Transcripts For CSPAN3 California Gold Rush 20170831

The 1800s. Good morning, everybody. In the areas immediately following 1848, the golds played a very Important Role in American History. If you think all the way back to the conquist arkconquistadors. And what happened was that the first gold was discovered and then suddenly people started pouring into the area in huge numberings because of the intoxicating possibility that gold would make them wealthy quickly. Until then this had been an area really beyond the line of settlement. But suddenly now the White Settlement catches up very quickly. Heres the governor George Gilmer explaining what it was like meeting the miners in 1829. Many thousands of idle people flocked into georgia from every point on the compass. When loosed from the strengths of law and public opinion, made them like the evil one, in other words the devil. They collected around light wood firings at night and played on the ground and on their hats, cards, dice, push pins and other games of chance for their days findings. Whisky carts served them as well. There were fisticuffs. This it wasnt a fight until one of them had gouged out the eye of their opponent. The chaotic scene where people have poured in from every direction. The army major sent to keep order wrote this, upwards of 200 persons, who presented a most motley appearance of what are breeds, whites and negros, boys of 17 and men in their 70s comprising diggers, peddlers, shopkeepers. Two candidates for the legislature and two minister of the gospel, all no doubt attracted by the love of gold. So hes making the most of it with those lovely twos. Buts this was a very, very rich side of gold and a large quantity was drawn out of the mines there from 1829 into the late 70s and 80s. On the left, you can see the United States of america coin and the Confederate Bank also used georgia gold for minting, and just by living there, you have all seen an example of gold on the capitol dome, the dome is thinly coated with georgia gold. So the people who already lived in the area where the georgia gold rush took place were the cherokees, one of the native american societies. Ever since the american revolution, the federal government had been trying very hard to integrate the native american nations into the United States, saying learn to become christians, learn literacy, learn to become farmers instead of hunters and gathers, become integrated into our society. Certainly that was the policy of the confederacy, but it turns out that the cherokees are living on lands for which the whites are very, very hungry indeed. What principle was going to prevail . Unfortunately, the principle of racial exclusion was going to prevail. The whites just wanted to get rid of the indians one way or another. And in the election of 1878, which immediately preceded the gold rush, Andrew Jackson he also wanted to get rid of the indians, if any community of native americans had lived up to the hope that is the federal government had, it was clearly the cherokees, they had learned to read, a vocabulary to enable them to write down the cherokee language, the bible had been translated into the cherokee language, many of them had become christians, many of them now wore american dress. This was a highly integrated community. But nevertheless, the principle prevailed, weve got to get rid of them. The indian removal act signed by Andrew Jackson, saying the five civilized tribes should move from their current lands out on to a place that was then called indian territory. The five groups they had in mind were the creeks, cherokees, seminoless, choctaws and the seminoless. And there would be a resettlement, this is now oklahoma, and was then called indian territory. The Georgia State government passed a law specifying that the lands up in this Northern Tier of georgia should be reallocated by a land lottery to white settlers, in order to dispossess the former inhabitants and to hand it over to the whites instead. So this was the prelude to the trail of tears, where the cher s cherokees were shifted west and this was one of the great Human Rights Violations in American History, and particularly in the state of georgia itself. Last time in talking about the spread of american settlement and also the spread of american political power, we talked about the mexican war. This was the war fought between mexico and the United States in the years 1846 to 48. Although the american armies were not particularly well led, they were much more effective than the mexican armies, and as a result they were able to win a spectacular series of battlefield victories and by late 1847, the leader of one of the american armies landed on the eastern coast of mexico at veracruz and they actually were able to overrun mexico city itself. You can see a picture of general scotts army marching triumium t triumphantly into mexico city. And this was the treaty of guadalupe hidalgo, whos geographical significance was that a vast area of mexico was now handed over to the approximate United States, nearly all the land which current comprises california, utah, nevada, arizona and parts of new mexico and colorado, which is today the southwestern quarter of the United States. Now certain things about it are important to remind you of. This is now an area with a high population, but then its population was extremely low, only a few thousand spaniards actually lived there. It was mainly unoccupied territory and the reason it was unoccupied is because its so dry. Nearly all this land has got very, very low rainfall, with a few exceptions like on the Northern California coast, most of it is too dry for ordinary agriculture, so not many people could live there. Just to give you an idea how how low its population was, whos been to San Francisco . As you know, its a fantastic natural harbor, you sail in through the golden gate, which was a fairly narrow entrance and now of course one of the great cities of the world is right there. But this is what it looked like in 194647. Just a handful of huts and a few streets, it was a very, very quiet and sleepy little place, and its significance was unimaginable at that time. This is a settler, this is a man called johan sutter, and he lived on what was called sutters site. I mentioned in one of the previous lectures that americans had been moving into texas even when texas was still a mexican territory, and american settlers were moving into california even when it was still mexican territory. One of those was johann sutter. There it is in the upper picture, its very different from a shop and the fact that he had to have a fort, was a sign of how politically volatile the area was. He was expecting to be attacked so he took precautions against that. He was in sacramento and one of the things he wanted to sell was lumber, but the lumber was going to come from up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains which is east of new mexico. And so he sent one of his assistants, called James Marshall up the American River and asked him to design and build a saw mill. And this was just a place where the American River is flowing fast enough that the water can turn a water wheel and the wheel is attached to circular saw blades so the wood could be cut and send down the river to sutter himself. And one thing you have to do to make an effective saw, is divert the river down the mill race, can you picture this, a designed flume which carries water fairly rapidly to turn the water wheel. In the mill race there, he found little metal flakes of gold. He reported back to sutter his boss saying i found gold and sutter said, dont tell anybody. But you know how bad everyone is keeping a secret. The only way to actually have a secret is no never tell anyone, because somehow has soon as you tell anyone, the secret gets out. And thats what happened in this case, and it wasnt long before the news got back east and it spread very rapidly all around the world, with the result that a massive incursion of people into california began to take place. This is the area where the gold was discovered. This is sacramento and sutters fort was right there. And he had sent his assistant marshall, upriver, up the American River to here where the gold had been discovered. We now know from extensive geological work is that the gold area is about whats shown there in yellow and the richest area, the area where most of the gold was found, is about here, this is called the mother lode. And those little boxes are where the mining camps sprung up and they correspond very closely as you would expect to the lode itself. And if you look at a very simplified version of the coast of california, im just going to do this for reasons of simplicity. Heres San Francisco bay, one river is flowing south, and this is the Sacramento River. And eventually it flows into the San Francisco bay. And its parallel with the coast, about 100 miles inland, theres a Coastal Range here, and then a big central valley, and another flowing north is the San Joaquin River and it also eventually flows into San Francisco bay. So this is the central valley. And over here is much higher mountains, what are they call, jenny . I dont know, actually. Theres a clue. Oh, well, the Sierra Nevada. Thats right, just means the snowy mountains, thats right. So as you can tell from the map, lots of rivers flow out of the Sierra Nevadas and the northern ones join the Sacramento River and the southern ones flow into the San Joaquin River. So thats kind of the schematic of southern california. So its important that you get a sense of what that looked like, and the gold is here, sort of in the foothills of the valleys. Okay . Now lets just first of all here, about the how the news got back east. Allen, can you come up and read first of all have you all heard of William Sherman . He was a famous Union General during the civil war, you see him on the right as a young man, at this point he was a lieutenant in the u. S. Army and witnessing what was happening when the gold was discovered. So here is lieutenant sherman. As the spring and summer of 1848 advanced the reports came faster and faster of the gold mines of sutters mill. Everyone was talking of gold, gold until it assumed the character of a fever. Soldiers began to dessert. We heard of men earning 50, 500 and of thousands of Dollars Per Day and for a time, it seemed someone would reach solid gold. Heres an Army Lieutenant reporting back to his seniors what was going on. And then the president made a speech. Youve got the president here, james k. Polk, so this again, this is just a few months after the initial discoveries were made by James Marshall. It was known that mines of the Precious Metals existed to a considerable extent in california. Recent discoveries render it probable that these mines are more extensive and valuable than was anticipated. The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory is of such extraordinary character is beyond belief. There are those who have visited Mineral District and derived facts. The explorations already made warrant the belief that the supply is very large and that gold is found in extensive districts of the country, mines of quick silver is being mined in the area of the gold region. One of those is now being worked and is believed to be the biggest in the world. The discovery of these rich Mineral Deposits have produced a surprising change of the state of affairs in california. All other pursuits but that of the Precious Metals are abandoned. Nearly the whole of the male population of america have gone to the district. Ships arriving on the coast are deserting their crews. Soldiers cannot be kept in Public Service without a large increase of pay, desertions in this command have become frequent and he recommends those that with stand the strong temptations and remain faithful should be rewarded. This pursuit of gold have already caused in california an unprecedented rise in the price of the necessaries of life. Thank you very much. Thats president polk and hes making this declaration that the population of california is already being changed. Ships arrive in San Francisco, the crews all dessert because they want to go up to the gold areas. And the curious thing about gold is that it isnt really particularly useful. I dont know if you have thought about this very much. Today its possible in things like semiconductors, there are some uses for gold, and in heat shields on spaceships, but then it was mostly for decoration, you make coins out of iron, eventually they rust away, but a gold coin persists, but its not really useful. Nonetheless it was incredibly valuable. Gold and tobacco on which great fortunes were made, even though they werent actually essential. Worth thinking about. Now people started pouring into california from all over, and back east and even around the world in england and in france and in germany and in south america, even in china, there was an enormous amount of enthusiasm about finding ways to get to california. And lots of handbooks like this began to be published. This was published in california. An account of the wonderful gold regions and routes to california and the ancient and modern d discoveries of gold. In other words help for travelers on how theyre actually going to get there. And there were essentially three ways of getting there, and one they had in common is that they were all incredibly difficult. By our standards, incredibly difficult. This is 1849 so still another 20 years were going to pass before you could get there by railroad. The first railroads had been invented but so far they were very short linings, one of the ways for going is by going in a clipper ship, this was a type of ship that was capable of sailing very fast. So one possibility was to sail down the east coast, all the way down to the south atlantic, and around cape horn, whats that like is . Horrible. The stormyiest waters in the entire world. Youre actual e it can take weeks to get around and get ship wrecked along the way. Lots of people tried that. This is an ad for it, the ship called the california with its commander henry bashe barber, w implied is that you can actually see the gold digging from the coast, and the artist rearranged the topography for that. Thats one possibility. The second possibility was to go by steam ship, instead of going all the way around, to go to the caribbean, panama, to actually go across by land, across the isthmus, the narrow part and second a second ship, which would also take you up to San Francisco. The advantage of doing it that way was that the journey was a great deal shorter. But the disadvantage, is that just about the best place in the world to die of malaria or yellow atmosphefever, it was th. This was an incredibly difficult place even to live. Just a few decades earlier, they tried to build they died of yellow fever. But people were trying because the insent ty was so great. From california direct. Nicaragua, the quickest, cheapest and safest, thats what they claimed, whether its true is another matter. The third way to go on the overland trail, and of the three routes taken this was the one that was done most frequently. As we know, the oregon trail had really opened up in about 1843 or 44 so five or six years previous to this. From trial and error they found out the best way was to go up the missouri river, up to the plant river, across the rockies across the lowest point at south pass, then pick up the head waters of the snake river and go in order until it meets the Columbia River and down the colombia as far as portland and thats where the great oregon farm land was. It was at this point that various cutoffs were established, particularly the california trail with a cut off down here towards sacramento itself. So this is approaching it over land rather than going by sea. But the oregon trail intrins intrinsically very difficult itself. And thrown if you took the california trail, it was even worse, because you would have to go into nevada to the humbolt sink. This is usually a dry river, it only has water in it a few days a year. Most of the time its just bone dry, so you have to cross this incredibly hot, pitiless desert. So all along the way people died from various things, then to make things worse, you then have to cross the Sierra Nevadas itself. It was Hard Crossing the Sierra Nevadas than crossing the rockies. And already by then, one of the most famous incidents in the history of american cannibalism had taken place there. The donner party was a group of immigrants who set up from independence, missouri took the california cutoff, were partway up the Sierra Nevada mountains when a very, very severe blizzard snowed them in. They werent capable of Going Forward any further, but neither could they get down the mountains because the snow was too thick, many of them died, and the survivors ate the bodies of their relatives who died in order to survive. And news of this traveled quickly, and those who go over the donner route, you still take this way, they knew this is the kind of territory they were crossing. And so, very, very rapidly, between the first discovers between early 1848 and early 1849, thousands of people poured into this area, the area of sacramento and the migration carried on for the next five or six years. Heres the thing thats easy to forget. It was only in 1848 that california became part of the republic. Most americans didnt know where it was. And suddenly it becomes part of america. And then this gold had been discovered. How galling for the mexicans, they hadnt known that they were sitting literally on a gold mine. Thats one of those historical ironies on the nature of good fortune. Now we need to talk about rivers. I said in drawing in diagram, its in the foot hills of the Sierra Nevadas that most of the gold was found. In other words its in the place where rivers flowing rapidly down hill are beginning to flow out into the plains, or into the flatter land of the central valley, so if you imagine the same thing, thats a birdseye vi view, now think of it looking at it from the side. Its something more like this, if this is the central valley, and thats the high sierras, the area where the gold was found was kind of this area. Now why should that be . Tell us why you think its found here . Maybe because thats where the Mineral Deposits were. Well it started in the river. The place where they started looking for gold was in the river itself. What happens to a river when its flowing out of the mountains and into the low lands . It deposit s sediment . Why does it deposit it there . Because thats the most level part, that the sediment cant move with to the water. Which carries more saediment fast moving water or slow. Fast . The river starts to slow down, and as it does, it starts to drop the sediment its carrying, does it first drop the heaviest or the lightest thing . The heaviest. Rocks . The gold, because gold is very, very dense. Fast flowing rivers carry a lot of sediment, but as they slow down as they flow into the low lands, they lose some of this energy and they begin to deposit their load, they deposit the gold first because its the heaviest element. Thats why its such a good place to dig. And sure enough if you look at that map with the red and yellow things it was, now look at this photograph, the river is meandering, they hardly ever flow straight, so when the river is flowing around curves, is the current faster around the inside or the outside . The outside. The outside, why . Im not quite sure why it flows faster on the outside. Youre absolutely right, its because the water flows in a Straight Line until something stops it. It flows straight downhill until it hits the bank, and then it flows in a Straight Line until it gets stopped again. Whats happening all the time in the rivers is that the bends are tending get more exaggerated. If you have window seat in an airplane and you look down, you can see where the river used to be. Theres things called ox bows, it used to be there, it used to be a huge bend and then eventually it was cut off and the river straightened itself and then the process starts again. So then think about what this means in terms of the deposit of gold, it means not only that in this transitional area coming out of the mountains, its also that the very, very best place to look is on the inside of the bends. Because thats where the current is flowing more slowly. That means thats where its going to be dropped. You can actually see on the photograph here, theres a little beach, isnt there, on the inside of the bend where the water is hardly flowing again, and you can imagine paddling across and see it flowing more rapidly. So the best place to stake a claim was on the inside of the bend on the place where the river leveled out and sure enough thats where they found a lot of gold. Now one of the great things about the early days of the California Gold rush is that it was a very democratic kind of thing, anybody could do it. You have to get there, which is hard, but once you were there, all you needed was a shovel and a pan, a pan that look like a wok, anybody ever pan for gold . Just like this miner is holding, what you do is you shovel into the pan some of the sediment from the river bank and put in water and then gradually swirl it around so you make a suspension of the lighter pa particles with the water, and allow that to flow over the site of the pan, you needed a lot of care and patience. What youre left with is a bed of gravel with gold flakes and you could actually pick out the flakes of gold, and thats the way it was done. So it was a very, very low tech business. But when we look at the history of who got rich in the California Gold rush, its not those who actually dug, but those who sold shuffles and donkeys and who sold tents and food. That was the way to make a fortune, because whether or not the diggers actually found the gold, you would get paid for to provisions, and you would get paid a high price, the stuff had to come a long way, it was in incredibly high demand and so you could get higher pricings for it. This is a more sophisticated device, its called a rocker and a mixture of gravel and water is poured through the top and it filters down a series of sivs, the coarser gravel gets caught in the top and then at the bottom, you have some rough burlap sacking, so after you have slushed the water across it, you were left with part kls of gold that you could pick out. And this became the actual currency in the gold district. Now eventually, of course, it starts to occur to some people that, if the gold is there, it must have been have come from further upstream, so doesnt it make sense to go upstream to actually find it. And of course the answer was yes and heres how that works. So back to the diagram of the hillside, you found lots of it just lying about in the water down here, that means that somewhere up here theres actually a vain of gold or a vain of gold bearing rock, which is exposed to the surface, and as the water flows over it, its being eroded a bit at a time over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, the gold itself has fall on deep into the earth under extremely holt pressures, but when you get tectonic thrust sometimes you get to the bottom of the rock starter. Thats why gold is usually found in mountain districts because of the irregularities of the earths crust. So lets imagine that this is where the gold vain is. So if youre actually if you decide to look for the gold vain itself, heres how you do it. You go upstream and you test the water here, and then you go upstream again, and test it here, then you go upstream again and you test it here. Now in each of these places, you find some gold, but les than you had down here, because of the pace of the river. But eventually you get to a place where you find none at all, why do you find none . Because youre gone above the vain, so that tells you, so you do some much closer testing, here and here, its hardly ever selfevident, it just looks like work, but you can work out where its come in. Then you come to the possibility of digging out the gold itself. Thats very difficult to do, but thats the idea that the miners came to. Thats why we have so many photos up here in the mountains. Its called a vein or a drift, theres lots of miners terminology, and it depends on which mine youre in there tends to be a different rhetoric to go with it. All the techniques for digging for gold actually required water. Some entrepreneurial miners found that water supply was required. And they would divert the river from where the miners were digging. They would divert like a plume. It would guide the water to places where people were digging. In other words, the very first strikes are here, on the river, on the main part of the river. But eventually people start saying, look, for a long time the river flowed here, thats a great place to dig, but we cant do it if its dried up, unless we have a water supply. But the flume, building a flume down to this area, so lots of very enterprises men were building flumes to diverse the rivers to bring it down to the gold bearing country. And in this picture, you can actually see the process going on. Theres a small stream here, they built a very, very primitive rock dam, but its good enough that they can carry it into the rock flume that carries it down into the area where theyre going to be exploring for the minerals. Then it occurs to somebody, if it is good on the side of the river, think how good its going to be if we actually dig into the bed of the river itself. How can we do that . We can only do that by damming and diverting the river. There were actually some photographers taking pictures of this going on. This was called murderers bar, and maybe thats because somebody was murdered there. Thats my deduction anyway. They built a dam across the river itself, here we are in the foothills and they built a diversionary channel. So what was once the bed of the river has now become dry, so they can dig down in it and get down to the saediment thats ben there for thousands of years, and when the water flows faster, you get a lot of water thats bringing up mechanically the stuff thats being produced and there was a steam engineer. So theres some technology thats been brought in. But as you can imagine, this is all expensive. A guy with a shovel cant afford this. Its only people that have got capital who can do work like this, so very early on, already by 1851, 52 2 its people with capital that are making the money because they can build these things where money is they actually become employees of Mining Companies working for wages in projects like this and they realized the value of going quite a long way down into the earth, so you can see here that its literally becoming mining, but theyre still mining into the gravel that is underneath the bed, although the old bed of the river itself. Now it wasnt long after that before somebody invented this method, a hydraulic method, this is an invention of the 1850s. They said look the river has been gradually eroding the mountain, lets speed up the process, by firing against the Mountain Side a very, similar High Pressure jet of water to in effect accelerate the erosion process over and over. So again, its a matter of getting a flume upstream, and guiding the water down until you bring it into these, theyre like big scale fire hoeses, if you have ever seen fire hoses at work, it has a very High Pressure. You shoot it out of nozzles with great pressure against the Mountain Side. When this washes down sediment, out of which its possible to gather the gold in the same way, hydraul hydraulicing, the very first environmental laws in the 1870s was to ban this practice, so the sediment was coming down to stifle the farms. But in the early 50s and 60s and 70s, the mining was more important than the farming. Then when all this is exhausted, then it becomes a question of actually digging into the Mountain Side and following the vein into the mountain itself. And the result of that is hard rock mining, and youre bringing big rocks, mainly quartz, and people tried it, but then eventually people with more capital did it on a large scale. So this is what the big mines looked like by the 1860s and 70s. And the topography was good enough that we have pretty good pictures of what it lookedlike so again 49ers become mine laborers. Heres what happens inside a working hard rock gold mine. You usually have teams of two working at a technique called double jacking. This is where one guys holding a chisel against the rock face, and the other ones hitting it with a sledgehammer, it means a very high degree of trust among friends, one hits it with a sledgehammer, and the other holds the drill and turns it slightly. And youre working against a rock face, you cut one there, one there, and so on all the way around, then fill them with gunpowd gunpowder, lead fuses to each one of them, light the fuses, retire to a safe distance and then let them explode. And if you have done it right, if the holes are this deep, an arc of explosions will dislodge the rock in that arc and when the dust and smoke clears, you bring up the hard rock and repeat the process again, its incredibly dangerous work, i think maybe right up to the present, being a miner is the job in which youre most likely to be killed at work. You can imagine that the roof can cave in, you can get caught by charges which didnt explode, which then sparks from a hammer will set off. Methane gas will sometimes explode. Sometimes theres suffocating gases that you cant breathe and you will die in the mine. It was a horrible, horrible environment, so in every way a very deplorable way of life. Gradually improvements were developing, one was the invention of an improved explosive called nitroglycerin, if it gets too hot, its spontaneously explodes. Then the invention of drills, in which High Pressure water is this power source, instead of simply guys with hammers. The problem with those is they also create showers of dust so that the miners tend to be breathing in a very dust heavy atmosphere, and tended to die early of mining related diseases, horrible way of life. Little underground railroads built so that you can load the o ore on the wagons, take the wagons to the pit shaft and then have them drawn up to the surface. When the ore gets to the surface, how do you get the gold out of it . Its no good to use the panning techniques and theres not much gold and a lot of rock, you had to use well, there are various names, but they used a crusher, fast flowing water turns the wheel, and its attached to this device, which is an axle bearing cams, and as the cams go past these rods, these are attached to great stamps, great heavy weights so the ore itself is fed through here on a conveyor, and these devices stamp it to reduce it to powder. Thats the way that a stamping bill works. And then the next thing to combine the pounded ore with mercury. What is mercury . Its a metal that melts at room temperature. We know its very toxic. Because its very dangerous. But that wasnt known at the time. And t one man said it appears from this report that quick silver has found in the area of the gold mines, so this becomes as important as gold mining because this is the standard process for separating the metal from the ore. What happens is you mix the powdered ore with water, make a kind of sludge, then you pour in mercury and the mercury and the gold combine chemically and theyre very heavy and so by sending it across a gently sloping gradient, youll cause this gold and mercury compound to fall to the bottom. Then you heat the whole thing, and because the mercury is already so volatile, it gets vaporized and driven off and you end up with gold, in a highly concentrated pure form. So you can turn it straight away into gold bars, so thats the way its done in a commercial mining operation. I wanted to show you this lovely, lovely photograph. This is about 20 years after the first invention of photography, but it perfectly illustrates the point that general sherman made, this is San Francisco bay in 1850, ships would come in from all over the world, but they would never set sail again because most of them were deserted, because theres gold in them there hills. So the whole harbor was littered with these abandoned ships. So much so, that one of the things that shopkeepers started to do was to drag the ships up on land, see this one and this one, they have just converted them into stores because theyre big containment areas, ideal. Thats one thing, but theres other interesting things, theres also good chromeo li lithographs. A you see a lot of people inside and i cant is this a bar or a gambling saloon . People are trading for gold, i think . Thats right. What are you meant to be surprised by as a viewer . Look at the clothes. Everyones pretty welldressed . Not just well dressed. Who do you think these guys are . Farmers . No, what country do they come from . Look at the hats. I cant really tell. Theyre chinese. And how about these who . Another asian country . Those are mexican. In other words, what the artist is doing here is showing us the traditional dress of all the different 2k3wr50groups of peop have come from all around the world. In other words this is the wo worlds most multicultural environment. And its very unusual. People werent used to that kind of thing. Whos this one . Its a stereotype . Irish. Its the irish drunk. People come from all over the world and when the irish get here, what do they do . They get drunk. Heres an illustration from the arte artists imagination. Chinese life, three exclamation points. Wow, the idea of Chinese People living here in america. Thats what the artists are getting at. This was meant to be a horse market in sonora. And then you see in the back of the line theres a saloon. You can see the mexican here, the anglo guy whos buying the horse, africanamerican over here. Southerners would take their slaves to the gold mines, a great concentration of people coming in from all over the place around the world. And the idea of pictures like this is to say, what a weird world is that . Nymph, its had the result of very, very rapidly populating what had previously been a very sparsely populated place. This is above the president s speech in the handout. This is a historyi ihistorian a years ago writing about the way in which gold accelerated the settlement. Established a front line of civilization along the Rocky Mountains and drew men from the east, farther out on to the arid plains, the glittering prize lighted the way illuminating the darkness of earlier obstacles. After the men came their baggage, most material and cultural. Freight wagons brought not only necessities but the trappings of civilization, printing presses, the refinement of books and other objects. When the family unit came or was locally assembled. Permanent assembly was assured. Those who were serious about the new land settled down to extract their own kind of gold, grain or cattle and another section of the United States was commence ed. He makes the point that they started out as agricultural and later on became urbanized, but in the west, in his mining camps, it was the other way around, they started out as concentrations of people all in the same place building these mining settlements then after the mines played out, then gradually people started disburse and the farming population of california is an after lothought. Thats the way in which normal civilization was reversed. Next time well talk about the origins of the history of the oil industry. Thanks very much, readers, thats greet. Youre watching American History tv on cspan 3 and well continue our look at the American West in just a moment. Tonight well have more lectures in history and prime time. Tonight well focus on the 1950s, with programming on the korean war, pop culture and the development of suburbs across the country, join us right here at 8 00 eastern right here on cspan 3. Sometimes we agree on something on both sides of the aisle in this body because theres nothing to it. Its National Peaches week or something, and everybodys for that. When its something big, and when its something consequential, thats where difficulties begin to emerge. Congress returns from its summer break on tuesday. And among the list of issues on their plate, racing the debt ceiling, tax reform and federal spending, which includes funding the federal response to hurricane harvey. Well have a detailed look at the congressional agenda for the fall tonight. Thats at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan. Sunday night on q a, we take a look at anthony clarks book the last campaign, how president s run for history, and enshrine their legacies. Every single comment i have received, is one of either two topics, how angry people are to learn whats happening or how flab flab eer gasoled about whats happened. Especially for the most recent ones, the records wont be open for 100 years and instead were paying for celebration and legacy building. Sunday night at 8 00 eastern on cspans q a. And now Providence College professor Jeffrey Johnson teaches a class about the 1916 bombing of a parade in San Francisco. The bombing took place on whats called preparedness day, organized by provigilance groups. It remains the worst act of terrorism in San Francisco history. This is about 50 minutes. Well, good morning, thanks for coming, i appreciate you all being here on a drizzly day at Providence College. Today i wanted to share with you, i think, a story and a moment in American History that is one of the, for me, more important moments of the late 19th and