COLOMA, California ‒ Ankle-deep in a stream, James W. Marshall bent over and grabbed a shiny object that caught his eye. He placed it on a rock and began striking it with another. The shiny material pounded flat, which told him nearly everything he needed to know.
He had struck gold – literally.
Looking down at his feet, Marshall saw more glimmering particles. Over the next half hour, the carpenter and businessman filled his hat with gold then worth about $15 (the equivalent amount would now be worth about $2,500). He must have felt rich: At the time, he was leading construction of a sawmill by the river. His men, working for $1 a day plus room and board, soon abandoned their jobs to search for gold.
Marshall’s Jan. 24, 1848, discovery at Sutter’s Mill sparked the California Gold Rush, one of the most significant events in America’s nearly 250-year history. The news of readily accessible gold attracted prospectors from across the country and around the world, launching a mass migration and a quest for success, the spirit of which lives on in the region today.
USA TODAY is tracing these epic journeys as part of our coverage of America’s upcoming 250th birthday.
California historian Ed Allen sees connections between the Gold Rush era and the state’s entrepreneurial culture, which has propelled California into a global powerhouse ‒ the nation’s most populous state and the world’s fourth-largest economy.
The state is now the epicenter of another quest: Instead of prospectors armed with pickaxes and gold pans, tech workers in Silicon Valley hunt for riches on computer screens, server farms and complex algorithms.
“I can see a similarity between the Gold Rush and the tech hub of the Bay Area – people from all over the world coming there, the education level that is concentrated there,” said Allen, the park historian at Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park.
Ed Allen, park historian at the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park next to the replica of Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, Calif.
Standing in front of a replica of the riverside sawmill where Marshall discovered gold, Allen continued: “The Gold Rush was a flash in the pan, and I think we’re on to a whole ’nother track with AI and, basically, the Silicon Valley.”
What was the Gold Rush?
Just days after Marshall’s discovery, California became a US territory with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War. Newcomers began to arrive almost immediately, with the growth driven by the forty-niners ‒ the gold-seeking pioneers who began flocking west in 1849.
The territory’s non-Native American population at the time of Marshall’s discovery stood at about 14,000. By 1852, with California newly named a state, there were 250,000 non-Native Americans, according to California State Parks.
James W. Marshall, circa 1884.
Boomtowns like Coloma sprang up to support the new arrivals. San Francisco transformed from a “sleepy port town” to a bustling city “filled with makeshift tent-houses, hotels, stores, saloons, gambling halls and shanties,” according to the National Park Service. And Sacramento became a supply hub and staging ground for gold-seekers.
The rest of the country benefited, too. Businesses back east provided supplies and profited from the gold the prospectors brought back. In 1852, at the peak of the Gold Rush, an estimated $81 million worth of gold was found in California.
Daguerreotype image of San Francisco harbor, January 1851
“Our economy just went through the roof,” Allen said.
But getting to California wasn’t easy. It could take as long as six months to cross the country by covered wagon in dreadful conditions with limited food and water, he said.
“In fact, most of the people that got rich in California, if they crossed the prairies and so forth, they were going to go home by boat,” Allen said.
A route had recently opened through the narrow isthmus of Panama, making the journey from the West Coast to the East Coast faster.
“Panama had a railroad on it after 1854, and so you didn’t have to walk through the jungles and catch all kinds of diseases,” he said.
Illustriation of prospector carrying mining tools, cookware, and food as he walks to California, circa 1849.
Even those who made it west more often struck out than struck it rich.
But even a small amount of gold could make the poor farmhands who rushed west feel wealthy.
“They had never had money,” Allen said, “and of course, this first money you get, you’re most likely going to spend it and have a good time.”
The Rush led to a devastating bust
The rush for gold was devastating for the region’s Indigenous people.
The 1900 census recorded the Native American population in California at 15,377, which Allen said was a historic low point, compared to the estimated 300,000 Native Americans living in the region at the start of the Spanish mission era in 1769. Much of that decline came between 1846 and 1870, during the height of the Gold Rush, according to the National Museum of the American Indian.
The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill brought “one of the darkest episodes of dispossession, widespread sexual assault and mass murder against the native people of California,” reported the California Native American Heritage Commission.
Ed Allen, park historian at the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park holds small pieces of gold, similar to what miners searched for during the gold rush.
In 1850, California passed a Foreign Miners’ License Tax intended to drive foreigners out of rich mining areas.
The tax ordered non-American miners to pay upwards of $20 a month to mine in the state. It was primarily enforced against miners of Mexican, Latin American, Chinese, and German descent, who often worked together while facing intense discrimination and violence, said Gregorio Mora-Torres, a retired Mexican American Studies professor at San Jose State University.
“You also had people coming from South America, Chile, and Peru who had this incredible knowledge of mining,” Mora-Torres said. But they weren’t entitled to take part in finding mineral wealth like everybody else. Sad.”
Across oceans, mountains and deserts, these routes led dreamers to gold and a new frontier.
The tax was largely repealed in 1852, “but the damage had been done. They obviously couldn’t afford it. They were priced out,” Mora-Torres said.
After 1852, gold became harder to reach, and large-scale, environmentally destructive mining practices took over.
For California, the bust was just as defining as the rush.
Some of the boomtowns that fueled the dreams of fortune-seekers became dusty ghost towns, according to the Autry Museum of the American West.
“In the end, very few gold miners became rich from finding gold,” the museum reported. “The people who ended up making a lot of money during the California Gold Rush were the people who sold different products and services to the gold miners.”
They sold things like mining tools, clothing, pots and pans and food, Mora-Torres said. “They were the ones smart enough not to get their hands dirty.”
Some of the businesses that got their start during the Gold Rush include Wells Fargo & Co., a bank that initially provided financial services to hopeful prospectors, and Levi Strauss & Co., which offered sturdy denim clothing for gold miners.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie speaks during a press conference at San Francisco City Hall on Oct. 23, 2025.
Today, billionaire Daniel Lurie, a renowned philanthropist and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, serves as San Francisco’s mayor.
Still chasing the American Dream
Now, the long-awaited rise of artificial intelligence is being billed as a modern-day Gold Rush, fueling the growth of tech companies in the Bay Area, such as Apple, Nvidia, Google and Meta.
Congresswoman and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco said in a retirement announcement, posted to the social media site X on Nov. 6, that the area doesn’t “fear the future, we forge it.”
“From the Gold Rush to the miracles of science and technology,” Pelosi said, the area has always been “the cradle of innovation, buzzing with optimism and creativity.”
Attendees take pictures of the next generation iPhone 17 during an Apple special event at Apple headquarters on Sept. 9, 2025 in Cupertino, Calif. Apple unveiled a new generation of iPhones and updated Apple Watches and AirPods during a special event at Apple headquarters.
As with the 19th-century Gold Rush, the tech boom is bringing people from around the world to California. About 60% of top AI scientists currently working in the United States were born abroad, according to the National Foundation for American Policy, a non-partisan nonprofit involved in public policy research.
The diverse array of intellectuals swarming Silicon Valley to advance AI is comparable to the multicultural collection of miners who scoured that same land for gold nearly two centuries ago, said Makeda Best, a deputy director of curatorial affairs at the Oakland Museum of California, which features a longstanding, popular Gold Rush exhibit.
“They come here to make their way, to find creation and community,” said Best about the foreign tech workers who venture to Silicon Valley.
Zededa CEO Said Ouissal believes just as California’s Gold Rush diversified America, artificial intelligence (AI) will create similar opportunities for many diverse and innovative minds today in Silicon Valley. “We haven’t even mined all of the AI gold yet,” he said.
Take longtime tech executive Said Ouissal, who moved to the United States from the Netherlands in 2010. Now, he’s CEO of Zededa, an AI-based software company headquartered in San Jose.
“As a techie, coming to California was a no-brainer for me,” Ouissal told USA TODAY. “This is the Ground Zero of innovation.”
Sandesh Patnam agrees. He’s the managing partner for Premji Invest, a Silicon Valley-based venture fund that has invested more than $16 billion in tech companies.
Sandesh Patnam, a Managing Partner at Premji Invest at his office in Menlo Park, Calif. Patnam came to the US as a teenager from India to attend college, eventually migrating with other would-be innovators worldwide to Silicon Valley during the massive 1990s tech boom in California.
“This is my version of the American Dream. Silicon Valley definitely has so much of that rebellious spirit. I can’t imagine I would be in this position had I just stayed back home,” said Patnam, a native of Bangalore, India.
One difference with the Gold Rush, Patnam said, is that there has been more than one boom-bust cycle in tech.
He’s weathered four periods of ups and downs in the last two decades in Silicon Valley, including the rise of the Internet, the cloud, social networks, and now the AI explosion.
“Every time you kind of think, ‘Gosh, you know, is the Valley done?” Patnam said. “But then again, with tech, there’s always something big just around the corner.”
The search for gold goes on.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: We prospected for gold in California’s past and present
