And they walk into these great big places, and there's excitement, and there's hope, and there's a sense of sin. 'Mother wouldn't want me to be here.… - J. S. Holliday

And he looks down where the soil has been dug and there's a sparkle, and there's a glint in the morning light, and he reaches down and he picks it up with his stubby dirty fingers, and the last thing in the world he might have expected, and here is this, this speck of the future, this tiny little shock that's going to reverberate right to today -- literally till now! He picks it up, and he says, you know, he says, 'My God!' And he yells out, he said, 'My God, I think I've found gold!'

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.

The gold rush changed California, it changed the whole west, and it changed America's sense of itself because for the first time the United States of America, in the minds of the American people, fulfilled the dream of Jefferson, which was a continental nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific. No one thought about America stretching from Chesapeake Bay to San Francisco Bay until fathers and sons and uncles and brothers and fiances were out there.