Gold Fever

Black Participation in the California Gold Rush

Detailed oil painting of three black prospectors in California during the Gold Rush in 1853. Copyright © Unique Coloring.

Gold was discovered in California on January 24, 1848. It happened on property owned by Johann A. Sutter outside Coloma. Sutter was a Swiss immigrant who intended on building a sawmill on the American River. He hired a carpenter named James W. Marshall to oversee the project, and just as construction got underway, Marshall made the discovery. His daily routine was to have workers dam the river, and the water that ran through at night carried away sand, gravel, and smaller stones. Marshall later spoke of the historic find, which happened as he walked the riverbank on a momentous morning:

My eye was caught with the glimpse of something shining.... There was about a foot of water running then. I reached my hand down and picked it up. It made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold.”

Marshall plucked several other pieces from the stream and took them to his boss Johann Sutter. Sutter wanted to keep the discovery a secret until construction on his mill was complete, but word got out. Sam Brannan, the owner of the general store at Sutter’s Fort, heard the news and saw an opportunity to strike it rich by selling tools and supplies to miners. That spring, Brannan made his way to San Francisco and stood in the middle of a busy street waving his hat while shouting: “Gold from the American River!”

Others had made similar claims in the past, but they did not lead to the discovery of gold, so Marshall’s claim met with resistance and skepticism initially. That changed when news reached the ears of an American military commander stationed in California named William T. Sherman. Sherman confirmed the report before carrying it to President James Polk. President Polk endorsed the discovery on December 5, 1948, by making an official announcement to the U.S. Congress. With that, the California gold rush was underway.

In the decades before the California gold rush, the state was the northernmost part of the Mexican Republic, which had emerged from a revolution from Spain. The Mexican administration upheld an anti-slavery constitution that attracted enterprising free North American blacks to its territory, a few of them deserters from the Union Navy. One such person was William Warren, a runaway seaman who lived under Mexican rule for eighteen years before California joined the United States of America. He was among the first to mine for gold the year James Marshall discovered the precious metal in Coloma Valley. The same could be said of prominent black American Allen Light, or "Black Steward," who deserted in 1835 and became a well-known Santa Barbara otter hunter. (See Blacks in Gold Rush California by Rudolph M. Lapp.)

Johann August Sutter was a Swiss immigrant who obtained Mexican and American citizenship and established an eponymous fort in a territory now known as Sacramento, California. He fled his native Switzerland in 1834 to avoid trial and incarceration surrounding unpaid debts, leaving behind a wife and five children in Burgdorf.

Men like Johann Sutter and James Marshall, who were foreigners in Mexican lands, became citizens and masters of their region following the Mexican-American War. A few blacks worked at Sutter’s Fort, but the black population in California amounted to less than 1%. The 1850 census recorded a mere 962 blacks in all—872 males and 90 females. And just the year before, in 1849, a wave of new white settlers swept in, winning the name “the ’49ers.” Many of these new arrivals were single men bent on amassing fortunes from prospecting. Some brought enslaved persons to mine for gold, increasing the number of California blacks by about 300. 

In fall 1849, two men—a black Methodist minister accompanied by a black man from Massachusetts named Kelsey—rediscovered an old Mormon mining claim on the south bank of the American River. Dubbed Negro Hill, it was one of the more successful claims held by blacks and it attracted not only other blacks but also white and Chinese miners, including Portuguese immigrants. Together, they eventually formed a community comprised of around 400 individuals by 1855. Miners struck gold on a nearby site that won the name Little Negro Hill, bolstering hopes of long-term prosperity. By 1852, the black population in California swelled to over 2,000, much of it concentrated in the gold mines. And there were several mining claims named for black miners of the era. Mining claims on gold rush maps bore such names as Nigger Bill Bend, Nigger Jack Slough, Negro Butte, Negro Run, and Arroyo de los Negros, where the Spanish recognized black involvement during the gold rush.

All of these claims were integrated, but the mix of blacks and whites led to racial tensions that resulted in violence and even death. Racist white miners got drunk and were arrested and tried following the killing of a black miner at Negro Hill in 1855, but they were ultimately released by a Coloma court. In total, Negro Hill was mined for nearly a decade before further gold prospects dried up and the miners dispersed to booming cities and towns established throughout northern California.

Some blacks made good strikes before all was said and done. One story that survives recounts an ironic windfall in Mokelumne Hill, one of California’s richest gold mining towns. Claims were so profitable there that miners refused to head to nearby Stockton to replenish supplies and pushed themselves to the brink of starvation. Gold prospects in Mokelumne Hill drew miners from various nations. Besides Americans, many hailed from France, Germany, Mexico, Chile, and China. The population grew to 15,000 people at its height.

Lured by the easy gold in Mokelumne Hill, a black man wandered into the area to stake out a claim. White miners repeatedly thwarted his efforts, telling him another white miner already held whatever claim he attempted to prospect. As a final blow, one white miner told the black man to head up to a high point where no miners held claims—the inside joke being everyone was certain no gold existed there. The black miner—whose name was Livingston—did as he was told and started digging. He took on a partner—another black man—and the two dug so deep they eventually struck gold. The story made the local paper, which ran a bulletin that read:

“A couple of negroes who had been at work at the cayote diggings of Mokelumne Hill went home in one of the steamers ... with eighty thousand dollars that they took out of one hole duing the past four months.”

Other success stories abound. A Maine native, Reuben Ruby—who operated a successful hack or taxi company in Portland—later relocated to New York City in 1837 with his family, where he opened a restaurant. In 1849, he boarded a ship and traveled to California by way of Panama. He struck gold on the Stanislaus River—six hundred dollars worth in four weeks—and returned to Maine with his family and earnings.

California joined the Union as a free state in 1850, and, as a result, many enslaved persons gained a measure of freedom, but slavery still flourished in the state. Congress passed the second Fugitive Slave Act days after California became part of the United States. The act made it legal to seize and return runaway or escaped slaves across states or federal territories. California matched that law with its own fugitive slave law in 1852, making it illegal for enslaved persons to flee slavemasters within the state. Like the broader Fugitive Slave Act passed by Congress, the new California law threatened the freedom of freeborn blacks as well. Blacks could neither vote, testify in court, or send their children to public school at the time, yet they remained a collective force in California. 

Portrait of Mifflin Wistar Gibbs.

Blacks did not suffer silently under the weight of California’s racist laws; men like Mifflin Wistar Gibbs—a black American civil rights activist and entrepreneur from San Francisco—waged battles against the state to repeal anti-black legislation. Colored Conventions were held across the country, as blacks in other regions sought legal protections and full citizenship rights. These organizing efforts proved highly effective, and the first Colored Convention in California was held in 1855 at St. Andrews AME Church in Sacramento. 

Its delegates included black leaders, entrepreneurs, influential writers, organizers, and abolitionists. The convention’s executive committee raised lobbying funds, and after years of tireless campaigning by convention delegates, things began to change. The Legislature overturned the testimony ban in 1863, and other repeals followed.

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