(FOX40.COM) — In the archives of the Crocker Art Museum sit 22 photos of a place that most Placer County residents wouldn’t know today, taken by a man who is legendary in the world of photography and captured at a turning point in the natural landscapes of the Sacramento region. Southern Placer County in the […]
Save this story for later.
Gum Shan. Gold Mountain. That was what the people in Guangdong Province called the faraway land where the native population had red hair and blue eyes, and it was rumored that gold nuggets could be plucked from the ground. According to an account in the San Francisco
Chronicle, a merchant visiting from Canton, the provincial capital likely soon after the discovery of gold at Sutter Creek, in 1848 wrote to a friend back home about the riches that he had found in the mountains of California. The friend told others and set off across the Pacific Ocean himself. Whether from the merchant’s letter, or from ships arriving in Hong Kong, news of California’s gold rush swept through southern China. Men began scraping together funds, often using their family’s land as collateral for loans, and crowding aboard vessels that took as long as three months to reach America. They eventually arrived in the thousands. Some came in search of gold; others were attracted
The incredibly racist San Francisco man who became dictator of Nicaragua
FacebookTwitterEmail
William Walker did not have the look of a conqueror.
He was slim with thin, light hair and grey eyes that were a little too close together. His cheekbones were unnaturally high, giving his face a sickly gauntness. Newspapers compared him often to Napoleon, both because of his size and his ambition.
In the summer of 1853, because William Walker was a narcissist and a racist, he decided he wanted to be the president of a country. He is not particular about locality whether in Lower California, Sonora, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, or elsewhere,” the Sacramento Bee wrote, “so that he can only be made President and Dictator of some populated spot on this hemisphere.