How did they get there?

In the year 1848 California had just become part of the United States of America. It was a long way away from the eastern states of the US, but some people from the East wanted to go there because the climate was so good for farming. Then news began to arrive in the East about gold in the hills of California. At first people just laughed. "Oh, the newspapers are just trying to make this new part of the US sound really good," they said. But they found out it was true: there were pieces of nearly pure gold in the rivers in California.

It wasn't easy to get there. There was no Panama Canal and no railway across North or Central America in the 1840s. Some travellers went by ship from the eastern coast of the US all round Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. When they got to San Francisco Bay, the nearest place to the gold fields, the passengers and crews just left the ships where they were and went straight off to look for gold. The gold rush was on!

Lots of people decided to go across the country. They took a train as far as the railroad went, then they took a steamboat to St. Joseph, Missouri. After that, they had to walk 2000 miles across the country. They started in the spring of 1849, with groups of wagons, animals to pull them, food and what they would need for a new home. They crossed the Rockies in the summer, then started the long walk across Wyoming. It looked flat, but it was all uphill and was difficult for the animals that pulled the wagons. Soon, people started to throw away anything heavy: stoves, beds, mirrors. They moved south west across the desert of Utah and into what is now Nevada. It was August and hot. There were no rivers, no good water and people and animals died. Then they came to 65 miles of desert with no water at all. It took 52 hours to cross it, if they could keep going. People and animals went mad and died, but some got through and found rivers and trees again. However, they still had to cross the High Sierras. They had to get through before September, after that the mountain paths were blocked by snow.

At last they came down to the rich grassland of the American River and could start to look for gold. The "forty-niners" washed it out of the river mud or they dug into the hill and became miners. Some of them didn't even have time to build houses, but lived in caves. Many of those who came later were disappointed. The first people there found gold and became rich, but there was nothing left for the late-comers. Those who didn't find gold went on later to look for silver in Nevada or to a later gold rush in Colorado in 1858.

Red Line New 4, Ernst Klett Verlag, Stuttgart, 1998, page 80 f.