The Discovery of Gold on This Date in 1848 at Sutter’s Creek Kicked Off the California Gold Rush and Transformed America

On January 24, 1848, American carpenter and sawmill operator James Wilson Marshall discovered gold in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. The discovery‚ facilitated by Native American guides who knew about the gold but did not value it like white settlers, spurred the largest mass migration in the United States, altering the course of history for both California and the nation.

Marshall was overseeing construction of a sawmill for influential landowner John Sutter, a Swiss immigrant, in what’s now California’s Coloma Valley when he noticed something shiny at the bottom of the ditch. “I reached my hand down and picked it up,” Marshall later said. “It made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold. … Then I saw another.”

Once word got out about Marshall’s find, approximately 300,000 people from around the country and even the globe flocked to California hoping to strike it rich. Known as “forty-niners,” a name referring to the year that thousands of prospectors began arriving, they came by both land and by sea, traveling from the U.S. Eastern seaboard as well as places like Latin America, Asia and Europe.

This mass influx created a surge in new wealth and population. San Francisco, for example, transformed from a sleepy port town of fewer than 1,000 inhabitants into a booming city of 25,000 residents seemingly overnight. The increased population also brought a need for civil government, fast-tracking California to statehood. On September 9, 1850, it was admitted as the 31st state.

With no existing laws regarding property rights in the gold fields, early prospectors simply “staked claims,” asserting their rights to a gold field as long as it was being actively worked. Initially, they panned for gold in the streams and riverbeds. When these methods were no longer profitable, they turned to digging in the soil and later, hydraulic mining—a highly destructive practice that used mercury-coated sluice boxes for gold recovery. This contaminated both water and fish, with environmental effects that still linger in California today.

A relative few who partook in the Gold Rush got wealthy—mostly earlier prospectors. But the development that sprung up around this mass migration of fortune seekers had a lasting impact on the state’s economy. This included the building of infrastructure like roads and bridges, the rapid growth of agriculture, and a stimulated interest in building what would later become the Panama Canal, which significantly cut travel time between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

California’s swiftly growing population also inspired the formation of banks like Wells Fargo and dry goods companies such as Levi Strauss, whose eponymous Bavarian immigrant founder sought to bring durable clothing to gold seekers.

But as miners became increasingly territorial over their claims, California’s Native American population—many of whom had been enslaved by earlier settlers during California’s days as a Mexican province—suffered. Tens of thousands succumbed to disease, starvation and mining-related accidents, while others were killed as part of a larger genocide. In the two decades following California’s Gold Rush beginnings, 80 percent of its Native American population was lost.

Between 1848 and 1855, California produced an estimated 750,000 pounds of gold. After that the take gradually declined, and by the end of the decade it was over. But not its impact: The Gold Rush may be long over, but its aftereffects still linger.