December 5, 1848: President Polk announces the discovery of gold in California, sparking the California Gold Rush.
In January of 1848, James Marshall discovered flakes of gold in a segment of the American River running through a sawmill owned by John Sutter, a German-born Swiss pioneer. Prior to the discovery, Sutter had planned to develop this land (located in California’s present-day capital, Sacramento) for commercial use, but the influx of gold-crazed settlers who arrived by the thousands before news of the discovery even reached the East Coast destroyed Sutter’s plan as his land was quickly overrun. Shortly after the discovery at Sutter’s mill, California, which was then part of the Mexican province of Alta California, was ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. Because California was soon rapidly settled and organized as a result of the Gold Rush, it was admitted to the United States only two years later, without ever having gone through the territorial phase of statehood.
In August of 1848, the New York Herald became the first major newspaper on the East Coast to report the discovery of gold in California. Two months later, James K. Polk announced the discovery to Congress; because many false claims of gold discoveries had been made in the past, and such a thing was difficult to prove, President Polk’s affirmation of the finding can be described as the real beginning of the California Gold Rush. Before 1849, most of those who sought wealth through Californian gold were the Californians themselves (including, to Sutter’s dismay, his own workers), but after Polk’s announcement, the “forty-niners” arrived by the thousands on boats and horses and mules, or a combination - over mountains, around South America, through Panama, whatever would take them to California. The trip, however it was carried out, was dangerous because of the lack of a safe and affordable route to the Mother lode, but the California Gold Rush came to be known as the “first world-class gold rush”, because, despite the danger, gold-seekers from New Zealand and Australia, France, South America, and even China still came looking to make their fortunes; by 1855, at least 300,000 people from all over the world had come to California. The Chinese, in particular, came to California in large numbers, and they were heavily discriminated against.
The idea of the “California Dream” emerged during the Gold Rush and endures to this day. One historian describes its infectious spread across the country:
The old American Dream … was the dream of the Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard” … of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year by year. The new dream was the dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck. [This] golden dream … became a prominent part of the American psyche only after Sutter’s Mill.