Which Way to the Wild West? by Steve Sheinkin

mine,
which, according to experiments we have made, is extraordinarily rich.”
    Then, over the first few months of 1848, Sutter’s workers started showing up in San Francisco with bags of gold they had found. One worker went into a store and dropped a bag of gold flakes on the counter, announcing to everyone: “That there is gold, and I know it, and know where it comes from, and there’s plenty in the same place, certain and sure!”
    Recognizing a good business opportunity when he saw one, a store owner named Sam Brannan paraded through San Francisco holding up samples of the gold found by Sutter’s workers and shouting, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!”
    As Brannan had hoped, people raced to his store to buy overpriced mining supplies. Then they rushed off to look for gold. By June 1848 three-quarters of San Francisco’s population was gone. Businesses and newspapers shut down. The only school in town closed its doors (and the teacher took his students along with him to search for gold).
    The Gold Fever Dance
    â€œT he whole population are going crazy,” one Californian said. “Old as well as young are daily falling victim to gold fever.”
    A man named James Carson never forgot the moment he caught the fever. News of gold discoveries started reaching his town of Monterey, California, in the spring of 1848. He was sure the stories were exaggerated. Until …
    â€œOne day I saw a form, bent and filthy, approaching me,” Carson
remembered. “He was an old acquaintance and had been one of the first to visit the mines.”
    This guy had once been neat and clean. Now his clothes were ripped and his wild hair and beard sprang out in all directions. Carson watched the man open a big bag filled with yellow chunks and flakes.
    â€œThis is only what I picked out with a knife,” the man told Carson.
    As Carson gazed at the gold, he felt something strange happening inside him. “A frenzy seized my soul,” he said. Carson was catching a disease that was about to spread across the country, across the world.

    â€œMy legs performed some entirely new movements of polka steps … piles of gold rose up before me at every step; castles of marble, dazzling the eye … in short, I had a very violent attack of the Gold Fever.”

    James Carson
    One hour after dancing down the streets of Monterey, Carson had his mule packed with supplies and was hurrying to the gold mines.
    Gold fever raced around the world, speeding through South America, Asia, Europe, even reaching the Australian island of Tasmania (eight thousand miles from California). A Tasmanian store owner started selling a new invention he called “gold grease.” The idea: you take off your clothes, smear your naked body with the stuff, roll down a hill—and the gold sticks to you.
    American newspapers, meanwhile, were making it sound easy to get rich in California, even without magic grease. Readers in Philadelphia opened their papers and read a letter from a California miner: “Your streams have minnows and ours are paved with gold.” People all over the country were hearing similarly exciting stories.
    â€œThe gold excitement spread like wildfire, even out to our log cabin in the prairie,” remembered a Missouri settler named Luzena Stanley Wilson. “And as we had almost nothing to lose, and we might gain a fortune, we early caught the fever.”
    Like so many Americans, the Wilson family packed up what they could carry, left everything else behind, and set out for California.
    But How Do You Get There?
    T here was no good way to get to California. There were three bad ways.
    First, you could cross the country by land, using oxen to drag your wagons along the trails to the western coast. This was bonebruising, slow, and dangerous—and getting more dangerous all the time. As the trails got busier, streams and wells along the way got more and more