My sons, God has given this gold to the Americans.
Had he desired us to have it, he would have given it to us ere now.
Therefore go not after it, but let others go.
Plant your lands and reap;
these be your best gold-fields, for all must eat while they live.
- Luis Peralta

Families who cherish their Gold Rush ancestors don't like to think of the darker side of the Argonauts' natures. The blindness of death claimed native American eyes as Forty-Niners shoved their way into Indian lands, polluted the rivers with mud so that the salmon didn't run, and shot Indians for "protection", for their land, or, sometimes, just for the sport of it. Newcomer Yankees and Chivalrists resented Californios who joined in the prospecting and mistreated hardworking Chinese laborers who had the thrift not to spend their money on gambling, women, and drink, often driving them from their honestly-got claims with guns. Miners decried the influx of the Asian "heathens", but few were true to Christian values. Men left families back East along with many of their inhibitions. John Bidwell wrote of a lawyer named Hastings who had come to California by way of Oregon after making his living as a temperance lecturer:

Hastings...reach[ed] San Francisco in a cold rain, went up to Vioget's and called for brandy. He poured out a glassful and was about to drink it, when [the bartender], recognizing him, leaned over the bar, extended his hand, and said 'My good temperance friend, how are you?' Hastings in great surprise looked him in the eyes, recognized him, and said 'My dear Methodist brother, how do you do?'

Some men did remain faithful or, at least, resumed monogamy once they rejoined their families either back East or in California. Others, like the San Francisco politcal hack, Ned MacGowan, remain estranged from their spouses for the rest of their lives. Professional gamblers came to draw the gold out of the pockets of foolhardy men and there were a few thieves. The Gold Rush was a carnival, in which some men and women took a brief sabbatical from the usual mores of American Victorian life; others whooped it up ever after.

It is true that the men who clamoured into California in the year 1849 built the state, but the men who worked the "diggings" often did not profit by their hard work: the dust slipping between their fingers was caught by merchants who had the wit to sell the miners the goods and services they craved. Men collected gold by the cupful and then spent it by the pint at the tent-covered saloons which appeared in the Sierra Nevada camps. They grew tired of washing their own clothes, so they paid Chinese workmen to launder it for them. Farmers sold them eggs and other comestibles at mutinous prices. Bandits sometimes robbed them. A few men returned home bearing grubstakes to pay off a mortgage or buy a better farm in the East. The millionaires were men like Leland Stanford (known to his detractors as $tealin' £andford) who had a shop in Sacramento and invested his money in the transcontinental railroad; Levi Strauss who came to California planning to make tents for miners and discovered that what they really needed was a sturdy pair of work pants; clever Henry Miller who made his fortune on ranchland he sometimes dishonestly acquired from the Federal government; or the miserly James Lick, who bought every parcel of real estate he could grab in old San Francisco and the Santa Clara Valley, then fertilized his land with ground bones he begged off butchers.

So, on the bones of Indians and on the backs of working men, California was built. Despite the ugliness begat by the chaos which the convergence of many men of many tongues produced, the period does deserve much of the reputation it has for color and interesting tales. In these pages, I have striven to show the whole story of the Gold Rush, in the hardships faced by the miners, in the disappointments they knew, in the prejudice they experienced as Chinese, in the deaths they inflicted on native Americans, in the ridiculous way they appeared to some onlookers, and in the dignity they strove to create for themselves out of the necessary squalor and punishing tasks which distinguished placer mining. The pieces here are always informative, sometimes irreverent, and always interesting. I give them to you to help you understand the madness that began in 1849 when men ran about the state like "a thousand hogs...would root up ground-nuts". In this barnyard, we may find the manure which fed the roots of the present California order.