California gold rush of the mid 1800s. He describes how people travel to california, the physical geography of the area and the evolving Technology Used to mind goal. Good morning everyone. Were going to talk about the history of the gold rush, im going to talk mainly about california and the years following 1948. But they have played a very important golds, think all the way back to conquistadores. One of the things they are fascinated by was the quest for gold. The history of their conquest first with the as tex and then of the incas, is of an quintuple desire for Precious Metals, gold and silver. When the first english settlers came to jamestown in 1607, while they are hoping to find some kind of supplies of gold that have been found by the spaniards. It was a source of bitter disappointment to not find gold in what is now virginia. They brought with him jewelrys, and goldsmith. Americas first gold rush took place close to us in georgia in 1829, this was the georgia gold rush in north georgia. If youve been about hundred miles north of here you can see that the old lump can county courthouse has been converted into mining museum. It is about 100 miles up the road. What happened was, the first gold was discovered, then suddenly people start pouring into the area, huge numbers. Because of the intoxicating possibility that gold would make them wealthy quickly. And tell them, this had been an area behind the line of settlement. But suddenly, the White Settlement catches up very quickly. Here is the governor, describing what it was like meeting the georgia minors in 1829. Many thousands of idle profit people flocked into georgia from every point of the compass. Whos pentup vicious propensity swim lucid from law an opinion, make them like the evil one, in other words the devil. In his worst mood. After waiting all day in the chat who she rivers, picking up articles of gold, they collected around fires at night and played on the ground and on their hats, cards, dice, push pin and other games of chance for their days findings. Whiskey cards serve them to. Hundreds of combatants sometimes seem swearing, striking and gouging eyes. As frontier men can only do these things. Frontiersman in the south used to fight, and tell one of them when it gouge out the eye of his combat. That was victory. The army was sent interest or some kind of order in this chaotic scene where people of poured in from every direction. The here on the sheet, the army majors reported this, upwards of 200 persons who presented whites, indians, halfbreeds and blacks, boys a 14 and old men, and either occupations were as various is there complexions. Comprising diggers, thieves, gamblers, shopkeepers. There is also two colonels of the georgia militia, two candidates for the congress, two of the gospel. All attracted by the love of gold. He is making the most of it there. But this was a very rich sight of gold. A large quantity of gold was drawn out of them, out of the minds there, between 1829 and into the 18 seventies and eighties. For a while it was minted into federal currency. You see the coin on the left is a u. S. Coin and on the right is after the confederate succession, the Confederate Bank also used gorgeous georgia gold. Fermenting just by living here, youve all seen an example of this cold on the State Capitol building. Five or six miles from here. The gold is thinly coated with gold. This is a very important source. The people who already lived there, in the area were georgia gold rush took place where the cherokees, one of the native american society. This 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 gatherers. Become integrated into our society. That was the federal policy in the first three or four decades of the republic. Now comes a test case, now suddenly turns out that the chair keys are living on land for which the whites are very hungry indeed. What principle was going to unveil, the principle of racial exclusion was going to prevail. The whites just wanted to get rid of the indians one way or another. In the election of 1888, in a successful candidate andrew jackson, they found someone who also wanted to get rid of the native americans anyway he could. This is john ross one of the cherokee chiefs. If any communities had lived up to the federal government, it was obviously cherokee, they learned how to read. One created a syllable bowl the bible had been translated into the cherokee language. Many of them had become christians, many of them now war american dress. This was a highly integrated community. But nevertheless, the principal prevailed, we have to get rid of them. Congress passed the indian removal act in 1830 which was signed by president jackson, saying that the five civilized tribes, this is president jackson he said, the five civilized tribe should move from their current lands and out onto a place that was then called indian territory. The five groups they had where the seminals, chicken saws and the idea was that it would be a forcible resettlement of population on the other side of the Mississippi River out here. This is now oklahoma, it was then called indian territory. The Georgia State government passed a law specifying that these lands in these Northern Area of georgia should be reallocated by a land lottery to white settlers. To forcibly dispossess the former inhabitants and handed over to the weights. This is the prelude to a movement, the trail of tears, by which the cherokee were shifted and forced to migrate several hundred miles under adverse conditions with large numbers of them dying along the way. It is one of the great Human Rights Violations of the u. S. History, particular in georgia itself. And talk about the spread of american settlers and political power, we talked about the mexican more. This was the war fought between mexico and the u. S. In 1846 to 48. As i said then, although the american armies were not particularly well lead, they were much more effective to bend the mexican armies. They could win a spectacular series of battlefield victories. By late 1847, the leader of one of the american armies landed on the coast of the eastern coast of mexico, let his army inland and they were able to overrun mexico city. Itself on the right there, you can see a picture of general scotts Army Fighting and marching triumphantly into mexico city where they were in effect were able to dictate the terms of the peace treaty that followed. This was the peace treaty of guadeloupe hidalgo. Whos geographical significance was, a vast area of mexico was now handed over to the u. S. Nearly all the land was currently was california, nevada, utah, arizona and then parts of new mexico and colorado. But that today was the southwestern quarter of the u. S. Certain things about this are important to remind you of. This is now an area with high population. But then its population was extremely low. Only a few thousand spaniards had ever lived there, or a few thousand mexicans. There is a low density of a native american settled. It was mainly unoccupied territory. The reason it was unoccupied was because it was so dry, all this land has very low rainfall with a few exceptions like the Northern California coast. Most of it is too dry for ordinary agriculture, so not many people could live there. To give you an idea of how low its population was, how many of you bid to San Francisco . It is a fantastic natural harbor. You sail into the golden switches of narrow entrance. It has enormous deep water enclosed harbor. Now its one of the great cities of the world. This is what it looked like an 1846 to 1847. Just a handful of huts and a few streets. It was a very, very quiet and sleepy little place. Its future significance was unimaginable that time. This is a settler, he lived in a place called sutters forte which is on the site of the current city of sacramento. Which is now the state capital of california. I mentioned in a previous lecture, americans have been moving into texas even when texas was still a mexican territory. In the same way that american settlers have been moving into california, even when it was still mexican territory, one of them was yo handset or. He came from switzerland and he set up a trading fort, and there it is in the upper picture. The fact that he had to have a forte is a sign that he was politically volatile the area was. He was expecting to be attack so he took precautions. He was in sacramento. One of the things he wanted to sell was lumber. And that was going to come from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, east of sacramento. So he sent one of his assistants, james marshall, up the river. Up to a place card colonia and asked them to design and build a sawmill. This is a place where the American River is flowing fast enough that it can turn the water will, and it was attached to circular saw blade so the lumber could be brought down and san and sent down the river. One of the things that you have to do to make an effective saw is diverts the river down the i designed flew met terms the water rapidly. In the middle there, he found little flakes of gold. Little metal flakes. He reported back to sutter, his boss, and said i found gold. His boss said, dont tell anybody. We will keep it secret. You could foresee this. You know how bad everyone is keeping secrets. Dont you know from your own experience . The only way to have a secret is to never tell anyone. As soon as you tell someone, the secret gets out and thats exactly what happened in this case. It wasnt long before the news got back east. Its spread very rapidly over the world. The result was a massive move of people into california. This is the area where the gold was discovered. This is sacramento, sutter sport was right there. And he sent his assistant up here and that is where the gold had been discovered. We now know from subscribes geological work, the gold field is about the area that a show marin yellow. The richest area, where the most of gold was found, was about here. This is called the mother lode. Those little red boxes, those are places where the mining cant camp spread up. They correspond very closely as you would expect to the load itself. Imagine a simplified version of the coast of california. Im just going to do this for reasons of simplicity. Here San Francisco bay, one river is flowing south, the sacramento river, and eventually it flows into the San Francisco bay. It is parallel to the coast. Theres a Coastal Range here. And then a big central valley. Theres another river flowing north and it flows into San Francisco bay. This is the central valley, over here is much higher mountains. What are they called . I dont know. This makes the snowy mountains. Nevada, yeah. And you can tell from the map that there are lots of rivers that flow out of this and join the northern ones and the southern ones flow into the san juan keen river. That is the kind of schematic of california. It is very important that you get a sense of what that looks like. And the gold is here, sort of in the foothills of the valleys. Lets hear about how the news got back east. Allen, can you come up in reeves . William sherman was a famous unit general. But at this point whos lieutenant in the u. S. Army witnessing what was happening when the gold was discovered. Here is lieutenant. German as the spring and summer of 1840 advance, the reports came faster from the gold mines. Stories reached us of fabulous discovery and spread throughout the land. Everyone was talking gold, gold, which soon adopted the character of a fever. Some of our soldiers began to desert. We heard of men earning 50, 500, and thousands of dollars per day. And for a time, it seems as though someone would reach solid golds. So the news gets out, heres an army officer reporting to seniors. Not long after that the president himself made a big speech. We have the president here with us. If you just look at the back sheet of the hand out, you can see what the president said. This is just a few months after that initial discoveries. It was known that minds of the Precious Metals consisted of a considerable extent in california. Recent discoveries found that these lines are more extensive and valuable than anticipated. They count for the abundance of gold in that territory and they are such an extraordinary character, corroborated by that centigrade ports of officers and Authentic Service who have visited and drive facts from personal observation. The explosions already made warrant believe that the supply is very large. And that gold is founded varies places. It appears also from these reports, minds of quick silver are found in the gold region. One of them is now being worked and believed to be one of the most productive in the world. The effects produced by this discovery of these Mineral Deposits have produced a surprising change in the state of affairs in california. Labor commands the most exorbitant price, and all other pursuits is that of searching,. Nearly all of the male population is gone to the district. Ships are deserted by their crews and their voyages suspended for want of sailors. Our Commanding Officer has apprehensions that soldiers cannot be kept in the Public Service with a large increase in pay. Desertions have become frequent. He recommends those that shell withstand the strong temptation shall be rewarded. This abundance of gold, and pursuit of it, have already caused california and unprecedented rise in life. Thank you. That is president poke. He is making this declaration about the way in which there economy is being transformed. People are pouring in and nobody wants to do any work except for digging for gold. Ships arrive, the crews dessert because they want to go up to the gold diggings. Psychologists are very interested in us, gold fever takes people. Over the curious thing about it is that it is not particularly useful. I dont know if youve ever thought about this, today it is possible to do 70 conductors, heat shields on spaceships. But then it was mainly for decoration. And also sometimes as a unit of currency. It doesnt rust. You can make coins out of it. It is not really useful, nevertheless it was incredibly valuable. Its one of the many things that have been so important to our history, like gold and tobacco, which great fortunes were made on. Though they werent essential. Were thinking about. People start pouring into california, even around the world, england, france, germany, south america, even china. There is a huge amount of enthusiasm about finding ways to get to california. Lots of handbooks like this began to be published. This was published in boston. And account of california and the wonderful gold regions with descriptions two different routes to california. Information about the ancient and modern discoveries of gold. It was help for travelers on how they are going to get there. Now one of the there were essentially three ways of getting there. What they had in common is that they were all incredibly difficult. Unbelievably difficult. This is 1849, still another 20 years before you could get their boy railroad. The first ones were invented but they were very short lines. One of the ways was by going in a clipper ship. This is a new type of ship with a lot of sale, capable of sailing fast. One possibility was to sail from the east coast all the way down through the south atlantic, then around cape horn. What is that like . Horrible. It is the storminess waters in the entire world, you are coming into the teeth and it could come in two weeks that is one way of doing it. Lots of people tried that. And this is an ad for it, the ship called the california. And you can see the artist has implied that you can see the coast, which is not true. They rearrange the topography. That is one possibility. A second possibility was to go by steam ship. Instead of going all the way around the tip of south america, sail into the east coast, into the caribbean where the crossing is narrowest. Then either at the place from panama or nicaragua, go across by land, then take a second ship which would take you to San Francisco. The advantage of doing it that way was that the journey was a great deal shorter. The disadvantage was that just about the best place in the world to die of malaria and yellow fever was there. This is an incredibly difficult place just to live. A few years for decades later people had successfully built the suez canal, they tried to build the panama canal, they failed because they all died of horrible tropical diseases. That was a risky business. The incentive was so great. For california direct, the extraordinary inducements. The quickest and cheapest and safe, it is what they claim. The third way was to go on the trails. Of the three routes taken, this was the one and most frequently. As you know, the oregon trail really opened up in about 1843 or 44. Five or six years previous to this. They worked out that the best way to do it was to start at independence, missouri, go off the river then across to the sweet water river, across the rockies of the lowest point, then pick up the headwaters of the snake river where meets the Columbia River, then down as far as portland where the Columbia River reaches another river. It was at this point that various cut offs were established. Particularly the california trail with a cut off down here near sacramento. This is approaching it overland rather than by sea. The oregon trail is very difficult itself. If you take the california trail, its even worse. You would have to go into northern nevada to a place called the humbled sink. Which is usually a dry riverbed, it only has water there it for a few days. It is usually just bonedry. They had to cross is incredibly hot, arid desert. And all along the way people died from various. Things but make matters worse, you then had to cross this year at nevada mountains themselves. It was harder crossing those rather than the rockies. Great skiing country today, but we lived in softer times and they did. Already by then, when most famous incidents in american cannibalism had taken place there. The dawn are party was a group that set off from missouri, took the california cut off, were part way of this year at nevada mountains when a severe blizzard snow them in. They were not capable of going forward, but they also can get down the mountains. The snow is too thick. Many of them died, the survivors ate the bodies of the relatives who died in order to survive. News of this spread rapidly. Anyone who is going to the gold rush over the donor route is the route taken today, you still go that way if you cross the mountains. It is hard but relatively the easiest way. But they knew this is the kind of territory they were crossing. So very rapidly, during the first discoveries in 1848 and 49, Something Like 80,000 people poured into this area, the area around sacramento. The migration carried on over the next five or six years. Here is something to think about that is easy to forget. It was only an 1848s that california became part of the republic. Until then it had been part of mexico. Most americans probably did not know where was. Suddenly, it becomes part of america. Suddenly it turns out to have been on a credible abundance of wealth. How galling must it have been to mexico, not only did they lose the war, they hadnt noticed for the previous 350 years that they were literally sitting on a gold mine. It is one of these many historical ironies. It can prompt meditations for the ditch of good fortune. Now we need to talk a little bit about reverse. I said im doing this diagram, this is the foothills of the Sierra Nevada where the gold was found. It is in the place where rivers are flowing rapidly downhill, but beginning to flow out into the plains into the flatter land of the central valley. Magic in that birdseye view. Now think of it looking at it from the side. It is Something Like this. If this is the central valley, and that is the high sierras, the only area that the gold was found was this area. Now why should that be . Tell us why you think it is found here . Maybe because thats where the Mineral Deposits were based on the geology of the area . They started looking in the river itself. What happens to a river when it is flowing out of the mountains into the low land. It a positive sentiment. It is carrying settlements, why does it deposit it there . That is the lowest part. It cant move through with the water, it just gets left. What carries more sentiment a fast or slow one . Fast. Exactly. This is the area where it starts to slow down, the river slows down. As it does it starts to drop the sediment it is carrying. Does it first drop the heaviest or lightest things . The heaviest. Such as . Rocks, gold. Gold is very dense. In other words, fast flowing rivers carry a lot of sentiment. But as they slow down, they lose some of its energy and begin to deposit their load. They deposit the gold first because it is the heaviest element. That is why it is such a good place to dig. If you looked at that map, here it is. Look at this photograph. Can you see that the river is meandering . It is flowing in a curve. Kelly, when the river is flowing around curves, is the current fastest on the outside of the band or the inside . The outside. Why . Im not quite sure why it flows faster on the outside. You are absolutely right. It is because the water flows in a Straight Line until something stops it. It flow straight downhill until it hits the bank, then it flows missed rate line until it hits again. What is happening all the time in the rivers is that the bands are tanning to become more exaggerated. If you had a window seat in a plane and look down, you can often see where the course of the river used to be, which isnt there any longer. We have things called talks bows which look like this. And you can see it clearly. It used to be there, it used to be huge band and that 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 in this transitional area coming out of the mountains, it means that the best place to look is on the inside of the bans. Because that is where the current is flowing more slowly. That means that is where it is going to be dropped. You can see on the photograph, there is a little beach on inside of the band where the water is hardly flowing at all. The Perfect Place to stake a plane if you are one of the california miners was on the inside of the band where the river ends. Sure enough, that is where they found a lot of goals. One of the great things about the early days of California Gold rush is that it was a very democratic kind of thing. Anybody could do. It you had to get, there that was hard, but once you where theyre all you needed was a shovel and a pan. It was just like a walk. Just like this minor is holding. What you do, you shovel into the pan some of the sediment from the riverbank, put it in water, and then you gradually swirl it around so that you make a suspension of the lighter particles in the water. And just let that flow over the sides of the pan with a heavier particle staying behind. You carry on doing it gently and methodically, with a lot of care impatience. Eventually what youre left with is a bed of gravel with gold flakes. You can pick out the flakes of gold. That is the way it was. Done it is a very low tech business. Incident, lame when we look at the history of who got rich, but we discovered that it was mainly the people who not dog but sold shovels and pans and donkeys and food. That was the way to make a fortune. Whether or not the diggers found gold, you would still get paid for the provisions. And you could charge a very high price. The stuff that come a long way, it was incredibly high demand and you can get top price for the sale of it. We have lots of illustrations of people using very primitive recovery techniques. Usually gangs of five or. Six it was a slightly more sophisticated device, it is called a rocker. It is a mixture of gravel and water is poured in at the top and filters down through a series of zips. Each one is a little bit finer than before. You pour the water over, the course or gravel gets caught on top. On the lower level, you have a piece of rough burlap sacking, or a bit of carpet, and the little particles of gold catch in the fabric. After you have sluice the water across, it you can pick out the particles of gold. This became actual currency in the gold district. It starts to courtesy on people that if the gold is there, it must have come further upstream. So doesnt that make sense to go upstream to find it . Of course, the answer was yes. Here is how that works. Back to the diagram of the hillside. You found lots of it lying about in the water down here. That means that there is somewhere up here, there is actually a vein of gold or gold bearing rock, which is exposed to the surface. As the water flows over it, this is over 100 of thousands of years, the gold is formed deep in the earth under High Pressure and temperature by a geological process. We have the tectonic thrust which is the boggling of the rocks which can bring to the service. That is why gold is usually found a mountain districts because of the irregularities of the earths crust. Lets imagine, this is where the gold vein is. If you decide to look for the gold vein itself, heres how you do it. You go upstream and you test the water here, and then you go upstream again and tested here. Then you go up in tested here. Each of these places, you find some gold, but less than you had down here because of the pace of the river. Finally you get to a place where you find none at all. You have gone above the vein. That tells. You then you do closer testing, here, and here. And eventually this is where it is. Its hardly self evident, it just looks like. Rock but you can work out where comes from. Then there is a possibility of trying to dig out the gold itself, which is very difficult to do. But that is a logical conclusion that the minors came to. Looking for the origins of the gold itself. Them go ahead. It is called a vein or adrift. There are lots of minors terminologye2pq depending on whe miner is speaking. All the techniques of digging for gold required access to water. Another group of very entrepreneurial 49 hours realized water suppliers were highly lucrative businesses. That is going to replace them and diverting the stream to the place that people are digging. That a flu ms. Just a primitive above ground canal. A wooden channel. It will guide the water to places people are digging. In other words, the very first strikes are here on the river, the main part. Eventually people start saying, for a long time the river flowed here, thats a great place to dig. We cant do it if it is dried up unless we have a water supply. But then the loom, entrepreneurs are bringing a flu to help them do it. So high up in the Sierra Nevada, lots of these enterprising men were building flew ms. To divert the reverse to bring it down to the goal bearing country. You can see the process going on. Theres a small stream here. They built a very primitive rock dam. That was goodenough so that they could channel the water into the flu which carries the water to where they will be exploring for minerals. Then it occurs to somebody, if it is pretty good getting it from the side of the river, think how much better it is going to be if we actually dig into the bed of the river itself. How do we do that . We can only do it by damning and diverting the river. This is a period where a lot of illustrators went to do pictures. We can reconstitute it pretty well. This is a place called murderers barr. You can see that that is my deduction them. You can see that what has happened here is that they have built a dam across the river itself, and they built a diversionary channel them. The bed of the river now becomes dry so they can dig down into it and get the settlement which has been accumulating there over hundreds of thousands of years. There is a catch. You also notice that they have introduced water wheels. Has the river narrows you get faster water, that is a lot of energy. It turns the wind wheels. There is a steam engine here. Theres some technology that is being brought in. This is all expensive. Guy with a shovel cannot afford this. It is only people who have capital that can do work like this. Very early on, by 1851 and two, it is people with capital who are making money mining. They can do these big earth shifting operations that can make it pay. What tends to happen, people come out hoping they would be independent gold diggers, they become employees of minors. And they realize the value had gone a long way down, it is literally becoming mining, and they are minding into the gravel underneath the bed. The old bed of the river itself. It wasnt long after that before someone invented this method, hydraulics. The river has been gradually eroding the mountainside over the course of millions of years, lets speed up the process by firing against the mountainside a very High Pressure jet of water to in effect, accelerate their russian process hundreds of times over. It is a matter of getting a flu upstream and guiding the water down until they bring them down at these like big skill fire hoses. They have incredible High Pressure. If you put your fingers there it would break your fingers. And they shoot it out of narrow gauged nozzles with great pressure against the mountainside. This washes down sentiment out of which it is possible to gather the gold in the same way. The very first environmental laws, were in the 18 seventies to ban this practice. Tons of debris was coming downstream and stifling the farms. Very bad for the farmers. In the fifties and sixties, the mining was more important than farming. When all of these other methods had been tried and exhausted, then it is a question of digging into the mountainside and trying to follow the vein into the interior of the mountain itself. That is hard rock mining. What youre bringing out of the mine is enormous quantity of mail quart sites, small elements of gold. The groups of fellows tried it, bit by bit they were edged oh by people with capital who could do it on a large scale. This is what the big minds looked like by the 18 sixties and seventies. The technology of photography was good enough them. 49 hours become mine labors. Heres what happens inside a working gold mine. You have teams of to working a technique called double jacking. There is one guy holding a chisel against iraq face, the other one is hitting it with a sledgehammer. High degree of trust among friends. You turn it slightly and hit it again, turn it again to dislodge the gravel. Over the course of an hour of hard hammering, you have cut a hole, maybe the steep. Imagine working against a rock face which is semicircular. You cut one there, one there, and all the way around. Then fill them with gunpowder, lead fuses to each one of them, late the fuses, retire to a safe distance, and then let them explode. And if youve done it right, if the holes are this deep, and arc of explosions will dislodge the rock, when the dust and smoke had cleared, you can go in and clear out that rock and repeat the process again. It is incredibly dangerous. For it being a minor was a job in which are most likely to be killed at work. You can imagine that the roof can cave in, you can get caught by charges that didnt get sent off. Methane gas will sometimes explode. Sometimes theyre suffocated gases where you cant breathe. They are horrible working environments. In those days they did not have electric light, they had smoky candles, the atmosphere was terrible. In every way it was a very deplorable way of life. Improvements were developed. One was improved explosive called nitro glycerin. A liquid explosive. More powerful than gunpowder, more violent volatile. Then the invention of drills, in which High Pressure water is this power source instead of guys with hammers. The problem with those is that they created showers of dust that the minors tended to be breathing in and tended to die young with them silicone cysts and new assists, mining related diseases. Horrible way of life. Underground railroads were bill so that you can float this onto wagons, and have them drawn up to the surface. When when the hard rock gets to the service, then the question is how do you get the cold out of it. It is no longer good to use the panning technique. The parts per million are very small. There is not much cold in a lot of rock. Instead you had to use a crush or. On the right you can see a water will, fast flowing water turns the wheel, it is attached to this device, an axle bearing cans. Has the cans go past these rods, these are attached to great heavyweights. So it is fed through here on a conveyor and these devices reduce it to powder. They stamp it. Them the next thing is to combine the powdered or with mercury. Who has seen any mercury . It is a metal that is liquid at room temperature, we now know that you could get poisoned in the gold mines. It is very toxic. You shouldnt work around it because theyre too dangerous. But that was it known around that time. This reddish rock is calleds in a bar. That is mercury oxide. It appears from these reports that minds of quick silver found in the vicinity of the gold mines. That is another name of mercury. So it becomes as important as gold mining. This is the standard process from separating metal from or. What happens is that you mix the powdered or with water and you make a sludge. Then you pour in mercury, the mercury and the gold combined chemically. And theyre very heavy. By sending it across a sloping gradient, this golden mercury compound to fall to the bottom. Then you heat the whole thing. Because the mercury is already so volatile, it is vaporized and you are left behind with the gold. In a highly concentrated pure form. You could turn into gold bars. That is the way it is done as commercial mining operation. I wanted to show you this. This is about 20 years after the first invention of photography. It perfectly illustrates the order that lieutenant sherman made. This is San Francisco bay in 1850. Ships would come in from all over the worlds and would never set sail again. The crews deserted. Everyone thought, gold. And they went to the hills. So this incredible photograph of the whole city, the whole harbor i should say, with these abandoned ships. Dramatic. So much so that one of the things shopkeeper started to do was to drag the ships up on land. See this one and this one, they just converted them into stores. They were big containment areas. Im there other things interesting. There are a lot of criminal lithographs, a style of pictures at the time. Tell us about this picture, if you would . Wait for one second while the mic comes over to you. Them you see a lot of people insides it is the bar of a gambling saloon. People are trading gold, i think . What are you meant to be surprised by as a viewer . Look at the close. Everyone is pretty 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. They would be chinese. How about these two . Are they from another asian country . They are mexican. The artist is showing us that the traditional dress of all the different groups of people who have come from different parts of the world. This is americas first multi cultural environment, there are people from, china chile, mexico, switzerlands, with all sorts of people have gathered. And it is very unusual. People were not used to that. Who is this . It is a stereotype. It is the irish drunk. I know that because i am irish. When the irish get there, they get drunk. Its just an old stereotype. And again, heres an illustration, what is it like in china town with its suddenly develops in sacramento . The idea is, how we are just that . Chinese People Living here in america. That is what the artist is getting at. This is meant to be a horse market in sonora. In the background, you can see the saloon. There are two chinese men here, the mexican here, the angle a guy who is buying the horse, African American over here. People, southerns were take their slaves to the gold mines. A good concentration of people coming from all over the world. They deal with pictures like this, we would say what a weird world is that. It is the result of rapidly populating them. This is above the president speech in that handout. Describing the way in which gold accelerated the process of american settlements. Little grains of bright yellow metal through bridge had across the desert, established a front line along the Rocky Mountains and drew them in from the east, farther out onto the plains. The glittering price lighted the way, illuminating the darkness of obstacles and convinced men that no matter how great the barriers, they could be surmounted. After the men came their baggage both material and cultural. Freight wagons bought trappings of civilization, the refinement of books and art. The advanced prospect errors found money with which to buy, and out of their spending came civic development, churches, schools and above all women. When the family unit came, Permanent Assembly was usually assured. With the floating scum gone, those that were serious settled down to extract their own gold, grain, cattle. Another section of the United States commenced. He makes the point. If you look at the history of how communities developed, they started out as agricultural and later on became urbanized. But in these mining camps it was the other way around. Lots of people all missing in place, and after the minds had played out, they gradually began to disperse and two of farming population. It was an afterthought in the long run. So that is an example of the way in which the process of organization was reversed. Next time we will talk about the origins of the history of the oil industry. Now on American History tv, from Technical Community cold, a history class about silver war weaponry such as muskets, carbines and revolvers. The professor describes the technological balances allowed searchers to fire faster and with more. Accuracy know, the weapons that they were issued because that is what you need for warfare. One thing that i felt fascinating in research was looking at the early 19th century. In other words, from the years 1800 up until the American Civil War from 1860, 60, winds to 65. This was also a period in the United States of intense invention. I mean americans were incredibly creative at this time. We were really a world leader in inventing just about everything. Everything from steam ships to steam power in factories to the telegraph. Just layer after layer of creativity. In a kind of strange fortunate way though, we see that a lot of these inventors started using their talents inventing weapons. In other words, there was a certain technological revolution in weaponry, technology during the early 1800s. This is one of the factors that leads to such high casualties in the america civil war. It
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