the public service, who have visited the mineral district, and derived the facts which they detail from personal observation,” the president said. The entire California region was in a fit of excitement. “Labor commands a most exorbitant price, and all other pursuits but that of searching for the precious metals are abandoned. Nearly the whole of the male population of the country have gone to the gold district. Ships arriving on the coast are deserted by their crews, and their voyages suspended for want of sailors…. This abundance of gold, and the all-engrossing pursuit of it, have already caused in California an unprecedented rise in the price of the necessaries of life.” Americans from every region of the country—eastern merchants and manufacturers, southern planters, western farmers—could expect to benefit from the gold discovery and the demand it created for those necessaries of life. Polk predicted that California and the other territories acquired from Mexico would “add more to the strength and wealth of the nation than any which have preceded them since the adoption of the Constitution.”
Rumors of the California gold had been circulating for weeks, but skeptics could easily dismiss such rumors as self-interested efforts to drum up business. Polk’s statement, backed by the can of gold, transformed the rumors into hard news. And it touched off a torrent of commentary and conjecture. “We are on the brink of the Age of Gold,” asserted Horace Greeley of the
New York Tribune
. The
New York Herald
declared, “The Eldorado of the old Spaniards is discovered at last. We now have the highest official authority for believing in the discovery of vast gold mines in California, and that the discovery is the greatest and most startling, not to say miraculous, that the history of the last five centuries can produce.”
New York’s merchants eagerly calculated what part of the profits they might hope to claim. One merchant, Franklin Buck, watched his commercialcolleagues lay in goods and passengers for the Far West. “Look out on the docks,” he wrote his sister, appealing to her mind’s eye, “and you will see from twenty to thirty ships loading with all kinds of merchandise and filling up with passengers.” Buck, a Massachusetts man by birth and an heir to the sober Puritan tradition of ancestor Samuel Sewall (of the Salem witch trials), wasn’t one to be swept away by every avaricious enthusiasm that came along. But this was more than he could resist.
When I see business firms—rich men—going into it, men who know how to make money too, and young men of my acquaintance leaving good situations and fitting themselves out with arms and ammunition, tents, provisions and mining implements, there is something about it—the excitement, the crossing the Isthmus, seeing new countries and the prospect of making a fortune in a few years—that takes hold of my imagination, that tells me “Now is your chance. Strike while the iron is hot!”
Not all were so sanguine. The
Boston Courier
—reflecting that dour Puritanism—wondered whether reality was so golden as portrayed. The Spanish, after all, had owned California for two centuries without discovering gold, despite their adeptness at locating it elsewhere. Imagination strained to think that Americans, with no history in precious metals, should find gold within weeks of acquiring the territory. But Boston’s doubts ran deeper than this. Even assuming that the reports were true in their entirety, they didn’t augur well for California, or for America. “The last thing that we should desire for the prosperity and permanent welfare of a country would be the discovery of a gold mine in it. Hardly any thing can be more certain to repress industry, productive labor, thrifty habits, and social improvement in general.” Were the mining regions of South America prosperous? Hardly—they were characterized by “ragged people, ruinous dwellings, neglected
Rumors of the California gold had been circulating for weeks, but skeptics could easily dismiss such rumors as self-interested efforts to drum up business. Polk’s statement, backed by the can of gold, transformed the rumors into hard news. And it touched off a torrent of commentary and conjecture. “We are on the brink of the Age of Gold,” asserted Horace Greeley of the
New York Tribune
. The
New York Herald
declared, “The Eldorado of the old Spaniards is discovered at last. We now have the highest official authority for believing in the discovery of vast gold mines in California, and that the discovery is the greatest and most startling, not to say miraculous, that the history of the last five centuries can produce.”
New York’s merchants eagerly calculated what part of the profits they might hope to claim. One merchant, Franklin Buck, watched his commercialcolleagues lay in goods and passengers for the Far West. “Look out on the docks,” he wrote his sister, appealing to her mind’s eye, “and you will see from twenty to thirty ships loading with all kinds of merchandise and filling up with passengers.” Buck, a Massachusetts man by birth and an heir to the sober Puritan tradition of ancestor Samuel Sewall (of the Salem witch trials), wasn’t one to be swept away by every avaricious enthusiasm that came along. But this was more than he could resist.
When I see business firms—rich men—going into it, men who know how to make money too, and young men of my acquaintance leaving good situations and fitting themselves out with arms and ammunition, tents, provisions and mining implements, there is something about it—the excitement, the crossing the Isthmus, seeing new countries and the prospect of making a fortune in a few years—that takes hold of my imagination, that tells me “Now is your chance. Strike while the iron is hot!”
Not all were so sanguine. The
Boston Courier
—reflecting that dour Puritanism—wondered whether reality was so golden as portrayed. The Spanish, after all, had owned California for two centuries without discovering gold, despite their adeptness at locating it elsewhere. Imagination strained to think that Americans, with no history in precious metals, should find gold within weeks of acquiring the territory. But Boston’s doubts ran deeper than this. Even assuming that the reports were true in their entirety, they didn’t augur well for California, or for America. “The last thing that we should desire for the prosperity and permanent welfare of a country would be the discovery of a gold mine in it. Hardly any thing can be more certain to repress industry, productive labor, thrifty habits, and social improvement in general.” Were the mining regions of South America prosperous? Hardly—they were characterized by “ragged people, ruinous dwellings, neglected
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