But I think more widely it has this kind of imprint as well that.

Yeah, successive generations reinvent it around, often around the anxieties of that of that time.

Liam Heffernan: 00:09:32

Yeah. Well, before we get down that rabbit hole, I'll wrap this up. But Stephen, thank you so much for joining me for this and for the full episode as well.

Really appreciate it.

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:09:41

Yeah, really enjoyed it.

Liam Heffernan: 00:09:42

Yes, it's been great.

And for anyone listening to this, if you are interested in learning more, the references to everything that we've talked about will be in the show notes. So go check that out. And if you like what you hear in this episode and you haven't yet listened to the episode, it's just a couple down on the feed.

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It's always appreciated, and goodbye.