The Striking Gold Rush from the article “Gold Fever” by J.S. Holliday — Summary

I wanted to share a cool Gold Rush story I read with you all called “Gold Fever” by J.S. Holliday written in 1998.

Pan For Gold!

In “Gold Fever”, Holliday, states that all the way back in 1848 in California, most of the men are all coming out to the goldfields in Sutter’s Fort to gather their fortune instead of working on the dreaded factories or farms back at home. Right after the newspaper columns are filled with the abundance of California’s gold being left out in the open in around 1849–1850, thousands of men board ships or walk off to the recently famous city, San Francisco. Coming to the goldfields is the correct choice for all the men because they earn triple the money they can have back at home from a week’s digging, so they could send letters and money back home to start a new life. However, as Holliday points out, no matter how much gold the “gold seekers” dig up, they are going to use it all up from the consumption in stores or mining materials because everything is paid by gold and gold only. When California’s capitalism was booming due to the amount of gold, there aren’t any sort of security to keep things safe and the Government did not contribute anything to the community at all. Therefore, the people of the city had to step up and hire their own security or have their own fire department. Their motto is that whatever we lost today, will be gained back the next day.

As the article goes into the 1850s when there are more miners each day, and according to Holliday, the successes of the cities surrounding the goldfields depended on whether the mining claims were successful or not. The other people living in those cities took this opportunity to make money off the miners and sell to them tripling the amount others would get back home. However, when the mining claims fail, the mining companies to food stalls all collapse because the miners’ successes are the only support which they could make a fortune. Some miners grasp the situation quickly and move into cities to find work, but no matter what the outcome is, California’s economy still revolves around gold. Therefore, once miners are in the cities, Stockton and Sacramento, they head straight to their comfort zones which are gambling, bathing, or prostitution and this is the motivation for merchants and workers to work faster as each day proceeds on.

Holliday points out in late 1849 that there is a tremendous amount of rain that everywhere around the goldfield cities or in the goldfields itself was in chaos due to the amount of rain that make it impossible to shovel for gold. As a result of the rain, mud is produced and because of this, people didn’t earn enough money which adds to the fact that not enough buyers out in the streets which makes the merchants have an excess supply by the end of the day. Therefore, their so-called motto of whatever we lost today, will be regained tomorrow is the main source of danger and blindness to money. The extreme danger is a whole building engraved in fire and no one step in to help unless the owner of the property pays money for water which saves the property in the end. Even after this chaos, no one learns anything. Everyone goes back to their normal lives, gambling, and money-making schemes, and they continue using the same materials that would cause another fire to rebuild all those buildings.

According to Holliday in the 1850s, forty-niners comes in to rescue California from its chaos and also end the Mexican eras to begin its own American history that is way better than Philadelphia and Boston. The forty-niners push America towards a new ethos in which we can leave the colliding traditions with other countries behind and be free.