As news spread of gold at Sutter’s mill, people flocked to the rivers and streams of the Sierra Nevada. For nearly a year the gold rush was an exciting and energetic endeavor, albeit a local and regional one. The first gold diggers came from the existing population of about 165,000 people in Alta California, of which 150,000 were indigenous, with the balance more or less evenly divided between Californios, the descendants of the first Spanish settlers, and white Americans and Europeans. The U.S.-Mexico war had barely concluded at the time of the gold rush; the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in February 1848, ceding California to the United States. Hundreds of American soldiers and sailors remained stationed in California under U.S. military command, but there was little to stop them from going AWOL for gold.
By summer, Mexicans experienced in gold and silver mining were trekking along long-established routes from Sonora into Alta California. Then came gold seekers from Oregon, Hawaii, and Chile, arriving by trade routes along the Pacific coast that had been established in the 1830s. In the first year of the gold rush, half the people mining for gold in California were native American Indians, especially Maidu and Miwok in the north. Many Indians—perhaps half of those on the goldfields—worked in the placers on their own account, sometimes in family groups, and traded gold with whites for tools and blankets. But many others worked for Californios and white Euro-Americans, like Sutter, at low wages or for subsistence, replicating the system of Indian servitude of the Spanish-mission ranches.
By mid-1848, news of gold trickled to the eastern United States, but it was only after President James K. Polk confirmed the reports in December and the U.S. Mint at Philadelphia declared a sample “genuine” that gold fever seized Americans east of the Mississippi River. In the coming year ninety thousand people made their way to California. Chileans and Mexicans were numerous, and Europeans, Australians, and Chinese were beginning to come, but white Americans were by far the largest group. Half the Europeans and Americans traveled by the overland route and half by sea, either around Cape Horn or by Panama. The latter, although considerably shorter, involved a weeklong crossing of the isthmus by mule and canoe through the jungle to connect between Atlantic and Pacific coast sailing ships. By 1854 there were 300,000 gold seekers in the hills.
The tens of thousands of Euro-Americans who arrived in 1849 called themselves, and came to be known to history and legend as, the forty-niners, cementing their status as California’s pioneer gold seekers. Certainly, they were the first wave of whites who came from the eastern United States; the economic development of California that they spurred and California’s entry into the Union as the thirty-first state in 1850 made the gold rush a national—and nation-building—phenomenon. But the American national identity embodied by the figure of the forty-niner also obscures the beginning year of the gold rush, 1848, when California was still populated largely by native peoples and Californio ranchers, connected to the rest of the world via Mexico and the Pacific, and received its first “foreign” miners from Mexico, Chile, and Hawaii.