California Gold Rush Peak

1849

Ninety thousand 'forty-niners' poured into California from every continent: Cornish miners, Chileans, Chinese, Yankees, Hawaiians. They built tent cities, paid ten dollars for an egg, and remade a Mexican province into an American state within a year. Few got rich. The merchants who sold them shovels did much better. San Francisco grew from a village to a city of 25,000 in a single year of mud and ambition.