![]() ![]() The importance of San Francisco was validated when it was decided that the first transcontinental railroad, a train line that connected the east coast and the west coast of the United States, would have its western terminus in the growing city. “It also was instrumental in the founding and growth of Stockton and Sacramento.” “The Gold Rush put San Francisco on the map,” Rohrbough says. The California Gold Rush turned the once- rural expanse of California into an area dotted with towns and cities. “They severely restrict dredging.” Social Growth “For example, they outlaw hydraulic mining,” the historian notes. They passed a series of laws that restricted the impact of mining on rivers. By the mid-1870s, the California government realized that agriculture was more lucrative than mining. All of this flowed downstream, and it heavily damaged the rivers as far as agricultural use is concerned.” Rohrbough says that throughout the 1860s and 1870s, a fierce conflict developed between the mining and agricultural industries. “It also involved, in many cases, using mercury in the process of separating the gold out. “The major impact it had was on agriculture, because the mining involved digging up the rivers and producing all this silt,” Rohrbough says. “People described the California landscape as looking like it had been dug up by giant moles.” Eventually, the effects of mining began to harm a new industry developing in California’s Central Valley during the mid-1800s. “Environmentally, the discovery of gold was a disaster,” he says. They used high-powered jets of water to wash away hillsides in a practice known as hydraulic mining, and burrowed thousands of mine shafts into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Rohrbough, a Gold Rush historian and the author of Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation, the countryside of California was torn up as the newly arrived settlers searched for gold. ![]() Though the riches found in the state’s rivers and mines eventually amounted to little more than a flash in the pan, the lingering effects of the massive migration known as the California Gold Rush would dramatically alter the political, social, and environmental landscape of California. Spurred by James Marshall’s discovery of gold in the American River during the winter of 1848, a flood of fortune-seekers came to the California frontier. ![]()
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