What Was the California Gold Rush?

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:01

On this day in: 1848

They reported on a man called James Marshall, who, while building a sawmill in California, just outside what we now know as Sacramento, he found gold flakes in the river.

What followed was a stampede of opportunistic Americans moving west to chase their American dreams in what became the largest gold rush in the country's history. So this week I want to know why it was so significant and how it changed the United States. As I ask, what was the California Gold rush?

Welcome to America a history podcast.

I'm Liam Heffernan, and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places, and the events that make the USA what it is today.

To discuss this, I am joined by a historian of the global and imperial history of the 19th century United States from the University of Oxford, whose research interests include American emigration and the history of commodities such as gold and ice. He's also the co editor of Global History of Gold Rushes, which we've linked to in the show notes as well.

It's a real pleasure to welcome Dr. Stephen Tufnell.

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:01:31

Thanks, Steven. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Liam Heffernan: 00:01:34

Oh, no, really great to have you on the podcast. And it's one of those things.

We've looked a little bit at California before and various issues around that sort of moving west and the frontier and American expansionism and. And I feel like the Gold rush is a perfect kind of case study to maybe kind of explore some of that mentality a bit more.

So I'm really excited about this and I guess really just to kick us off and more for my benefit. How do we define a gold rush?

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:02:03

Yeah, this is such a fascinating question and we could talk for hours about this alone. So there's no singular definition, I don't think at present. It's not defined by, say, the amount of gold that you extract.

They're incredibly profitable kind of gold mines that are extracting more gold than, say, some of these rushes have done in the past, but that do not involve rushing.

I think the things that historians look at that define a rush over a kind of prospecting or kind of gold mining more widely, is to do the scale, I think, and the speed.

So one of the things that we were most interested in for California, which really triggers a sort of half century of gold rushes, is the mass transfer of migrants, people, to the gold fields, and with that, the goods, the capital that comes with it.

And I think a sense that from following California, the sense that among those, the protagonists, that they are involved in a kind of gold rush phenomena.

And so they move quickly from Goldfield to Goldfield and so suddenly there are Americans in Ballarat, in Australia, then they're coming back over to Frasers river in Canada, then they're going down to Otago and on and on. It becomes quite self referential. So there's a culture of Russian, a perception of it.

And I think that those behavioral patterns are important too because there's the perception among metropolitan elites, among the popular press that these people are involved in a phenomenon known as a rush, which I think how they understand that for those that are not participating and they reach for metaphors to do with some of the most unsettling things that can happen in the 19th century. So that's. They reach for metaphors of disease.

So these are people who have gold fever and they're acting irrationally and perhaps even it's bringing out some of the baser elements of like of humanity that they've lost all restraint. You know. And middle class men are supposed to sort of display these, these characteristics of restraint and control.

I suppose as part of that too unsettling that it's irrational in the sense that it's a gamble.

These are people who really kind of going against the kind of quite Victorian work ethic of the Eastern United States and taking this huge risk away from paid wage labor to, you know, the hopes that they'll kind of strike it lucky. So I think it's both those things.

It's the mass transfer that we can see as historians and was felt at the time and then the perception that these people are bitten by a kind of gold rush mania.

Liam Heffernan: 00:04:34

Yeah, it kind of strikes me that those people that followed gold rushes back then, it's kind of like the same people that jumped on the sort of crypto bandwagon recently. You know like you got. They kind of treated a little bit like crazy people. But actually, you know, there's a lot of money to be made for some people.

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:04:54

I think that's right. Yeah, it's a sense that, yeah, it's a, it's a high risk economic behavior that yeah could end in, you know, entire collapse. But yeah, stands out.

They're very highly curated sort of sense of what is legitimate economic activity at that moment and that, yeah, this kind of murky world of the crypto world that to be frank, I mean I don't fully understand myself and I think most people think of as associated with some sort of part of the Internet that they're not Familiar with.

You know, it's the kind of behavior that gold rushes are kind of associated with, too, that these are on the edge, the fringe of what is legitimate economic behavior.

Liam Heffernan: 00:05:32

articularly, you know, in the: 1800

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:05:56

I think. Yeah, I think that's probably one of the crucial components is the emergence in the United States of a.

A very diverse, thriving, large, popular press among a very literate, comparatively speaking, kind of population. Yeah, that fuels. That fuels that sense. And the press that's increasingly interested in sensation as well.

There's sort of simple practices of the press in the 19th century, also that part of it. You have the large metropolitan papers like the Herald, the New York Times, maybe the Washington Post, and then your kind of smaller local papers.

They often copy and paste in, as it were, articles from those. Those national magazines wholesale and just reprinting them time after time after time.

And I don't know, there might be undergraduates listening if you've ever used one of those. Those newspaper databases from that period, you see the same articles appearing over and over and over again.

But I think that is fueling, you know, the mania, really. The press has a kind of crucial role in disseminating that information which reaches New York quite quickly.

ident at the time in December: 1849

Liam Heffernan: 00:07:10

And so I guess, taking it back a few steps. I wonder if you could give us a bit of an outline of that timeline. What was the sort of chain of events that led to the gold rush?

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:07:21

l's born in New Jersey around: 1810

nd decides, well, so now into: 1834

And the United States by now has acquired all that territory in Louisiana, and so is expanding westward, gradually taking him more and more territory. So he reaches the age of 24 and decides, I'm gonna go and try and make my fortune in the West.

So he's the eldest son of a paper mill owner in New Jersey and he sort of meanders west and ends up in Missouri where he tries his hand at farming in a region just taken from indigenous peoples through treaty known as the Plaque Purchase. So he's kind of is already embroiled in that kind of world of American imperial expansion. What happens is he gets yellow fever.

And then on doctor's orders he joins. This sounds extraordinary. A doctor tells this.

He joins an emigrant train that's heading to Oregon where quite a lot, quite large numbers of Americans are now migrating over the Oregon trail into the kind of extreme northwest of, of the continent. And from Oregon he goes, he travels down to California. He ends up at a place called Sutter's Fort.

this point. So this is about: 1845

he's tasked in sort of spring: 1848

Then what he's going to do is open up that dam and sluice it out and use the force of the water to kind of create a deeper, deeper channel. As he's doing that, he kind of looks down at his boots and that's when he spots this, this flake of gold.

We think probably about the size of a contact lens, you know, about a gram's worth of gold. Yeah, I mean you have to have good eyes, I think. I mean and it must really stand out, I guess in the California sun, like glinton there. Yeah.

And then, you know, he's quite cautious to begin with. He and do a few tests to test whether or not it is actually gold. Try and dissolve it. And lye doesn't, it doesn't fuse with any other metals.

It looks like gold. It's malleable. And so they think it's probably gold.

So that's, that's the trigger moment really almost immediately, you know, the sawmill then becomes a failure. Everyone employed to work on it downs tools and starts hunting for gold in the river.

They take those samples to the governor of California, which by this point has now been annexed by the United States. After the Mexican American war. The governor and then John T. Sherman, who later becomes the kind of famous commander in the American Civil War.

hington. And then by December: 1849

So I think you're talking about a gold rush. We're talking about two rushes.

a kind of tight local rush in: 1848

Marshall himself, I think, you know, unfortunately finds, despite being the discovery, he's already on the outside of that process, that the region is overwhelmed with incomers and he makes very little money himself out of the gold rush. And you know, as we know, over time it dies a pauper. So, yeah, it's a sort of extraordinary tale of discovery and impoverishment for Marshall.

Liam Heffernan: 00:11:26

Yeah, I mean, Marshall himself seems like such a tragic figure and, and I find him so interesting because he really epitomizes this, this binary opposition that we don't really look at when we think of like the American dream.

Because for everyone that does go to California and find gold, someone else is going to miss out, you know, the American dream, as much as it's sort of sold as this sort of something for everyone, it's. It's really not. And James Marshall kind of represents that, doesn't he?

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:11:56

It does really, I think the kind of cultural perception of the kind of 49er, the kind of bearded lone miner who through hard work and a little bit of luck will get the kind of homeward bounder and make their fortune. And upon which rest a lot of these ideas about the power of individual labor in the American dream, that's largely a creation after the rush.

And for most rushers, they find that the gold, they are finding gold in small quantities. They find really it's like a new form of wage labor.

Very few are getting the kind of fortunes that they're hoping for, certainly in this kind of what we call the placer phase. So this is the flakes that you can find easily in riverbeds.

ind of imperial moment of the: 1840

's in California in the early: 1840

Liam Heffernan: 00:13:05

Yeah.

f this, as you say it was the: 1840

Like it was a lot of individuals that travel west that then find their fortune. But you also mentioned that it reached the California governor.

So I'm just wondering what was the kind of infrastructure sort of federally at the time and how much intervention was there at government level in the mining of gold?

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:13:42

Yeah, it's a really good question.

Technically speaking, all of this kind of Gold Rush activity is illegal in the sense that the US Government retains the right to own the minerals under the ground. And so the rushers, the miners are squatting on. It's not federal land, but they're squatting on state land.

The distinction would be that that's really common. So when migrants move west and they take up territory in the public lands, they're known as squatters.

But if they improve it as a farm, they'll get that land. What's happening here though is they're just extracting that. They're extracting the wealth from it, but the government can't really control it.

And this is the interesting thing about California is the, like the remoteness of the place even to get there. We can talk about it briefly. Takes a lot of money and it takes a long time.

quicker from San Francisco in: 1848

And similarly, you know, you could travel from California to Tasmania quicker than you could get to Washington D.C. overland or by sea. So California is this sort of Pacific facing kind of place and very much disconnected from the long arm of the federal government.

Certainly on the eve of the Gold Rush, what the federal government has just done, though, sort of 100 hours before Marshall finds the gold, is sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which is the treaty that formalizes the cession of California from the Mexican Republic to the United States, really for the bargain price, $15 million, which in hindsight is cheap as chips, but nobody knows about, like the kind of mother load in the Sierra Nevada. So it's facilitated the expansion of the United States into that area.

There's a sort of early Creation of civil government, though what they do is they kind of appropriate the Mexican system of government that's there.

So John Sutter himself is a Swiss migrant actually in California, but he's the local alcalde, so the kind of local sheriff, landowner, and they kind of appropriate that. And that's the kind of bare bones for an early California government.

I think this is another feature of gold rushes, certainly in frontier regions in the Anglo world, is that they prompt then the government to kind of swing in thereafter.

in: 1848

So for all that territory is very sparsely populated. And I think that's one of the attractions of this drama is how do you get there?

And given all that, how do you make a thriving kind of society out of it?

Liam Heffernan: 00:16:43

Yeah, and presumably as well, it wasn't just people mining for gold that had an opportunity there, it was the railroad companies too. Right?

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:16:51

Yeah. Well, certainly later at this point, it sort of triggers the dream of a transcontinental railroad.

And so as you move into the: 1850

All those disputes about Kansas and Nebraska are based around Stephen Douglas's plan for this transcontinental railroad to reach California.

What you do see though is this is the era of the kind of wagon train or the mule train, Wells Fargo and plans to erect kind of telegraph communication. You know, you need to then erect a kind of fort system to protect migrants as they travel across the west.

So one of its consequences is the rapid integration, I guess, of California into maybe not like the east coast, but certainly into places like St. Louis, Missouri, kind of gateway to the west. These kind of frontier gateway cities that kind of integrated into that, into the kind of California economy.

Railroads in part though too, because what, you know, to cut the travel time to California, the federal government subsidizes the creation of the Forbes Aspinwall company to construct a railway line across Nicaragua so that Russias can skip the kind of perilous Cape Horn Passage, which comes into operation quite quickly. So yeah, it does prompt this whole. What we're doing at the time would be called internal improvements.

It prompts this massive transformation of transportation and communication between those places.

Liam Heffernan: 00:18:19

Yeah, I've actually been on a train from California to New York and I'm actually not sure if it was much quicker than just jumping on A horse and wagon, to be honest, but lovely and scenic, but very slow to contextualize all of this. How much gold are we talking about here and what would it be worth in today's money?

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:18:39

For reference, like a heck of a lot of gold, sort of. We have to be kind of quite a little bit cautious. Some of this is about these sort of estimates.

ia by about one estimate from: 1900

In: 1900

cise figures from the kind of: 1840

In: 1852

So I think, you know, to go back to your original question, is it, you know, does it depend on the amount of gold? In part, yes.

I mean, it sustains the rush for a long amount of time, but yeah, so it's like a colossal amount of gold to the extent they're buying 56. So they create a kind of new mint in San Francisco to process the gold.

They're putting so much gold through the mint that it's blowing out of the chimney stack. And so San Franciscans are sweeping the soot off the roof, trying to reprocess the gold that's coming out of it. It's extraordinary amounts.

I think that does make the scale, like California different in scale from previous kind of gold mining ventures in the United States. And it triggers, though, a period of kind of near constant gold discovery in the west thereafter.

So the total amount of gold, I mean, if we put it in a global context, 19th century, there's more. More gold is mined from the earth in the 19th century than in the previous two millennia of human. Human life.

So, yeah, this is like an entirely new scale of gold extraction. Yeah, Powered by all kinds of innovations and new approaches to gold extraction, too.

So about: 1852

And thereafter it becomes this capital intensive hydraulic mining where you can extract ever more quantities of quite fine quality gold.

There's a lot about California that's coincidental as well, I think though not just that the United States just happens to have annexed it, but it's also the new Armadan Quicksilver mine is just integral to the processing of gold in that kind of hydraulic system.

So they use the mercury that kind of comes from that mine and to bind it, bind the gold out of the water onto it and then roast it off and extract the gold that way. So California is sort of extraordinarily kind of geologically blessed for like gold mining enterprise.

Liam Heffernan: 00:21:44

Yeah. So I'm going to ask a really simple question here because I know nothing about the process.

How do you take a bit of gold found in the ground and turn it into something monetary and usable and quantifiable for the economy?

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:22:01

Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. There's various ways of extracting it. A lot of the, what we call the plasigold.

So this is gold that is like through the processes of erosion, it's kind of worn off like mountains and then it finds its ways into sort of creeks and riverbeds, then sinks to the bottom. That's pretty pure and flake gold.

And the kind of flour gold that you get from that, you don't need to subject to much processing to turn it into kind of gold bar. You can just melt that down and reshape it.

In the case of lode mining or nuggets which are bound into pieces of rock, you have to actually put that through quite a lot of processing. That might include refining it with a stamp mill and then using kind of various processes then to separate out the gold.

Let's say you crush the ore body and then you end up with a load of quartz and gold mixed together.

And then you have to kind of either through kind of milling processes or later on chemical extraction process like cyanide ation, so you dissolve the quartz in cyanide. You can separate those two things out.

Or in the case of the hydraulic mining, what you're doing is just like using a big kind of garden hose to spray away the riverbed. Because you're getting the kind of very fine gold that is embedded in the rock that's bound, as I said to Quicksilver, mercury.

And then you roast off. You gather up your kind of from the bottom of your mill race, gather up the kind of accumulated gold and mercury.

ensive process that begins by: 1853

The gold rush itself is only about five years really, of that kind of panning kind of process. That's the crucial part of it as well. I mean, the physical labor that goes into this is really important.

We think of the lone prospector as being the kind of archetypal 49er.

Actually most of them are working in companies and they're pooling resources because, you know, you either have to dam a riverbed or divert the flow to run through kind of wooden races to trap the gold, or you're digging up the riverbed and then with your kind of sieve, you're extracting the kind of larger rocks and then you're panning out the gold. But it's incredibly arduous hard work. It's also that, you know, the best time to do this is in spring and summer. In the spring, this is.

The rivers are swollen with meltwater from the Sierra Nevada's snowpack. So it's incredibly cold as well. This is incredible amounts of human energy going to incredible mass. Timber to divert rivers. Yeah.

And so depending on how you're mining, it sort of depends on how much extra milling or refining kind of goes into that process.

Liam Heffernan: 00:24:55

Yeah.

And you touched on before as well about some of the kind of industrial factors that helped sort of the scale of this, this gold mining effort to increase massively.

when we're Talking about the: 1840

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:25:28

It does over time. The initial rush is the tools are really simple picks, pans and shovels.

Or for the Chinese miners who make up about a quarter of the gold miners in California, something called a long tom, which is another kind of sifting device. There's great images of that on Library of Congress's image database. It's hard to describe what it kind of looks like and how it operates. Yeah.

Then thereafter, I think the gold rush becomes a kind of incubator for technological development. A kind of not a start because there's a kind of startup economy in a sense, and how that works.

I mean, even still, the hydraulic mining that takes over in California, it's quite simple science. You just spray a lot of water at high pressure at ore bodies and wash away the ore.

ite rapidly, such that by the: 1870

And so they turn to what's known as kind of mass non selective mining, which is like, I don't know if you ever seen a picture of the Finston Super Pit in Perth, Australia, you just what it is, you just take all of the rock out the ground and then process it that way because it's cheaper than using selective mining techniques. But that requires both huge amounts of cash, but also the invention of these techniques like cyanidation so you can dissolve the rock, etc. Etc.

So yeah, there's a quite a rapid shift in the technologies of industrial capitalism really that are powered by, not just in fairness, not just by gold, but increasingly by copper and silver as well.

That's the sort of part of the story that's not often told is that the west, it's also this, this place of rushing for other metals and minerals as well that become more important really for the industrialization of the United States and especially copper. Think about the electrification of the world.

And those copper ranges in the northwestern United States are probably more important than the gold rushes, if we're being honest. But they don't know, they don't have the cultural imprint that gold does.

Liam Heffernan: 00:27:59

Yeah.

And you know, talking about kind of moving west, I think it's really hard to ignore some of the other factors that were happening in America at the time that must have contributed to this rush west.

I mean, for instance, the treatment of Native Americans, I mean, you know, American expansionism couldn't have happened without this sort of quite brutal treatment of Native communities. And the gold rush wouldn't really have been possible without that, would it?

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:28:30

I think that's undoubtedly true both in terms of how the removal of Eastern Indians into what becomes Oklahoma, what's then known as Indian territory, paves the way for expansion of agriculture west, then opens up lands for migrants to travel over and through, Though they still haven't solved the problem of like the Plains Indians in the west, that that will remain problematic. Yeah. And then California becomes just the kind of prime example of how the process of settler expansion leads to the elimination of Native societies.

The historian Ben Madley talks about how quite quickly in California, what he calls a kind of killing machine kind of emerges.

California Indian population is already declining before the gold rush happens through the settlement of Americans, but also of Mexicans into the region. But it suffers a dramatic collapse with the Gold rush, in part because the Yuki Indians and others tend to be societies that settle along rivers.

And their ecologies, food ways, life ways, are dependent upon subsistence from the land. There's some farming, but the gold rushes just tear up the earth and destroy the ecologies that they depend on.

of indigenous peoples. And by: 1850

By the end of that year, appropriates another 600,000. The federal government starts to send troops to protect militia and to protect gold miners. Yeah.

And the California Indian population just suffers an enormous collapse. Ben Madley would go so far as to say this is, you know, evidence of a native genocide.

You know, it's a systematized attempt to remove indigenous presence, not only through murder and extrajudicial violence, but through the removal of children from Indian populations and their enforced movement away from the gold mines. So yeah, California encapsulates the story of the west that way too. It also encapsulates this other story of the West.

The west quite quickly becomes like the nation's kind of melting pot. It's incredibly multi ethnic, kind of polyglot place. But there's a lot of violence against foreign miners in California too.

1850, they introduced foreign miners tax to push Chinese miners and the Sonorans and the Peruvians and others who have migrated in the early phase of the rush out of the wealthiest gold mining regions.

Americans makes probably the: 1850

Now, we mentioned before that the state's infrastructure is very limited and that includes the rule of law. And so mining communities erect their own institutions for vigilance committees and others for.

For meting out retributive violence against, you know, claims jumpers, against perceived thieves. Yeah. And against non white others.

So it can seem a very unregulated, deeply violent society which stands at odds with the romance, I think, of the idea of Settlement and migration. So I think that really does matter.

And the environmental impact also tells its own story about the expropriation of Western minerals and goods as well, which the United States still grapples with today. Right. I mean, it's. The Environmental Protection Agency has got a thing called Superfund, Superfund sites.

And most of those are abandoned gold mines which are full of kind of dangerous chemicals.

There's still advisories in California rivers not to eat the fish because of the methyl mercury that's accumulated there from the hydraulic mining processes.

So the long term consequences of these that the US still grapples with, not least in terms of its relationship to indigenous Americans and then the environmental consequences as well.

So they do embody, I guess, the kind of the violence and destruction in addition to the kind of creative economic life that sort of comes out of gold rushes.

Liam Heffernan: 00:33:00

Yeah.

And I would guess on the subject of sort of systematic ethnic persecution, for want of a better term, I think we should probably look to the Deep south and some of the other gold rushes in the U.S. so I mean, I learned of, you know, North Carolina, I think it was in Georgia, there were other gold rushes before California.

Do you think that the system of slavery and the economic benefits to that and, and the way that other industries such as cotton were able to proliferate on the back of all of that maybe meant that the, the effort to mine gold in those areas wasn't as concentrated as it was in California?

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:33:42

That's a really interesting. It's a really interesting question. I don't know that I have a good answer to that.

It's long been argued that Southern planters and slave owners turn away from industrial pursuits because it's harder to manage labor in those settings.

aordinarily profitable by the: 1830

And there are efforts to settle slaves in California before it becomes a free state in the hopes of using them to extract gold. And it never really comes to fruition.

I think what slavery enables is the emergence of coerced labor systems and ethnic and racially differentiated labor systems across the West.

So the fate of Chinese miners, I think is enabled off the back of this idea that white Americans possess a unique capability to manage the labor of non white others.

And so there's a kind of hierarchical approach to labour management and the sense of part of the expertise of the Anglo American is their ability to manage the work of others as sort of management of difference. So I think slavery is really important in creating those ideas. In terms of Georgia. Yeah, that's really interesting.

The question there is around who will have right to access the land that the gold is on. It's bound up in the process of Cherokee removal. That's happening then too.

It takes an interesting road though in Georgia where there's a moment where they're going to divvy up the, the gold claims by a lottery system and it's going to be this radical democratic experiment which in the end is kind of quashed because you know, that type of radical democracy is dangerous in a slave owning republic where planet power is based upon their monopoly of the political system. So I think that that matters. Again, you're right.

lina Gold Rush that begins in: 1790

But the miners they bring in there are Cornish and they don't use as much slave labor as you might sort of presume at first sight because they're going deep underground. And Cornish tin miners have this skill. Right. That's in high demand.

So I think the nature of the gold there probably dictates whether or not slavery can sort of succeed in that moment. So you know, There are about 600 gold miners in Carolina I think. But yeah, it's really a kind of experienced workforce drawn from.

Yeah, from Cornwall that is sort of leading it. And because of that, like the importance of skilled labor there. And that's what means. It's not a.

That means that it doesn't become a rush in the way that California does where it's primarily unskilled, although there's some skill to, to mining. But it's not underground. Anyone can do it. If you have a pen, if you have a pen, if you have a pick and a pan, technically anyone can kind of do it.

So the above ground phase I think plugs into the ideal of like democratic, the ideal of a kind of democratized society in which anyone can get rich. So yeah, in some ways is a contradictory and unfinished answer about slavery, but I think that's an interesting question. More needs to be done on.

Yeah, to think about that.

Liam Heffernan: 00:37:14

It's interesting because I think, you know, we have spoken a lot on, you know, the institutions of slavery and of the treatment of Native Americans.

And I think that, you know, the California Gold Rush kind of provides a nice kind of case study for Exploring how all of that at the time has really just kind of come together in sort of a melting pot and caused this huge opportunity for California as a state to sort of benefit from.

And I just wonder more broadly, to kind of wrap all of this together, how much of an impact do you think that the California Gold rush had, not just on the state of California, but on the future of America as a whole?

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:37:53

Oh, enormous. It's hard to see how the US Would have developed without it. On the one hand, it precipitates the sectional crisis that's coming over slavery.

It's that question of what to do with the territories from the Mexican War and the Texas annexation that triggers. Right. The collapse of the Old Union and the coming of the Civil War.

And what I think what's interesting there is, you know, if had gold not been found, that question might have rumbled on a bit longer, where California could have been deferred. California would have gone through a slower process of statehood. There would have been no need to rush it through in the way that they did.

I mean, that's the nature of the gold rushes that, as we've been talking about, accelerates phenomena that are already kind of taking place. So I think it's hard to see without it.

I think it also births an approach to resource extraction that fundamentally shapes how the United States views its western territories. This idea that it's a place where. Yeah, I mean, these ideas exist before the Gold rush. It's a place of abundance. Man can extract it at will.

That will be the path to kind of national union.

But it creates new institutions that systematize the industrial exploitation of the west and that pave the way, without being too, I suppose, theological about that, pave the way for the United States to become like the preeminent export and industrial nation by the end of the century.

So there's things like the US Geological Survey, which is part of the army that goes out, and maps where mineral deposits can be found, exploration parties that are traveling west and doing similar functions. Once you start doing that, you need a land office to distribute the land.

Maybe you need railroads, like you said before, to kind of connect those places. So I think it fundamentally shapes how the west is viewed within the kind of national project and the trajectory that the United States then goes on.

the agrarian Republic by the: 1870

And what that might mean for individual workers. Yeah.

And as you say before in the story of Indigenous America is that by the time you get to the Black Hills Gold Rush, it accelerates the end of the planes wars and the demise of the Sioux empire and others. So the overall effect, I suppose, of the phenomena of Russian is to put the US on this kind of fast paced development.

And one of the things the United States depends on the 9th century is the influx of migrants. And without these kind of gold mining phenomena, you might not see the same scale of migration as well.

So it does, I think, have extraordinary consequences on the future development of the U.S. yeah.

Liam Heffernan: 00:40:56

And far more than we can, I guess, continue talking about in this episode. So if anyone does want to find out more and do their own research, are there any kind of resources that you could recommend?

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:41:08

Yeah, there's a few.

I mean you look at the, there's a great electronic source called the Callosphere, which is a University of California system, has digitized loads of its material kind of put online for free. There's loads about, about, about gold rushes in that Library of Congress has loads of material too, especially in its kind of print collections.

There are great lithographs depicting people rushing to the, to California and all kind of fantastical contraptions that they. I think we'll get them there. So yeah, I think there's a lot out there that you can find.

Liam Heffernan: 00:41:41

Great. Yeah. And we'll put links to everything that we've mentioned in the show notes for anyone listening as well.

But Steven, thank you so much for joining me for this episode. Really appreciate it. It's been a fascinating discussion. If anyone wants to connect with you directly. Where can they do that?

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:41:58

I'm old school, I'm not on any social media. So over email and you can find, find that on my kind of faculty profile page.

Liam Heffernan: 00:42:08

There's, there's definitely a link between academics and lack of social media use, I think. But yeah, you can find me on, on BlueSky and on LinkedIn if you care to just search for my name.

And if you enjoy the podcast, do please leave us a rating and a review. Wherever you're listening to this, give us a follow as well so that all future episodes just appear in your feed.

And if you follow the links in the show notes, you can also support the show from as little as as $1 or $1 or whatever currency you're working in. So do check out all the links there. Thank you so much for listening and a big thank you to Steve and. Oh, thank you.

And we're going to record a quick bonus episode actually after this as well. So anyone listening? Look out for that. Thank you all for listening and goodbye.

Stephen Tuffnell: 00:42:57

Sa.