it would be difficult to argue that if Mexican authorities had known about the gold
in California earlier, the outcome of the
conflict would have been different. If the
discovery had been made many years
earlier, perhaps that wealth could have
changed the economic and political situation in Mexico.
Perhaps a larger population, or at least
a substantial garrison, would have been
in place, and the capture of California
might have been a battle or even campaign, rather than a matter of wading
ashore from a whaleboat and running up
the Stars and Stripes. The course, but not
likely the outcome, of the war could have
been different.
In contrast, there is no doubt about the
effects of the California gold discovery
on the adolescent United States. Word
only took a few months to filter back
East, and the 49ers stampeded their way
into history. The population of California
boomed, and it applied for statehood that
same year. Its state constitution prohibited
slavery, and its admission precipitated the
Compromise of 1850, one of the series of
fragile measures that slowed, but did not
stop, the slide into civil war.
The vast wealth, estimated at 750,000
pounds of gold by the time the fields were
played out in the late 1850s, boosted the
US economy and gave the federal government some financial footing on the eve of
war. After the war, the need to connect
California to the rest of the nation spurred
Abraham Lincoln’s dream of a transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869.
Meanwhile Mexico, shorn of its northern
third, endured cycles of revolution, dictatorship and reform. In a statement of great
accuracy and great melancholy, José de la
Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori, who served seven
terms as president of Mexico (between 1876
and 1911) said, “Pobre México! ¡Tan lejos
de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos!”
[Poor Mexico! So far from God and so
close to the United States!] Born in the poor
southern state of Oaxaca, he is buried in
Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.
Library of Congress
Spanish-speaking people sought gold in
North America for 358 years. They missed
it by nine days.
The first major gold discovery in North
America was January 24, 1848, when gold
flakes were found in a mill race in a settlement outside what is now Sacramento, California. At the time it was technically Alta
California, a province of Mexico. But in
name only, and not for very much longer.
Mexico was at war with the United
States, and on July 7, 1847, a small detachment of US Navy officers and sailors had
captured the presidio at Monterey, the
provincial capital, without firing a shot;
the small garrison had already decamped
to Los Angeles.
Nine days after the gold discovery,
on February 2, 1848, the government of
Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo, ending the Mexican War and
ceding California, along with what is
today Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and
parts of other states, to the United States.
Given the one-sided nature of the war,
Gold miners in El Dorado, CA, circa 1849–53.
14 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Fall 2015 | www.MoAF.org