Gold Rush Reading Center
Directions:
1. Pick one reading to read closely
2. Read the piece 2 times if time permits.
3. Ask yourself:
4, Respond in your notebook, answering one of the questions above.
2. Read the piece 2 times if time permits.
3. Ask yourself:
- What type of document is this (a journal entry? A song? A newspaper article?)
- Who wrote it? When?
- What does this piece teach us about the time period?
- Why was it written?
- How do you think the author feels about the time period/event in consideration?
- If there was a debate about this topic, what position might the author take?
4, Respond in your notebook, answering one of the questions above.
|
Lewis C. Gunn's Journal
In the early days of the gold rush, many people flocked to California in hopes of making a quick fortune. But what they found instead was a life of hard work and drudgery. Lewis C. Gunn’s experience was typical of many Forty-Niners. He traveled from Philadelphia to California in 1849. The following is an excerpt of a journal he kept describing his early days in the goldfields.
August 17. Reached our destination today at Jamestown, on Woods Creek, about one mile above what were first called Woods Diggings, at six o'clock in the afternoon. Our distance traveled was about sixteen or eighteen miles. At the end of the first four miles we passed the last store tent. The freight on my articles cost eighteen dollars and fifty cents. Not wishing to pay out all my money, I left my gun in pledge. We were too much fatigued to go around and encamped under the first tree. My supper was flour mush or rather gruel.
August 18. Our first day in the diggings! Spent the morning in looking around, and in the afternoon one of my companions and I tried our luck at a hole, but with little success. It was our apprenticeship. We selected for our campsite a large California oak tree on the left bank of the creek, opposite Jamestown, but a few rods below. Five of us are encamped here. And it has been selected, with ourselves and baggage under it, as the scene of a picture to be painted and exhibited in New York and other large cities. The only objection that I have to the place is that it is beside the road [and] we are much annoyed with dust.
August 19, Sunday. Spent most of the day in the woods on the adjoining hills, as it was uncomfortable at the camp. Enjoyed no pleasant meditations.
August 20. Dug with another in the morning and made nothing. In the afternoon worked alone and made twenty dollars, finding one large piece worth fourteen dollars. Cooked and ate by myself.
August 21. Nothing important. Made about five dollars.
August 22 and 23. Made only about two dollars per day. The diggings here are exhausted. I have opened several holes, all of which prove to have been dug before. I found also that it was the same with three-fourths of the diggers.
August 24. Went to Sullivan's Diggings, five miles off. Found five dollars in about one hour; felt quite elated with my success. Others here are doing well, but the labor is immense and requires several to work in company. They sink holes thirty feet deep, and while one keeps pumping out the water all the while, another digs the dirt, and a third and a fourth wash it. In some holes they have two pumps constantly at work.
The scenery at Sullivan's is truly sublime; high hills and very steep.
August 25. Went again to Sullivan's and carried part of my baggage. Had no success today.
Library of Congress, General Collections.
August 17. Reached our destination today at Jamestown, on Woods Creek, about one mile above what were first called Woods Diggings, at six o'clock in the afternoon. Our distance traveled was about sixteen or eighteen miles. At the end of the first four miles we passed the last store tent. The freight on my articles cost eighteen dollars and fifty cents. Not wishing to pay out all my money, I left my gun in pledge. We were too much fatigued to go around and encamped under the first tree. My supper was flour mush or rather gruel.
August 18. Our first day in the diggings! Spent the morning in looking around, and in the afternoon one of my companions and I tried our luck at a hole, but with little success. It was our apprenticeship. We selected for our campsite a large California oak tree on the left bank of the creek, opposite Jamestown, but a few rods below. Five of us are encamped here. And it has been selected, with ourselves and baggage under it, as the scene of a picture to be painted and exhibited in New York and other large cities. The only objection that I have to the place is that it is beside the road [and] we are much annoyed with dust.
August 19, Sunday. Spent most of the day in the woods on the adjoining hills, as it was uncomfortable at the camp. Enjoyed no pleasant meditations.
August 20. Dug with another in the morning and made nothing. In the afternoon worked alone and made twenty dollars, finding one large piece worth fourteen dollars. Cooked and ate by myself.
August 21. Nothing important. Made about five dollars.
August 22 and 23. Made only about two dollars per day. The diggings here are exhausted. I have opened several holes, all of which prove to have been dug before. I found also that it was the same with three-fourths of the diggers.
August 24. Went to Sullivan's Diggings, five miles off. Found five dollars in about one hour; felt quite elated with my success. Others here are doing well, but the labor is immense and requires several to work in company. They sink holes thirty feet deep, and while one keeps pumping out the water all the while, another digs the dirt, and a third and a fourth wash it. In some holes they have two pumps constantly at work.
The scenery at Sullivan's is truly sublime; high hills and very steep.
August 25. Went again to Sullivan's and carried part of my baggage. Had no success today.
Library of Congress, General Collections.
Excerpt from Daniel Jenks' Gold Rush Diary
Gold Rush Diary of Daniel Jenks, who traveled by boat around Cape Horn to San Francisco at the age of 21 in 1949
First Impressions of San Francisco
8 October, 1949: "It is a difficult matter to describe this place. Imagine a town built of cloth, with here and there a wooden shanty, an adobe house or two, the streets filled with tents, the valleys packed with tents, tents here, there and everywhere, 10,000 men of all nations and languages, thrown helter skelter into this town of tents. No system, no order but all excitement, hurry and bustle. Gods own sun never shone upon another such a place….Gambler's Paradise ought to be the name of this sink of iniquity, for they rule supreme here. Hells of gambling are on every corner..."
Frustrated by his failures at gold prospecting in San Francisco, Jenks tries to make a go of it as a merchant's clerk in the northern California town of Yreka, on the California-Oregon border. But he ultimately returns to gold prospecting and sees several deadly encounters between whites and Indians. In April and May 1853, he is desperately ill with "ague" and raving fevers.
"But it is horrible to be so sick as I am, alone, not a cent of money, not bed clothes enough to keep me warm when the ague is on me...Oh my God did I ever think that I should be reduced so low as this..."
1 January 1854: "Nine tenths of the people here would return home tomorrow if they could get there...If people at home only could learn from the experience of others there would not be such a rush out here every spring. The chances are worse than any lottery that I ever heard of."
In late 1854 and early 1855 he comments much about the Indian war raging in Oregon. "Over 120 whites are known to have been killed by the poor Indians in Rogue River valley this season." 9 March 1856: "This week we have received news from Crescent city and were pained to hear of another horrible massacre of whites by the Indians at the mouth of Rogue River. Report says that every settler on the south side have been killed some 20 in all..."