1)Watch the film Gold Rush 5:37 minutes

2) Read the 3 primary sources found in this assignment (scroll down)
Answer the question below and upload your assignment as a file. This does not need to be a
proper essay but be sure to thoroughly answer the question and provide evidence examples and
quotes to support your claims. Cite your source as by its name in parentheses such as (women,
washerwomen) or (Coronel) etc.

Assignment
The Gold Rush was a positive in U.S. History? Why or why not?
Support your answer with evidence from the video, and all 3 primary sources to support
your claim/ thesis.   Make sure you elaborate on each example or supporting evidence
that you use. Cite the source of your information like this (Women, Pie Maker) (Chinese
Merchant), (Coronol) (Video) in the body of your paper.

Primary Sources for this assignment.  They are embedded below
Antonio Franco Coronol
Chinese Merchant

Women in the Gold Rush

Primary Source: Antonio Franco Coronel Describes Tensions Among Miners

Antonio Franco Coronel was born in Mexico, came to California as a child in 1834, and settled 

with his family in Los Angeles. As one of the original miners in the state’s gold fields in 1848, 

he found success at the Placer Seco in northern California. When he returned to the same area in 

1849, he found many more miners there, and he describes the tensions that arose among them. 

After his experiences in the mines, Coronel became mayor of Los Angeles in 1853 and served as 

state treasurer from 1867 to 1871.

. . . I arrived at the Placer Seco [about March, 1849] and began to work at a regular digging. In 

this place there was already a numerous population of Chileans, Peruvians, Californians, 

Mexicans, and many Americans, Germans, etc. The camps were almost separated according to 

nationalities. All, some more, some less, were profiting from the fruit of their work. Presently 

news was circulated that it had been resolved to evict all of those who were not American 

citizens from the placers because it was believed that the foreigners did not have the right to 

exploit the placers. . . . 

There was a considerable number of people of various nationalities who understood the order to 

leave—they decided to gather on a hill in order to be on the defensive in case of any attack. On 

the day in which the departure of the foreigners should take place, and for three or four more 

days, both forces remained prepared, but the thing did not go beyond cries, shots, and drunken 

men. Finally all fell calm and we returned to continue our work. Daily, though, the weakest were 

dislodged from their diggings by the strongest. . . . 

The reason for most of the antipathy against the Spanish race was that the greater portion was 

composed of Sonorans who were men accustomed to prospecting and who consequently 

achieved quicker, richer results—such as the Californios had already attained by having arrived 

first and [learned how to find gold]. Those who came later [mainly Anglo Americans], were 

possessed by the terrible fever to obtain gold, but they did not get it because their diggings 

yielded but little or nothing . . . Well, these men aspired to become rich in a minute and they 

could not resign themselves to view with patience the better fortune of others. Add to this fever 

that which the excessive use of liquor gives them. Add that generally among so many people of 

all nationalities there are a great number of lost people, capable of all conceivable crimes. The 

circumstance that there were no laws nor authorities who could protect the rights and lives of 

men gave to these men advantages over peaceful and honorable men. Properly speaking, there 

was no more law in those times than that of force, and finally, the good person, in his own  

defense, had to establish the law of retaliation.

Source | Antonio Franco Coronel, “Cosas de California,” dictated to Thomas Savage for the 

Bancroft Library, 1877, translated by David J. and Carol S. Weber.

Creator | Antonio Franco Coronel

Item Type | Biography/Autobiography

Cite This document | Antonio Franco Coronel, “Antonio Franco Coronel Describes Tensions 

Among Miners,” SHEC: Resources for Teachers, https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1718.

Primary Source: Chinese Merchant Complains of Racist Abuse, 1860

The California Gold Rush of 1849 brought a major influx of Asian immigrants to the new state. 

This number only grew after railroad companies turned to Chinese laborers to build western 

railroads. Life for these immigrants was particularly difficult, as even financially successful 

Chinese immigrants faced considerable discrimination. In 1860, the Chinese merchant Pun Chi 

drafted this petition to congress, calling on the legislature to do more to protect Chinese 

immigrants.  

We are natives of the empire of China, each following some employment or profession–literary 

men, farmers, mechanics or merchants. When your honorable government threw open the 

territory of California, the people of other lands were welcomed here to search for gold and to 

engage in trade. The ship-masters of your respected nation came over to our country, lauded the 

equality of your laws, extolled the beauty of your manners and customs, and made it known that 

your officers and people were extremely cordial toward the Chinese. Knowing well the harmony 

which had existed between our respective governments, we trusted in your sincerity. Not 

deterred by the long voyage, we came here presuming that our arrival would be hailed with 

cordiality and favor. But, alas! what times are these! –when former kind relations are forgotten, 

when we Chinese are viewed like thieves and enemies, when in the administration of justice our 

testimony is not received, when in the legal collection of the licenses we are injured and 

plundered, and villains of other nations are encouraged to rob and do violence to us! Our 

numberless wrongs it is most painful even to recite. At the present time, if we desire to quit the 

country, we are not possessed of the pecuniary means; if allowed to remain, we dread future 

troubles. But yet, on the other hand, it is our presumption that the conduct of the officers of 

justice here has been influenced by temporary prejudices and that your honorable government 

will surely not uphold their acts. We are sustained by the confidence that the benevolence of 

your eminent body, contemplating the people of the whole world as one family, will most 

assuredly not permit the Chinese population without guilt to endure injuries to so cruel a degree. 

We would therefore present the following twelve subjects for consideration at your bar. We 

earnestly pray that you would investigate and weigh them; that you would issue instructions to 

your authorities in each State that they shall cast away their partial and unjust practices, restore 

tranquillity to us strangers, and that you would determine whether we are to leave the country or 

to remain. Then we will endure ensuing calamities without repining, and will cherish for you 

sincere gratitude and most profound respect.

… The class that engage in digging gold are, as a whole, poor people. We go on board the ships. 

There we find ourselves unaccustomed to winds and waves and to the extremes of heat and cold. 

We eat little; we grieve much. Our appearance is plain and our clothing poor. At once, when we 

leave the vessel, boatmen extort heavy fares; all kinds of conveyances require from us more than 

the usual charges; as we go on our way we are pushed and kicked and struck by the drunken and 

the brutal; but as we cannot speak your language, we bear our injuries and pass on. Even when 

within doors, rude boys throw sand and bad men stones after us. Passers by, instead of 

preventing these provocations, add to them by their laughter. We go up to the mines; there the 

collectors of the licenses make unlawful exactions and robbers strip, plunder, wound and even 

murder some of us. Thus we are plunged into endless uncommiserated wrongs. But the first root 

of them all is that very degradation and contempt of the Chinese as a race of which we have 

spoken, which begins with your honorable nation, but which they communicate to people from 

other countries, who carry it to greater lengths.

Now what injury have we Chinese done to your honorable people that they should thus turn upon 

us and make us drink the cup of wrong even to its last poisonous dregs?

… If a Chinese earns a dollar and a half in gold per day, his first desire is to go to an American 

and buy a mining claim. But should this yield a considerable result, the seller, it is possible, 

compels him to relinquish it. Perhaps robbers come and strip him of the gold. He dare not resist, 

since he cannot speak the language, and has not the power to withstand them. On the other hand, 

those who have no means to buy a claim seek some ground which other miners have dug over 

and left, and thus obtain a few dimes. From the proceeds of a hard day’s toil, after the pay for 

food and clothes very little remains. It is hard for them to be prepared to meet the collector when 

he comes for the license money. If such a one turns his thoughts back to the time when he came 

here, perhaps he remembers that then he borrowed the money for his passage and expenses from 

his kindred and friends, or perhaps he sold all his property to obtain it; and how bitter those 

thoughts are! In the course of four years, out of each ten men that have come over scarcely more 

than one or two get back again. Among those who cannot do so, the purse is often empty; and the 

trials of many of them are worthy of deep compassion. Thus it is evident that the gold mines are 

truly of little advantage to the Chinese. Yet the legislature questions whether it shall not increase 

the license; that is, increase trouble upon trouble! It is pressing us to death. If it is your will that 

Chinese shall not dig the gold of your honorable country, then fix a limit as to time, say, for 

instance, three years, within which every man of them shall provide means to return to his own 

country. Thus we shall not perish in a foreign land. Thus mutual kindly sentiments shall be 

restored again…

Pun Chi, “A Remonstrance from the Chinese in California to the Congress of the United States,” 

in William Speer, The Oldest and the Newest Empire: China and the United States (Pittsburg: 

1877), 588-589. 594, 597-598.

Women of the California Gold Rush Primary Source

Miner

“We saw last April, a French woman, standing in Angel’s Creek, dipping and pouring

water into the washer, which her husband was rocking. She wore short boots, white duck

pantaloons, a red flannel shirt, with a black leather belt and a Panama hat. Day after day

she could be seen working quietly and steadily, performing her share of the gold digging

labor.” -San Francisco Daily Alta

Louise Clappe tried her hand at digging gold too:

“I have become a mineress; that is, if the having washed a pan of dirt with my own hands, and procured

therefrom three dollars and twenty-five cents in gold dust…will entitle me to the name. I can truly say, 

with

the blacksmith’s apprentice at the close of his first day’s work at the anvil, ‘I am sorry I learned the 

trade;’

for I wet my feet, tore my dress, spoilt a pair of new gloves, nearly froze my fingers, got an awful

headache, took cold and lost a valuable breastpin, in this my labor of love.”

Pie Maker

“I concluded to make some pies and see if I could sell them to the miners for their

lunches, as there were about one hundred men on the creek, doing their own cooking –

there were plenty of dried apples and dried pealed peaches from Chili, pressed in the

shape of a cheese, to be had, so I bought fat salt pork and made lard, and my venture was

a success. I sold fruit pies for one dollar and a quarter a piece, and mince pies for one

dollar and fifty cents. I sometimes made and sold, a hundred in a day, and not even a

stove to bake them in, but had two small dutch ovens.”……… -Mary Jane Caples

One woman boasted:

“I have made about $18,000 worth of pies—about one third of this has been clear profit. One year I

dragged my own wood off the mountain and chopped it, and I have never had so much as a child to take 

a step for me in this country. $11,000 I baked in one little iron skillet, a considerable portion by a 

campfire, without the shelter of a tree from the broiling sun.”

Another woman wrote, from San Francisco:

“A smart woman can do very well in this country—true, there are not many comforts and one must 

work all the time and work hard, but there is plenty to do and good pay. If I was in Boston now and know 

what I now know of California I would come out here – if I had to hire the money to bring me out. It is the only

country I ever was in where a woman received anything like a just compensation for work.”

Hotel Keeper

Running a boardinghouse was the commonest money-maker for women. One woman earned $189 a

week after only three weeks of keeping boarders in the mines. She shared with her boarders

accommodations decidedly minimal, as she wrote her children back East:

“We have one small room about 14 feet square, and a little back room we use for a storeroom about as

large as a piece of chalk. Then we have an open chamber…

divided off by a cloth. The gentlemen occupy one end, Mrs. H and daughter, your father and myself, the

other. We have a curtain hung between our beds but we do not take pains to draw it, as it is of no use to 

be particular here.” 

Luzena Wilson set herself up in the boardinghouse business, too. 

Despite its rustic beginnings, she had grand plans for her Nevada City enterprise, which she elevated 

with the title ‘hotel’: “I determined to set up a rival hotel. So I bought two boards from a precious pile

belonging to a man who was building the second wooden house in town. With my own

hands I chopped stakes, drove them into the ground, and set up my table. I bought

provisions at a neighboring store, and when my husband came back at night he found,

mid the weird light of the pine torches, twenty miners eating at my table. Each man as he

rose put a dollar in my hand and said I might count him as a permanent customer. I

called my hotel ‘El Dorado. ‘”From the first day it was well patronized, and I shortly after took my

husband into partnership.”……… -Luzena Stanley Wilson

But running a boardinghouse was hard work, as Mary Jane Megquier attested from San Francisco:

“I should like to give you an account of my work if I could do it justice. I get up and make the coffee, 

then I make the biscuit, then I fry the potatoes and broil 3 pounds of steak, and as much liver, while the hired

woman is sweeping and setting the table. At 8 the bell rings and they are eating until nine. I do not sit 

until they are nearly all done…after breakfast I bake 6 loaves of bread (not very big) then 4 pies or a 

pudding, then we have lamb, for which we have paid $9 a quarter, beef, pork, baked turnips, beets, 

potatoes, radishes, salad, and that everlasting soup, every day, dine at 2, for tea we have hash, cold 

meat, bread and

butter, sauce and some kind of cake and I have cooked every mouthful that has been eaten excepting 

one day when we were on a steamboat excursion. I make 6 beds every day and do the washing and 

ironing and you must think I am very busy and when I dance all night I am obliged to trot all day and if I 

had not the constitution of 6 horses I should have been dead long ago but I am going to give up in the 

fall, as I am sick and tired of work.”

In full agreement was Mary Ballou, who kept a boardinghouse in the mines. Her complaints included the

additional inconvenience of unwelcome animals. “Anything can walk into the kitchen and then from the kitchen into the dining room so you see the hogs

and mules can walk in any time, day or night, if they choose to do so. Sometimes I am up all times a 

night scaring the hogs and mules out of the house. I made a blueberry pudding today for dinner. Sometimes I  am

making soups and cranberry tarts and baking chicken that cost $4 a head and cooking eggs at $3 a 

dozen. Sometimes boiling cabbage and turnips and frying fritters and broiling steak and cooking codfish and

potatoes. Sometimes I am taking care of babies and nursing at the rate of $50 a week but I would not 

advise any Lady to come out here and suffer the toil and fatigue that I have suffered for the sake of a little  gold.”

Gamblers

“In one corner, a coarse-looking female might preside over a roulette-table, and,

perhaps, in the central and crowded part of the room a Spanish or Mexican woman

would be sitting at monte, with a cigarita in her lips, which she replaced every few

moments by a fresh one. In a very few fortunate houses, neat, delicate, and sometimes

beautiful French women were every evening to be seen in the orchestra. These houses, to

the honor of the coarse crowd be it said, were always filled.”……… -Eliza W. Farnham

Muleteer “She is genuine Castilian, owns a train of mules and buys and loads them. We bought the

flour she sent to Weaverville. I had a strong idea of offering myself…but Angelita told me

she had a husband somewhere in the mines and she has a boy about five years old. So I

didn’t ask her.”……… -Franklin Buck

Speculator

“I have before spoken of her….Her husband would give her no money to speculate with,

so she sold some pieces of jewelry, which she didn’t value particularly, & which cost her

about twenty dollars at home, with this jewelry she purchased onions which she sold on

arriving here for eighteen hundred dollars, quite a handsome sum, was it not?…She also

brought some quinces & made quite a nice little profit on them.”……… -John McCrackan

Victim

“As she began to make considerable money the bigger, if not better, half of this couple

began to feel quite rich and went off on a drunk, and when his own money was spent he

went to his wife for more, but she refused him, and he, in his drunken rage, picked up a

gun near by and shot her dead.” -William Manley

Washerwoman

“Magnificent woman that, sir,” he said, addressing my husband; “a wife of the right sort,

she is. Why,” he added, absolutely rising into eloquence as he spoke, “she earnt her old

man,” (said individual twenty-one years of age, perhaps) “nine hundred dollars in nine

weeks, clear of all expenses, by washing! Such women ain’t common, I tell you; if they

were, a man might marry and make money by the operation.”……… -Louisa Clapp

One woman determined to get her gold the old-fashioned way, by marrying it. She placed what must

have been the first personals ad in a California newspaper, under the heading:

A Husband Wanted… By a lady who can wash, cook, scour, sew, milk, spin, weave, hoe (can’t plow), cut

wood, make fires, feed the pigs, raise chickens, rock the cradle, (gold rocker, I thank you, Sir!), saw a

plank, drive nails, etc. These are a few of the solid branches; now for the ornamental. “long time ago” 

she went as far as syntax, read Murray’s Geography and through two rules in Pike’s Grammar. Could find 

6states on the atlas. Could read, and you can see that she can write. Can—no, could—paint roses, 

butterflies, ships, etc. Could once dance; can ride a horse, donkey or oxen…Oh, I hear you ask, could she 

scold? No, she can’t you _____________good-for-nothing _________! Now for her terms. Her age is 

none of your business. She is neither handsome nor a fright, yet an old man

need not apply, nor any who have not a little more education than she has, and a great deal more gold, 

for there must be $20,000 settled on her before she will bind herself to perform all the above. Address 

to Dorothy Scraggs, with real name. P.O. Marysville.”

Dame Shirley (MRS. LOUISE AMELIA KNAPP SMITH CLAPPE) describes one of her first

experiences in the mining town of Rich Bar, CA and with the men who inhabited it:

Through the middle of Rich Bar runs the street, thickly planted with about forty

tenements, among which figure round tents, square tents, plank hovels, log cabins, etc.,

the residences varying in elegance and convenience from the palatial splendor of “The

Empire” down to a “local habitation” formed of pine boughs and covered with old calico

shirts.

To-day I visited the “office,” the only one on the river. I had heard so much about it from

others, as well as from F., that I really did expect something extra. When I entered this

imposing place the shock to my optic nerves was so great that I sank helplessly upon one

of the benches, which ran, divan-like, the whole length (ten feet!) of the building, and

laughed till I cried. There was, of course, no floor. A rude nondescript, in one corner, on

which was ranged the medical library, consisting of half a dozen volumes, did duty as a

table. The shelves, which looked like sticks snatched hastily from the woodpile, and

nailed up without the least alteration, contained quite a respectable array of medicines.

The white-canvas window stared everybody in the face, with the interesting information

painted on it, in perfect grenadiers of capitals, that this was Dr. ——’s office.

At my loud laugh (which, it must be confessed, was noisy enough to give the whole street

assurance of the presence of a woman) F. looked shocked, and his partner looked prussic

acid. To him (the partner, I mean; he hadn’t been out of the mines for years) the “office”

was a thing sacred, and set apart for an almost admiring worship. It was a beautiful

architectural ideal embodied in pine shingles and cotton cloth. Here he literally “lived,

and moved, and had his being,” his bed and his board. With an admiration of the fine arts

truly praiseworthy, he had fondly decorated the walls thereof with sundry pictures from

Godey’s, Graham’s, and Sartain’s magazines, among which, fashion-plates with imaginary

monsters sporting miraculous waists, impossible wrists, and fabulous feet, largely

predominated.

During my call at the office I was introduced to one of the finders of Rich Bar,—a young

Georgian,—who afterwards gave me a full description of all the facts connected with its

discovery. This unfortunate had not spoken to a woman for two years, and, in the elation

of his heart at the joyful event, he rushed out and invested capital in some excellent

champagne, which I, on Willie’s principle of “doing in Turkey as the Turkeys do,”

assisted the company in drinking, to the honor of my own arrival. I mention this as an

instance that nothing can be done in California without the sanctifying influence of the

spirit, and it generally appears in a much more “questionable shape” than that of

sparkling wine

http://www.goldrush.com/~joann/women.htm

http://www.historichwy49.com/women/women.html

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23280/23280-h/23280-h.htm