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" "What they had expected was the image that they had received in November, December of 1848, and the story of digging up gold, and all the people succeeding. They were stunned, shocked, dismayed. The realism that struck them above all else was there're so damn many miners. There were forty thousand miners in the mining camps and the mining regions of California by the fall of 1849.... These are people who've been coming... overland... as early as August. They've been coming by ships since December. They've been coming from Hawaii, from Oregon, from Chile, from Sonora. They've been pouring in. The world rushed into California.
Jaquelin Smith Holliday II (June 10,1924 – August 31, 2006) was the author of The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience and contributer to the PBS Documentery "The West"
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But when you get to the other side of the Sierra Nevada, you don't see the green of the Sacramento Valley, you see the desolation of the Pit River Valley. You see rocks and stunted growth, and mountain deserts. It's just, it's just a pain, it's a shock, it's a hit in the head, it hurts your heart to see what still lies ahead. And you haven't gone a short cut. What you've done is you've gone north, and you're at what's called Goose Lake. So instead of going west, you've gone north-northwest. Now you've got to go south.
I think that the West is the most powerful reality in the history of this country. It's always had a power, a presence, an attraction that differentiated it from the rest of the United States. Whether the West was a place to be conquered, or the West as it is today, a place to be protected and nurtured. It is the regenerative force of America.
He is a farmer. He lives a simple life. He's pretty well educated. He's read Shakespeare, he's read Wordsworth. His wife is a teacher. They have a very comfortable life. They don't have anything to complain about in eighteen forty-nine. This is a key point. They did not have anything that would cause them distress. His expectations were perfectly comfortable expectations of an average family, a farming family in America. The Gold Rush changed that. Suddenly he wanted more. Suddenly he wasn't satisfied.