Who rushed for gold seems to be a very broad question, instead it should be who didn’t rush for gold? Anglo-Americans, Chinese men, Mexicans, Irish, Australians, French, Chileans and Italians are just a few of the nationalities that flocked to California to strike it rich. They came by boats, by railroads, by wagons and sometimes by foot. Even though the Americans were intruding on former-Mexican land, won in the Mexican-American War and where the government had promised earlier to protect Mexican and Spanish land titles, they still took over the region and attempted to push the foreigners off of “their” land to keep all the gold for themselves and other Anglo-Americans. The Americans in control of the mines and the towns passed the Foreign Miners’ Tax Law, heavily taxing any foreigner who dug for gold, in a hope to drive them from the dig sites. The 49ers also attempted to drive the Indians from their land in California by murdering them in groups. These brutal attacks coupled with starvation and low birth rates forced the Indians to relocate to the most remote part of the state, where they tried to stay out of the way. Eventually corporations took over small mines, leaving the 49ers to either become a wage earner within those mines or to open their own small business or to farm.
Question 1. How did the treatment of minorities during the Gold Rush potentially impact racial relations/tensions in the US?
Question 2. How did the invention of the telegraph and the rapidly spreading railroads help contribute to gold fever?
