The Mining Frontier of the American West: An Introduction

Abstract

On the morning of January 24, 1848, John W. Marshall, one of the first New Jerseyans to seek a new and better life in the West, in spected the tailrace for the sawmill he was building on the south fork of the American River for John A. Sutter. In the newly-exposed stream bed, he spied a dull yellow metal. A few days later, Marshall rode to Sutter's New Helvia head quarters, where Sacramento now stands, to share the exciting dis covery with the eccentric Swiss emigre. Despite attempts to keep the find secret, the news slowly spread. By May and early June, nearly all the able-bodied men had poured out of San Francisco for the gold fields. Pacific Basin prospec tors, from as far away as Australia and South America, followed later that summer. Not until November, however, did eastern skeptics begin to believe the rumors that had been circulating for several months. When President Polk spoke of Cali fornia gold in his December fare well address to Congress, all doubts evaporated. As the snows melted from the prairies in the spring of 1849, an army of would-be mil lionaires crowded the western-most settlements, poised to make a mad overland dash to the new El Dorado. Some hardy souls were al ready underway, making a perilous sea journey around Cape Horn or through the Isthmus of Panama. The California gold rush was on! The unexpected discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill marked only the beginning of mining's substan tial impact on the American West. In contrast to Frederick Jackson Turner's conception of an orderly westward expansion by successive waves of fur traders, miners, and farmers, the mining frontier in stead leapt across the interior West and initially implanted itself on the Pacific. For the remainder of the nineteenth century, it fanned out across the region, from Alaska to the Black Hills of Dakota and to the deserts of the Southwest. Yet, the mining frontier, especially dur ing its earliest years, also shared many of the characteristics of the westward movement identified by Turner. On perhaps no other fron tier, for example, were restlessness and optimism more prominent. These similarities and differences with the classical Turnerian model make teaching about the mining frontier both interesting and in structive.