1849: The California LEVELED BOOK • U

Gold Rush
A Reading A–Z Level U Leveled Book 1849: The California
1849:
Gold Rush
Word Count: 1,498

Connections
Writing
Write a paragraph explaining what the
author wants readers to learn from the
Prices Gone Wild chart on page 14.
Social Studies and Art
Create a poster that shows the tools for
placer mining and how these tools were
used to find gold in California.

•U
O•R
Written by Cynthia Kennedy Henzel
Visit www.readinga-z.com
for thousands of books and materials. www.readinga-z.com
 Glossary
devastating (adj.) causing great physical or
emotional damage (p . 15)
economy (n.) the circulation of money in
industry, trade, and finance 1849: The California
1849:
Gold Rush
in a country or area (p . 15)
entrepreneurs people who start and operate
(n.) their own businesses (p . 14)
erosion (n.) the natural removal of rock or
soil by water, wind, or ice (p . 6)
gravel (n.) a loose mixture of rock
fragments (p . 6)
greed (n.) a selfish and intense desire
for more of something than
is needed (p . 7)
hatred (n.) a strong feeling of dislike
or disgust (p . 12)
hazards (n.) possible dangers or risks (p . 9)
hostility (n.) deep-seated anger and
unfriendliness (p . 10)
Written by Cynthia Kennedy Henzel
settlers (n.) people who make a new,
www.readinga-z.com
permanent home on a
frontier (p . 12)
transcontinental extending across a continent
Focus Question
(adj.) (p . 15) What was the effect of the gold
wealthy (adj.) having a large amount of rush on westward expansion?
money or possessions (p . 15)

16
 Words to Know
devastating hatred
economy hazards
entrepreneurs hostility
erosion settlers
gravel transcontinental
greed wealthy

Front cover: A miner poses with his donkey and pan.

Title page: Miners found more than 750,000 pounds (340,000 kg) of gold
during the Gold Rush. San Francisco in 1851 (top) and today (bottom)
Page 3: Prospectors mine in California around 1852.

Photo Credits:
Front cover, back cover: © Underwood Archives/age fotostock; title page:
© Jupiterimages/PHOTOS.com/Thinkstock; page 3: © GRANGER/GRANGER;
pages 6, 11: © Photo Researchers, Inc/Alamy Stock Photo; pages 7, 13: © Hulton
Archive/Getty Images; page 9: © Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo; page 10:
© P.R. Wood/Bettmann/Getty Images; page 14: © Courtesy: CSU Archive/
Everett Collection Inc./age fotostock; page 15 (top): © Everett Collection
Historical/Alamy Stock Photo; page 15 (bottom): © zhudifeng/iStock/Thinkstock
The Golden State
The biggest winners of the Gold Rush were
white settlers, the U .S . government, and wealthy
investors . The Gold Rush was devastating to Native
peoples, however . Around three hundred thousand
settlers, mostly white, swarmed California . In the
1860s, the country began to connect the East and
West by building the transcontinental railway,
causing further destruction to Native lands .

The Gold Rush changed the western United

1849: The California Gold Rush States forever . Today, California has more people
Level U Leveled Book Correlation
than any other state . It has a huge economy—larger
© Learning A–Z LEVEL U
Written by Cynthia Kennedy Henzel
Fountas & Pinnell Q than that of most countries . Nearly two centuries
All rights reserved. Reading Recovery 40 after the Gold Rush, California still lives up to its
www.readinga-z.com
DRA 40 nickname: the Golden State .

1849: The California Gold Rush • Level U 15

 Prices Gone Wild
Forty-niners could get what they wanted—for a steep price.

Quest for Fortune, 1848–1853, by Edward Dolnick

Here’s what some items cost in 1849 San Francisco and in 2021
dollars (adjusted for inflation): 1849 2021

Source: The Rush: America's Fevered

one can of peas $6 = $206
one egg $1 = $34
one breakfast $43 = $1,479
one pound (.45 kg) of coffee $3 = $103
one mule $360 = $12,384
one pair of boots $96 = $3,302

Entrepreneurs made a fortune by selling to

the miners . Sam Brannan became one of the first
millionaires in the United States . Levi Strauss sold
pants tough enough to handle the work—blue jeans .

Women, especially, had many more

opportunities in the West . They started Table of Contents
businesses cooking, running boarding houses, Keeping a Secret . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
and washing clothes for the prospectors .
Panning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Mary Ellen Pleasant The Forty-Niners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Mary Ellen Pleasant was a Black American By Ship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
businesswoman who worked as part of the
Underground Railroad. Women weren’t accepted By Wagon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Mary Ellen
as important prospectors during the Gold Rush. Pleasant
Some people say that Pleasant worked as a cook and a Equal Opportunity? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
housekeeper just to get close to wealthy people to secretly
The Golden State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
hear what they were talking about. Pleasant became a millionaire
buying and selling buildings and businesses during the Gold Rush. Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

14 1849: The California Gold Rush • Level U 3

 Keeping a Secret
On the morning of January 24, 1848, James
Marshall went to inspect the ditch that carried
water from the American River through the new
sawmill his crew was building in California . The
crew had deepened the section of the ditch that
ran out of the mill to make the water flow more
quickly . At the end of the ditch, about six inches
under the water, he spotted something shiny .
Marshall collected several pieces and showed
his crew . They tested the pieces . It was gold!
Marshall showed the gold to the owner of
the mill, John Sutter, who controlled forty-eight
thousand acres of land in California he called
“New Switzerland” after his home country . Sutter
bought the land from the Mexican government,
but it actually belonged to the Indigenous
Nisenan people .
Sutter had taken more than land . Sutter’s deal
with the Mexican government required that he
not harm any of the Nisenan people in the area .
Nevertheless, he trained many Native people
to become part of his own private army and
kidnapped and enslaved other Native people
to work the land . Sutter tried to get everyone
to keep the secret that gold had been discovered .
He wanted to keep the riches for himself .
4 1849: The California Gold Rush • Level U
As the hills filled
with prospectors,
white miners began
to oppose other
groups hunting
for gold, especially
Chinese miners .
White prospectors
sometimes violently
forced miners from Chinese miners search for gold
in California around 1850.
outside the United
States to leave the mines . Almost three thousand
Chinese people came to California in 1851 . A
terrible crop season in China made that number
rise to more than twenty thousand the next year .
California taxed miners from outside the United
States to prospect . Some U .S . miners wanted to
make it so difficult for them to mine that they
would leave .
One in every five miners who came to
California in 1849 died within six months .
Even those who found gold often lost it to
robbers, gambling, or paying high prices for
everyday goods . Some early prospectors were
successful . Most of the riches from gold went to
large companies . They were able to mine with
high-pressure jets of water or dig deep mines .
13
 Equal Opportunity? Territory Lost to the U.S. in the Mexican-American War
For Native peoples, the Gold Rush was United States Land that today makes up the
disastrous . It opened the gateway to the West . Sutter’s Mill states of California, Nevada,
Utah, most of Arizona and
Throngs of adventurers and settlers poured into New Mexico, and parts of
San Francisco
Native lands . Many different groups of Native Colorado and Wyoming were
included in the treaty. These
peoples lived in California . As forty-niners moved lands were home to many
out West, violent attacks forced Native peoples off Native peoples, but Mexico had
PACIFIC claimed ownership, then gave
much of their land . Thousands were killed, and OCEAN R io them to the U.S. after the war.
Gra
thousands more died of disease . Mexico nd
e
NORTH

Ri
A

ve
Once California became a state in 1850, AMERICA

TL CE
r

O
AN AN
TIC
the U .S . government took control of the land,

PA C E
including areas with gold . Soon, fear and F

O
CI
AN IC

hatred led to the killing of thousands of
Native peoples . New laws allowed settlers to
arrest Native people for minor wrongdoings . The
government then forced them to pay their fines
by working on ranches . Around three hundred
thousand Native peoples lived in California
before the Gold Rush . More than one hundred
thousand were dead only twenty years later .
Good Prospects, Bad Endings
Several of the men involved in the original discovery
of gold ended up with nothing to show for it. John Sutter
lost his golden property when the United States would
not recognize his land grant from Mexico. Sutter, along
with Sam Brannan and James Marshall, eventually lost
their fortunes.
Six days after Marshall found the
gold, Mexico signed the treaty that ended
the Mexican-American War . The treaty gave
California to the United States . Neither side
knew that gold had just been discovered there .
Sam Brannan, who ran a store near Sutter’s Mill,
soon let out the secret . Brannan wanted to cash in
when he heard the news, but he wasn’t interested
in mining . Instead, he bought all the shovels in the
nearby city of San Francisco . Then he filled a bottle
with gold dust and ran through the streets yelling
about the great discovery . The city of 850 people
almost emptied after Brannan sold them each the
tools they needed to find gold—picks, axes, pans,
and shovels—at very expensive prices .

12 1849: The California Gold Rush • Level U 5

 Panning They were pounded by rain, wind, and snow .
Unlike gold in most places, California’s gold In addition to bad weather, other dangers facing
wasn’t locked deep under the ground . Erosion had forty-niners came from disease, starvation, and
long ago washed the metal down the mountains accidents .
and into rivers . Miners used a technique called For those who made it to California, life did
placer mining that allowed them to sift gold out not get easier . Prospectors lived in mining camps
of the riverbed using a shallow, flat pan . Placer made of tents and rough shelters, and worked
mining works twelve hours a day . Many fell ill, often due to poor
because gold is much conditions and diet . Despite these challenges, it
heavier than gravel . was difficult to give up—the next pan of gravel
Prospectors stood in might be worth a fortune!
rivers and shoveled
gravel into their pan .
They removed large
rocks, then carefully
swirled the pan .
The dirt and gravel
spilled over the edges
with the water . The
shiny flakes of gold
Each day, most miners only found gold
that would be worth between $10 and
stayed at the bottom
$15 today. of the pan .

The term prospector means a person who

moves to a spot with the prospect, or possibility,
of finding gold and becoming rich. Gold miners stand in their camp at El Dorado, California, around 1850. The
original El Dorado in South America is a mythical place of immense wealth.

6 1849: The California Gold Rush • Level U 11


A drawing from around 1900 shows people traveling together in a group
of wagons called a train.
By Wagon
It took about the same amount of time to get to
California by wagon . Much of the land between
forty-niners on the East Coast and California still
belonged to Native peoples . Settlers moving out
West often hunted without permission, stole from
Native peoples, and attacked them . Native peoples
thus viewed them with hostility .
Most people left from Saint Louis, Missouri,
the westernmost U .S . city at the time . Wagons
followed the California Trail for 2,100 miles
(3,380 km) across the flat prairie . A wagon could
travel about 15 miles (24 km) in a day—if it didn’t
break down, there wasn’t much rain, and the oxen
stayed healthy . The forty-niners had to get the
wagons across rivers, up mountains, down cliffs,
and across deserts .
10
The Forty-Niners
Rumors soon swirled in
the eastern states about gold
out West . A California official
sent a report about the gold to
Washington, D .C .—along with
a sample . In December 1848,
the president told Congress A gold miner shovels gravel
about the discovery . It was true! in California in 1852.
Gold fever—the greed and contagious
excitement brought on by the discovery of gold—
took hold of many people . At the time, many
workers earned less than a dollar a day . For them, it
was the opportunity of a lifetime . In 1849, around
ninety thousand people—called forty-niners—
joined the Gold Rush . Around 10 percent, or nine
thousand, were women .
The forty-niners came from across the United
States as well as from Mexico, Central and South
America, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand .
Black people were among the forty-niners as
well . Around 200 to 300 were enslaved and had
been forced by their enslavers to go to California .
Free Black people also traveled west in hopes of
finding gold . By 1852, around 2,000 Black people
lived in California, which was about 1 percent of
the population .
1849: The California Gold Rush • Level U 7
 The trip to the gold mines could take By Ship
months—and was not cheap . People had to pay About half of the forty-niners decided to travel
for transportation and supplies to last until they by ship to avoid crossing the lands of Native
arrived in California . Many forty-niners left behind peoples . It took ships between five and eight
jobs and families . They planned to make a fortune months to sail from the East Coast, around the
quickly and return home . Others were ready for tip of South America, and back up to California .
whatever adventure they found . The cheapest ticket was $75—about $2,300 in
People from California, Oregon, and Mexico today’s money . Lodging was a tiny bunk in the
were the first to show up at the rivers near Sutter’s bottom of the ship . Passengers ate dried meat
Mill . Locals only and hard biscuits filled
The Routes the Forty-Niners Took with weevils, and drank
had to travel
short distances NORTH
water . They suffered as
with their pack AMERICA a result of shipwrecks,
animals . It Saint Louis, New York City seasickness, and disease .
Missouri 6

took longer for 6 Sacramento

6 6
ATLANTIC Many reported that
San Francisco Posters like this one advertised ships
immigrants to
OCEAN the worst things were that would carry forty-niners from
arrive by boat crowding and boredom . New York City to San Francisco.
from faraway Panama Some passengers decided to save time by
countries and taking a shortcut through Panama . They could
for people to canoe and hike across 60 miles (97 km) of jungle,
PACIFIC
cross the United OCEAN SOUTH then catch another ship . These forty-niners
AMERICA
States . At that faced an extreme environment with hazards
time, it was they were unfamiliar with, including bad
KEY
easier to get to Overland route weather and wild animals . Many fell ill . If they
(five to eight months)
California from Panama route made it across, there was still a risk that they
(one month . . . if you could
China than catch a ship on the Pacific side) would have to wait weeks or months to catch
Cape Horn route
from the (five to eight months) a ship on the other side .
Cape Horn
East Coast .

8 1849: The California Gold Rush • Level U 9