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Book Review
| Gold Rush Capitalists: Greed and Growth in Sacramento. By Mark A. Eifler. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. 280 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8263-2821-0. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 0-8263-2822-9.)Riches for All: The California Gold Rush and the World. Ed. by Kenneth N. Owens. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. xiv, 367 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8032-3570-4. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 0-8032-8617-1.)
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| In California gold rush studies, Sacramento has long been neglected. We have many works on the mining regions and on San Francisco, which quickly asserted an economic hegemony over the entire region. Yet Sacramento, situated about halfway between the emporium of the Pacific and the diggings, played an important role as a distribution center for goods and a population center for tired overland trekkers and wintering miners. Mark A. Eifler's excellent book fills this void well. |
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Eifler begins with John Sutter, whose "New Helvetia" was the first European settlement in the area. He admirably situates Sutter within the context of trade relationships, which were well established when he arrived in the late 1830s. The Mexican settlements near the coast, the indigenous peoples of the central valley, and American and British trappers had constructed a series of informal commercial networks that Sutter was able to control for a time. He was tragically assisted by the epidemics that ravaged the valley in the mid-1830s and seriously weakened the Indian groups of the area. |
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After the discovery of gold, Sutter hoped to make his town of Sutterville the commercial linchpin of the region. He was outflanked by two speculators, however; in August 1848 Samuel Brannan and P. B. Cornwell unloaded their supplies about three miles away and set up a business center to serve the growing mining population. They named their site after the Sacramento River, and they and others like them dominated the new city for a year. |
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Their position began to be challenged in the fall of 1849, when the overlanders who had begun the journeys in the late spring arrived. They settled in the city, often occupying lots that the speculators had already bought up. The overlanders were joined by a large group of miners who came down from the diggings to spend the winter. Both groups brought with them rough notions of community, forged on the trail and in the camps, which contradicted the relentlessly individual acquisitiveness of the speculators. Like many in the 1840s, they also believed in preemption. In these circumstances, tension between the initial speculators and the newcomers boiled over in the squatters' riots of 1850. |
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In the aftermath of the riots, Eifler argues, Sacramento began to take its first steps toward stability, as unsuccessful miners began to dabble in business and thereby give the city the beginnings of a more conventional commercial class. This group craved middle-class respectability, and they wanted the new city to become the type of environment in which commercial and middle-class virtues could develop. |
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