5.5-5.6 West migration and gold rushes

• Mining settlements:

  • quickly built towns for miners, heavily male dominated and full of gambling dens and saloons

  • miners forced natives from land - to set up more mining camps

  • violent places - murders and robberies were common
• How did people make money from gold rushes?


  • selling equipment like shovels or gold-washing pans

  • selling maps and supplies to get to california

  -> many made misleading maps leading to hotels to gain profit

  • in 1852 crushing machines needed to extract gold, paid for by rich and rented out

  • woman washed miners clothes, sold food or were prostitutes
• When was the California gold rush?

  1848-55
• What impact did the gold rush have on Native Americans that lived in California?

  • pushed off land to make room for miners

  • Act for the Governement and Protection of Indians in 1850 - meant Natives could be sold into forced labour
• What impact did the California gold rush have on immigrants in the west?

  • in 1850 Foreign Miners' Tax Act - meant non-US miners had to pay $20 tax

  -> forced thousand of mexican and chinese people to leave
• What impact did the California gold rush have on plains indians?

  • miners travelled through hunting grounds disturbing buffalo

  • government forced to sign Fort Laramie treaty in 1851 - promising not to settle on plains or disrupt hunting
• What impact did the California gold rush have on California?

  • San Francisco grew to have 56,000 people

  • environmental destruction due to mining - clogged rivers as harmful chemicals in water supply
• What impact did the California gold rush have on America?

  • California became a free slave state in 1850

  -> lead to an imbalance of free and slave states

  • demands of a railroad
• When was the pikes peak gold rush?

  1858-59
• What impact did the Pike's Peak gold rush have?

  • over 100,000, double amount of California

  • new mining towns need food - leading to thousands more settling in Kansas and establishing farms

  -> proved plains were not just a derset land - more people settled

  • settlement broke treaty - Fort Laramie in 1851 and plains indians like cheyenne fought back