Hello, hello everyone. Hi, I’m glad you’re here. Welcome to Tea & Gemstones, your podcast home for anything and everything to do with jewelry, gemstones, and precious metals. We talk about royal jewels, the psychology of diamond shapes, analyze red carpet looks and dive into all things historical. To take you along on these sparkly auditory journeys is me, I am your host, Jen.
This episode you just started is the conclusion of a four-part series called “A Casual History of Gold.” We began the series with episode one, where we looked at the big, biiiiig picture as we addressed some fundamentals. Where does gold come from? I explain this seemingly simple question with a great deal of nuance and metaphors, haha but to summarize the answer, gold probably came from stars going boom! Or stars going smash! That’s an explanation my four-year-old would really adore and honestly maybe I should try to explain more of my complex science scenarios through a toddler filter. Once gold got to Earth, humans started finding it. And we loved it instantly. We’ve discussed how mankind across time, culture and location has always attributed a reverence and valuableness to gold; naming the yellow metal with words meaning, “skin of the gods” in Egypt, “blood and excrement of the gods” in South America. Gold has been used to craft the objects that mean the most to us; those items associated with religion, royalty and romance. Humans then started putting gold to work- can’t just sit in a temple as a pretty idol statute anymore- well… you can- but hey- gold- you’ve also got to go to work. Coins enter the world stages and economies are forever changed. Get it? Coins… changed? Okay, that joke was bad. And what is also a bit of a downer is that along with gold becoming the basis of wealth… powerful European nations follow their gold lust across the Atlantic. Episode two of the series examined the collision of Spain’s desire for colonizing and conquering upon the indigenous South American civilizations. There really could not have been more opposite viewpoints on golds and they clashed with tragic consequences. Gold is a powerful motivator for the exploration and development of the two American continents. And in the most recent episode, episode three, we talked about the exploration not of physical land, but of the scientific and philosophic possibilities that could be unlocked by the human mind. It is fascinating how different cultures all over the world; Asia, the middle east, Egypt, the Greco-Romans and Europe, all fairly independently endeavored to create gold… and I still marvel how this art of alchemy, which sought synthesized gold and artificial eternal life led to a plethora of true scientific achievements and the establishment of the modern profession of chemistry. Whew. So. For this fourth and final episode in the Casual History of Gold series, I wanted to look at gold’s involvement in history a bit closer to home… my home continent of North America, and my country, the United States of America. What part did gold play in helping the USA become a country stretching “for sea to shining sea”? What thanks do we owe to gold for the multi-cultural melting pot nature of our nation? And is gold the answer to any economic problem… or the cause? Plus… Americans just really love shiny jewelry… right? Let’s dive into part four of “A Casual History of Gold”: Red, white and gold.
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In terms of natural resources, the United States is a treasure trove. We’ve got vast amounts of coal, copper, lead, iron, natural gas, timber and uranium- lots of all the valuable and functional stuff a bustling world power with a population of nearly 330 million people needs. So where does gold fit in? With a resource like coal, it’s pretty straightforward to see how coal contributed to the development of America- literally fueling the Industrial Revolution and all that jazz. Gold has first been found in Virginia in 1782, but not much- and for some reasons people didn’t pay the discovery much attention. Fast forward a little bit to 1799. In North Carolina, a 12-year-old boy named Conrad Reed found a 17lb yellow “rock” in his family farm’s creek. Conrad brought his discovery to his dad, John Reed and Reed starts using it as a doorstop for his front door. Three years later farmer Reed showed his doorstop to a jeweler friend and his buddy was like, “hey… um- I think that’s gold.” And Reed is like, “so what?” And the jeweler offered to buy it and told Reed to name his price. Reed suggest $3.50, which was about a week’s worth of wages. The jeweler agreed, paid Reed and took the gold rock with him and he promptly resold it for $3,600. Reed decided he should do some more investigating of his farm’s gold potential, and he opened the United States’ first gold mine on his family land. Right after he opened the mine, one of Reed’s slaves found a 28lb gold nugget. Hopefully Reed got better business advice about a selling price than what he let his ‘doorstop’ go for. Local newspapers reported on the gold discovery and farmers all across the Carolinas started dedicating their off seasons from growing crops to mining their properties for gold. At first American gold mining was a really down-home operation, literally people digging in their backyards or panning their creeks in their spare time. But as word of the Carolina gold was spreading all over the world.
In southern England, a class of miners had honed their skills extracting copper and tin for decades… but those deposits were now running empty. When word of the American gold deposits reached those English miners, a lot of them left and immigrated to North Carolina. They brought their generations of mining expertise with them and gave the American gold mining community a super boost of knowledge and skill. And there was plenty of work… because just three years after Farmer Reed and his golden doorstop, gold was discovered in the neighboring state of Georgia. Unfortunately, it wasn’t on a farm this time, but instead on Cherokee land… which on brand for American history… was overrun and big air quotes here “claimed” by white settlers who swarmed in and established mines. So much Indian land was taken for gold mining the land grab is marked in history as the “Great Intrusion.” The Cherokees understandably were not happy about being pushed off their land for mining operations. The tensions over the gold mines in Georgia contributed to the overall anti-Indian sentiment in the government, and in 1830 President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830… aka the Trail of Tears. In episode two of this series we talked about the devastating consequences heaped upon south American indigenous peoples when foreign settlers come seeking gold, and sadly the Indian of the United States’ southeast were not an exception to the violent trend. The Indians tried to fight the Indian Removal Act in the supreme court, who actually sided with them at first… but then overturned the ruling the next year. The Native Americans were forced out and gone, and Georgia hosted a Gold Lottery and gave away the Cherokee land in 40-acre parcels to miners. And the miners sure got busy; they mined up so much gold that in 1835 President Jackson signed into existence new branch locations for the national mint to make coins from all this new gold; with locations including Charlotte, North Carolina and in Georgia. The rapid establishment of an experienced mining workforce meant that in 1849, these east coast miners were primed to lead the charge into sunny California.
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The American Dream is a concept at the center of the American identity. People journeyed across the Atlantic into the unknown to try and make a better life for themselves and their families. The “dream” was rooted in hard work, the hustle; if you work day in and day out, your wealth will increase bit by bit, year after year. But the discovery of gold in California morphed this concept of ‘the American dream’ forever… changing it from a long process of a lifetime dedication to hard work to the new dream of a burst of instant fabulous wealth. The mindset shifted to seeking out a lucky ‘big score’ which would set you up for life without the hard scrabble hustle of daily work. But how did people discover there was “gold in them there hills?”
How did that all kick off? In present day we call California The Golden State and their slogan is ‘Eureka!’ Meaning… I found something! And that something was gold! How was that gold first found?
Well, the land area we call California has been in the hands of a couple different nations. Spain claimed the area first, and in 1821 when Mexico won independence from Spain, Mexico got to be in charge. Mexico didn’t develop the land much beyond setting up some missions to quote “make civilized Christians” out of the indigenous peoples. We first have a record of gold out of California from March 9th, 1842, when a farmer slash rancher named Francisco Lopez was hiking to look for some runaway horses. He stopped at riverbed to dig up wild onions for a snack and found some gold nuggets. He sent the pieces off to the US Mint for authentication, but word of gold in the wilds of Mexican territory didn’t spread. Lopez set up a small local mine around the river, but he did it pretty quietly. No rush was triggered. Four years later in 1846, some Indians at one of the Mexican missions found some gold but the friars kept it a secret because they too wanted to avoid a gold rush- a whole bunch of settlers and prospectors frenzily descending on their land wasn’t what they wanted. But gold can’t stay hidden forever. And while the California Gold Rush is an enormous cultural and historical event that rapidly changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people- the phenomenon originated with some guys just trying to build a town in the wilderness.
The man who found the gold that really started the California gold rush was named James W. Marshal. He had been born in New Jersey in 1810. When he was 24, he left home to seek adventure in the west. Unfortunately, the adventure he got was malaria. He was living in Missouri and having a really hard time feeling healthy after getting sick. His doctor suggested Marshal move farther west to nicer weather. So, Marshal took a train to Oregon… decided he didn’t like Oregon and he finally ended up in a newly founded agricultural settlement in California called Sutter’s Fort. Marshal became friends with the founder of Sutter’s Fort, a man named John Sutter. Quick bio about John Sutter… he started life named “Johann” and was born in what’s now Germany. When Sutter was 21, he’d married a rich widow and spent so much of her money he was about to go to jail for debt. But he skipped his trial and took his wife and five children to America under his self-stylized new name of ‘Captain John Sutter.’ He wasn’t in the military… he was lying, he just liked having the title. He had some pretty colorful travel adventures all over North America, including living in the Kingdom of Hawaii for a while. Sutter ultimately ended up in Mexico, getting permission from the Mexican government to start a settlement in California he claimed would be an “agricultural utopia.” He got permission granted and set up “Sutter’s Fort.” Now Sutter… he is an atrocious human being who committed truly heinous human rights atrocities against the indigenous peoples who were already living on the land he was quote, “given” unquote. He treated them like slaves locked up on his property as laborers. He would give Indian children away to friends as gifts. Yeah- not a good guy. Well, Sutter had this land, and he was trying to build and develop it. When James Marshal arrived, Sutter hired him to build a water driven sawmill on the banks of a river. While the sawmill was under construction, Marshal went to inspect the water wheel and found a few nuggets of gold caught up in it. He took the nuggets to Sutter, and they actually went and got an encyclopedia to read about “gold” to see that’s what they really had found. Sutter expressed great concern that a gold rush would destroy his utopia in the making and he tried to keep the discovery quiet. But there was a man in Sutter’s Fort named Samuel Brannan who owned a store that sold supplies… and he also had a newspaper. Brannan wanted to make money… so he published the gold discovery in his newspaper. Apparently, Brannan took a jar of gold and walked up and down the streets of San Francisco yelling quote, “Gold! Gold from the American river!” That will get people’s attention, haha. Larger newspapers and east coast papers picked up the story and it. Was. On.
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At first it was local people in California and neighboring Oregon deserting their everyday lives to go look for gold. Samuel Brannan after he published his first paper about finding gold couldn’t publish another issue for a long time because all his workers quit and went mining! But he sold mining supplies out of his store at a massive mark-up to the influx of people; Brannan had purchased pans and spades for 20 cents each… and then sold them for $15 each. In nine weeks he made $36,000. On December 5th, 1848, President James K. Polk confirmed the massive gold discoveries in a speech to Congress. At this time the United States had won the Mexican-American war and California was a territory, not a state. But people from all over the United States and abroad were headed for the California mines. 1849 was the biggest year of immigration to California, hence the nickname “the forty-niners.” People poured in from Latin America, China, Australia, Turkey, New Zealand, France, Italy, Germany, Mexico even some African nations. 90,000 people came to California in 1849. In six years there were 300,000. For a point of reference, in 1847 San Francisco had only 500 people. Scores of boats arrived on the California coast, and they were just abandoned because not only did the passengers disembark, but the sailors and boat crew ditched the ship and went ashore too! California didn’t stay a territory for long, gold was a powerful motivator for obtaining statehood, which California was granted in September 1850. It wasn’t all good news… on a very local level… Sutter’s fears came true- his little Sutter’s Fort was totally overrun by huge crowds of people and squatters and his livestock was poached and buildings torn down. His fields of crops were emptied and trampled. Sutter actually tried to appeal to the United States government for compensation for what was done to Sutter’s Fort, but he never received any money. He was broke. But the fact that Sutter didn’t make it rich off the gold rush seems exactly like what he deserved for all the awful things he did to the Indians. James Marshal did not benefit from the gold rush either- his sawmill project was a failure and hordes of prospectors pushed him from his land. Marshal subsequently tried in turn to start a vineyard, and then his own gold mine, but nothing turned a profit. He died penniless.
On the micro scale of personal individual stories, the gold rush in California was brutal and harsh. The California goldfields were lawless places, with violence as the preferred method to settle disputes and claims. Once the easily accessible gold was panned from the rivers, the business of extracting gold from deeper in the earth was messy and difficult, fraught with hazards. Many of the forty-niners who mined never made enough money to have a “big score” and never work again. But the businessmen supplying the equipment for the dreamers… they made bank. One example is a Mr. Levi Strauss, who first started his denim empire by selling overalls to miners in San Francisco in 1853. But the huge influx of people immigrating into an area at warp speed brought with them equally tremendous development of towns, roads, infrastructure, railroads… And not just for California… A 2017 study by the Journal of Economic History states that the economic expansion of the California gold rush led to 15 years of steady, recession-free growth for all of America.
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Let’s look to the north… the wild untamed north of the Alaskan territory and the Yukon in Canada, just to the east of Alaska. In the area of the Yukon there is a region called the Klondike which is particularly wild. With no real roads, the only way into this land was to go up rivers in boats… and only in the summers when the temperatures were above freezing. The landscape was varied with mountains, valleys, dense forests and wide-open exposed tundra. The Native peoples shared the land with bears, moose and wolves. Needless to say, the climate was nowhere near as welcoming as sunny California. So how in this inhospitable landscape did gold come to be discovered? Who was poking around the Yukon? Well, let me introduce you to a man named Ed Schieffelin (she-fah-len). Ed Schieffelin was born in 1847 in Pennsylvania. He was a restless, curious man who history paints as being just compelled to seek out precious metals. There’s a quote directly from Schieffelin, “I never wanted to be rich, I just wanted to get close to the earth and see mother nature’s gold.” End quote.
Ed and his brother had discovered silver in the Arizona territory and founded the famous city of Tombstone, Arizona. He had also tried prospecting in California, but he was not successful there. Schieffelin loved maps and geology and he had a belief there was a “continental belt” of precious minerals that striped across and up the North American continent. After coming up empty in California, this belief led him to lead a prospecting expedition by the Yukon River in 1882. He found some gold nuggets and because of Schieffelin’s tremendous jackpot with silver in Arizona, his gold discovery got a lot of publicity. Hundreds of hopeful miners followed Schieffelin’s route up the river. Schieffelin, himself already extremely rich from his Arizona success, didn’t think the 50 degrees below zero temps of the Arctic were fun… it wasn’t worth freezing to death to him- he declared Alaska impossible to mine and he went home to his mansion in San Francisco. But to a lot of other people, gold was worth the risk.
After Schieffelin left the north in 1883- the north was fairly quiet. Prospectors continued to follow the rivers and stake claims. Several small boom towns would burst into life over a spring and summer only to vanish come winter. Now, in this time period of the late 1880s, communication and travel still isn’t that quick, especially somewhere far, and remote like the Yukon. In August 1896, a small group of prospectors went down a tributary of the Klondike River called Bonanza Creek… and they found absolutely massive amounts of gold. Every local-ish miner and prospector anywhere in the Yukon swarmed upon the newfound bounty… they came up the rivers on boats or across land via dog sled. But because this discovery happened over the north’s harsh fall and winter- word of the new gold found didn’t really leave the Yukon. But whoa-ho-ho, when the rivers and ports unfroze come spring… oh my my! ….the prospectors who had been mining the Bonanza Creek all winter started sailing into ports like San Francisco and Seattle with their bounties. The first ships from the Yukon miners docked on July 15th, 1897 in San Fran. There were two ships were named ‘Excelsior’ and ‘Portland.’ And get this- adjusted to today’s values, those two ships were carrying one billion dollars in gold. During the entire California gold rush estimates state about 2 billion dollars of gold were found. So… half of that total amount is on the first TWO SHIPS from the Yukon. When this news hit the newspapers and telegraphs, people went hysterical. On July 17th, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a front-page headline in all capital letters: “GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!” The news of chunks of gold just laying on the ground will excite people at any time- but particularly now Americans were primed for gold fever. By now the glow of the California gold rush had long since faded… the 15-year economic boom had not only slowed, the United States was in some financial trouble. In the 1890s there had been a series of financial recessions and bank failures leading to mass unemployment. And America was using the gold standard- meaning paper money was tied to how much gold the government physically had in hand…. And that wasn’t going well- people were hoarding gold because HELLO- the banks are failing! People aren’t comfortable with economic uncertainty. Having a large amount of physical gold in their possession seemed like an absolute dream come true to a LOT of people. In one year after those two ships came to harbor, 100,000 people tried to go mine the Yukon. To took California six years to amass 300,000 people from their gold rush. Getting to the Yukon was exceptionally difficult and dangerous, but the massive amount of people making the effort should indicate how powerful a motivator gold was to desperate people. ‘Gold fever” caused mass resignations of staff which shut down many businesses in the continental US, even whole cities! In Seattle, the city was thrown into disarray when the mayor, 12 policemen and most of the streetcar drivers abandoned their civic duties to go treasure hunting. The gold rush was a full cultural phenomenon. Branded clothing, equipment, food, etc were all branded as “Klondike”. We still do that nowadays- think of like The North Face or Patagonia… we all like to feel connected to the wildness.
Now technically the Klondike Gold Rush was happening in Canada, but the borders of southeast Alaska had been murky and disputed between the US, Britain and Canada ever since the US bought Alaska from Russia in 1867. But because of the remote area and the sheer numbers of American prospectors, the US kind of got to steamroll in unhindered. The Canadians were able to draw some lines in the sand in areas they could control, like the shipping ports- at which point the prospectors had to cooperate with things like paying custom duties… however steep the price.
The frenzy of the Klondike gold rush concluded almost as suddenly as it had burst into happening. The Spanish-American War began in 1898 which removed the gold rush updates from newspapers, cutting off a supply of newly interested miners finding out about Yukon. And funnily, the boom towns of the rush, like Dawson City and Skagway- once known for their wild lawless ways, were becoming more civilized and developed, even as their populations dropped and leveled off from boom height numbers. In August 1898, gold was found in Nome, Alaska and many prospectors left the Yukon to seek new fortunes.
The long-term consequences of the Klondike gold rush are mixed. Like in California, the economic boost brought new lines of communication and travel to places that would have otherwise stay much longer isolated and underdeveloped. But also as in the Golden State, the native Indigenous population suffered greatly, the Han people’s numbers fell catastrophically from environmental damage to their rivers and forests, their traditional fishing and hunting grounds destroyed. They actually had to appeal to the Canadian government for aid to prevent dying of famine in 1904… thanks to the gold rush.
Seattle really reaped the rewards of the gold rush- it is what truly established Seattle as a major city. The year before the rush, Seattle’s business receipts totaled $300,000. Spring of 1898? $25 million in just eight months. In 2016, Seattle was home to six Fortune 500 companies, including Amazon, Starbucks, Costco and Microsoft. Do we owe these massive global brands to the Yukon gold rush? The rush helped give Seattle the foundation to be the business powerhouse metropolis it now is. Maybe you can thank gold for your pumpkin spice latte and two-day prime shipping. The American economy as a whole experienced a boost, much like it did after the California gold rush. The bank crises of the 1890s were able to be put in the rear view. The Canadian economy experienced a ten-year gold super charged period of prosperity.
Aside from financial numbers… another benefit from the Klondike rush was establishing a relationship of cooperation between the US and Canada. The establishment of smooth transcontinental rail traffic, moving ships of cargo and passengers through ports- Canada and the US have a reputation for the longest peaceful border between nations and that good relationship really solidified at this time.
The northern gold rushes greatly contributed to the development of the state of Alaska. Alaska was officially incorporated as an organized territory in 1912, though it didn’t become the 49th US state until 1959. Alaska was literally a cash cow; with America’s economy on the gold standard, it was super awesome that Alaska was cranking out gold. But having the nation’s money tied to physical gold wasn’t a perfect situation; and the United States went off the gold standard in 1933 as part of trying to rebound from the Great Depression. But through the decades, Alaska has continued to sustain a high output of gold; in 2018, gold still accounted for 28% of all mining wealth from Alaska.
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America has always been a hungry nation. The United States perpetually wants to consume and spread and build… and gold is fuel for all those goals. Of course the country is going to want to expand and claim land if it has valuable resources. And what is more valuable than gold? Not much, haha With money comes power and the opportunity to grow and develop other facets of an economy beyond just mining; case in point, California has the largest economy of all fifty united states, and indeed if California was it’s own country it would have the fifth largest economy in the world. I submit that the greater gains from the gold rush come on the macro scale; what happened to California as a state and a culture, and in turn what that did for the United States. The California gold rush caused a rapid multi-cultural infusion into a small area. Gold created a super melting pot, setting California up to be an example of vibrant cultural fusion. Alaska saw it’s development as sort of a discovered piggy bank for America; the northern state funded and boosted the national economy on a grand scale. The gold boost from the north helped set America up to be in a good financial situation heading into the challenges of the early 1900s, like World War I.
Looking beyond just America’s direct history… Gold is connected to so much of our human experience. How we show love and commitment with rings and jewelry. To crown our royalty and our winners… we still give out gold medals to Olympic athletes. Gold has historically been at the center of religions; gold has been divinely personified in multiple cultures. Gold is a motivator; sending people across seas to unknown lands, expanding borders of nations, and explorers simply putting foot to ground to hunt lost treasures. Gold motivates not just physical seeking, but the lure of gold spurred mankind to experiment and wonder about the natural world- the side effect was not really synthetic precious metals- but the foundation of modern chemistry… with some notable scientific discoveries along the way. And with all these grand philosophical concepts, historical events and thousands of cultural artifacts… there really is nothing like the feeling of hanging your own gold chain around your neck, slipping on a beloved ring or pair of earrings. Gold is beautiful and we love it, always have, and always will. For that fact, a golden thread will stay woven tightly to human history.
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So that concludes the series “A Casual History of Gold.” It truly has been my pleasure to walk through these last four episodes with you. I mentioned in the introduction to the series back in episode eight that I wanted this series to feel like I came and sat down in your living room with a glass of wine to talk about gold… I suppose at this point we would have finished the bottle haha Please reference the show notes for a link to our website which has transcripts of all Tea & Gemstones episodes and the bibliography. Check out our Instagram to leave me some feedback on what you think of the series, or what you’d like for a future podcast episode. Our theme song is by Joseph McDade. I have been your host, Jennifer. Until next time, stay sparkly.