Many of us dream of finding instant wealth. Just imagine if you were able to go to a place where you could simply gather from the ground gold worth many thousands of dollars. Now imagine that at a time when the average wage for an unskilled worker was barely ten dollars per month.

That was the reality in California from 1848 to 1855. In the early days, people were able to find large quantities of gold using little more than picks, shovels, and metal pans. Fortunes were made not just by the gold-seekers themselves but also by those who sold them goods and services. When news of these discoveries reached the rest of America and the wider world in late 1848, a vast influx of hopeful prospectors descended on California, sparking a gold rush.

In 1849, an average of over 1,000 people were arriving in San Francisco every week. With so many people looking for increasingly scarce gold, only a few of these “forty-niners” actually found wealth, and many instead experienced crushing work, disappointment, crime, disease, and death. For the Native Americans who lived in the areas that the prospectors sought to exploit, this influx of white settlers inevitably brought not wealth but death and destitution.

The story of the California Gold Rush is a story of success, failure, boldness, avarice, and the birth of a new American dream.