On January 24, 1848, a few days before the signing of the peace treaty whereby Mexico ceded California to the U.S, gold was discovered on the Sacramento Valley estate of the Swiss-born frontiersman, John Augustus Sutter. Despite his attempts to keep it secret, the news leaked out and from all over California men flocked to the diggings. By September the news had reached the East and the whole country succumbed to golf fever. Clerks deserted their desks, soldiers their regiments, husbands their families. Within a year some 80,000 “Forty Niners” had poured into California from all over the world, most of them intent on sudden wealth. Many traveled overland by covered wagon, following the trails across the Plains and mountains, at least 5,000 dying from cholera, starvation, exhaustion and Indian attack. Thousands of others chartered vessels around Cape Horn, a voyage of 18,000 miles occupying four to eight months. Still others sought a short cut to the Pacific through the sweltering jungles of the Panama isthmus. It was one of the largest mass migrations in history which, in two years, transformed the sleepy seaside settlement of San Francisco (1847 population approximately 600) into a major seaport and the financial and cultural center of West (1850 population approximately 25,000).

Tags: California, covered wagon, Mexico