How Did The California Gold Rush Change

912 Words4 Pages

California had a population increase of 310% in just 10 years. How did that happen, you may ask? Well, gold had just been found in California, and people across the world wanted to get rich fast. This caused California to change positively during the California Gold Rush. Because the population increased, California transformed industrially, but this was bought at the cost of the environment and was damaged negatively. The state of California was changed by the number of people and types of people brought to California through the California Gold Rush. According to the text (Historical Impact of the California Gold Rush), it says, "With the massive influx of migrants, California underwent a radical transformation in a very short amount of …show more content…

The state of California went through a huge change, not only through people, but also industrially. According to the text (Historical Impact of the California Gold Rush), it says, "The fervor surrounding the Gold Rush led to a revolution in transportation. New roads, bridges, ferries, wagons, and steamships were created to help prospectors reach California, which was fairly isolated at the time."(https://online.norwich.edu/onl...) This text explains the impact of the California gold rush. When the gold rush began, there was no easy way to travel through or to California, which is one of the reasons it was such a hard trip to the gold rush. People pushing through California for this gold fever caused there to be an explosion in ways of traveling through California. According to the author Gerald, D. Nash. I am a nass. ), "The Gold Rush spawned a wide range of entrepreneurial activities and led thousands of individuals in California and elsewhere to embark on new business ventures, in manufacturing as well as in service industries. Food, clothing, hardware, mining, supplies, all kinds of luxuries, and steamboats for river traffic."(https://publishing.cdlib.org/u...). This text explains how California was affected industrially by the gold rush. The gold rush changed California and a huge change that caused California to be a state that people would want to live in. The Industrial Revolution in California gave people the opportunity to …show more content…

The environment of California will never be the same as it once was because of the gold rush. According to the author Stuart Thornton. ), "the countryside of California was torn up as the newly arrived settlers searched for gold. 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." California's environment was no doubt affected awfully, but if we look at how it was affected, we can look at hydraulic mining. Hydraulics shoot water at high speeds at the faces of cliffs to easily find gold. This would cause unwanted erosion and flooding depending on how much water they would use. It would cause riverbeds to clog up because of all the sediment that would be released into the rivers. In the text (California Gold Rush and Today’s Water), it says, "More than 100 years ago, California’s Gold Rush left a toxic legacy that continues to cause problems in Northern California watersheds." This text is talking to us about the effect the gold rush had on California's water today. Water is the most valuable thing on this planet; some call it liquid gold, ironically. Therefore, this is a huge problem because water is valuable. Through the gold rush, toxins were put in the water, causing the water to be unhealthy or even undrinkable. This has affected California, and its water supplies,