-Background Information-
The California Gold Rush started around the beginning of the year 1839 when a carpenter from New Jersey named James Wilson Marshall discovered a gold nugget in the American River . He was constructing a saw mill at the time and was trying to hide the secret of the American River but failed at doing it. As soon as a storekeeper named Samuel Brannan showed the local people a bottle filled up with gold, everyone started flooded the American River and started the search for gold.
Most of the miners from the Gold Rush are poor people who were all desperate to find a job to take care of their family. For the others, their jobs weren't so stable and the monthly salary wasn't high at all therefore they abandoned their jobs and fled to California, hoping to make a living out of the American River. After the miners flooded California, the population there increased to an estimated of 100,000 people who were non-natives. But it didn't stopped there, as the news of gold in the American River kept spreading across America, miners kept leaving their family to come to the river in search for wealth. But it didn't work out so well, although there was a enormous amount of gold in the American River, not so many people actually got rich from it. But those who actually did like Samuel Brannan, wasn't a miner at all. In fact, he was a jerk that happened to have a wise mind. He started thinking about the benefit of buying the mining tools that were imported in to California and selling it again with a higher price. After doing it for a few days, Miguel started to gain huge amounts of money so he started to buy all of the tools needed for mining purposes and reselling them for a much higher price. Then at the end, Samuel Brannan became the richest guy from the California Gold Rush from 1839 to around the 1850s. Miners kept coming to California after the Gold Rush although most of the surface gold was mined out that was forth about $81 million dollars. The money income slowly decreased to $45 million dollars by 1857 and eventually ended the California gold rush. After the Gold Rush, the landscape of California was mostly destroyed by the miners in search for precious gold by using the new hydraulic mining technique. The population in California dropped as well because there wasn't anymore surface gold that the miners could collect so they moved to other areas that have what they needed for wealth, gold!