"A Business Man's Revolution"

Revolutions marked the year 1848. In France, a revolution pitted workers against entrenched aristocracy. Worker radicalism swept through Europe, challenging the old hierarchies. But while the European proletariat struggled to destroy class distinctions and private property rights, a revolution of a different sort unfolded in the rugged country inland from the small trading port of San Francisco, California. On 24 January James Marshall, supervising the construction of a mill for the land baron John Sutter, discovered several gold nuggets in the gravel of the American River near Coloma. Within weeks the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War and the United States forced Mexico to cede a vast portion of its northern territories. ¹ Unable to contain the enthusiasm for gold seeking, word of the find at Sutter’s Mill flooded newly-territorial California with tens of thousands of hopeful migrants. The state’s population boomed from barely 20,000 in 1848 to more than 200,000 just four years later. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, careful observers of nineteenth-century change, warned in their manifesto (published within weeks of Marshall’s find) of the new capitalist alchemy, the “subjection of nature’s forces to man...the clearing of whole continents...whole populations conjured out of the ground.” ²

If anywhere represented such a conjuring, then it was surely gold rush California. Even homegrown chroniclers such as Grass Valley’s Josiah Royce recognized the revolutionary character of California’s rise. Writing a history of gold rush California, in the 1880s, Royce described the spirit that San Francisco vigilantism unleashed, noting “the true character of this movement as a Business Man’s Revolution.” ³ California’s sudden rise, with its promise of economic independence founded in precious metal rather than land, seized the world’s attention. In 1852, Engels wrote to Marx that California was a case “not provided for in the Manifesto: the creation of large new markets out of nothing. We shall have to allow for this.” ⁴

One hundred and fifty years later we are still reckoning with the significance of the rush. “Gold Fever! The Lure and Legacy of the California Gold Rush,” an exhibition created by the Oakland Museum of California, wrangles with this complicated past. (Historian J.S. Holliday’s Gold Fever! The Lure and Legacy of the California Gold Rush, the exhibition catalogue, was not available for review at the time of this writing.) This ambitious exhibition links the gold rush past to the Californian present, highlighting throughout an on-going economic dynamism that has drawn into its borders a polyglot of cultures. Through 10,000 square feet of museum space, more than 1,000 artifacts—from the pea-sized original nugget to the enormous stern of a gold rush ship—interactive exhibits, a curiously anachronistic diorama, and a concluding paean to a multicultural present founded in the gold rushing past, Gold Fever! commemorates the sesquicentennial. The exhibition opened in January 1998, on the anniversary of the original discovery, marking the beginning of a statewide, three-year examination of the rush and California’s rapid rise to statehood.

A fine line often separates critical commemoration from celebration. Gold Rush observance poses a slippery pursuit. To the Hispanic Californios who lost control of vast grazing lands and other Spanish-speaking gold seekers who were taxed and driven from productive gold fields, to the native Californians whose population succumbed to disease and attack (dropping from an estimated 150,000 just prior to the rush to some 30,000 twenty years later), to Chinese and African American gold seekers subjected to violent racism and legal-disenfranchisement, these days of gold were hardly reason...