Everybody Came at Once

In 1848 San Francisco was a settlement of a few hundred people. Within two years it held tens of thousands, most of them young men who had crossed an ocean or a continent on a rumour. Ships were abandoned in the bay by crews who walked off to the goldfields and were built into the waterfront where they sat. The city was made by an emergency and has never entirely stopped behaving like one.

Part of San Francisco

83 moments in this segment.

  1. - Printed handbill advertising passage to the California goldfields. One of the advertising sheets put out during the Gold Rush to sell berths and outfits to men heading west. Notices like this one drove the steamship traffic that turned San Francisco from a small settlement into a port city within a couple of years.
  2. - Flyer calling men and women west to the goldfields. A recruitment sheet from the summer of 1849 aimed at both men and women willing to make the journey to California. Handbills of this kind fed the migration that passed through San Francisco's harbour on the way to the diggings.
  3. - White buckskin bag said to have carried gold rush gold. A soft white buckskin pouch reputed to have been used in the California gold rush by John T. Williams of Bonne Terre, Missouri. Bags like it held the dust and nuggets that men carried out of the diggings and spent in San Francisco. The object is in the collection of the Missouri History Museum.
  4. - Satirical lithograph of an overloaded prospector walking to California. A hand-coloured Currier print showing a comically over-equipped gold hunter on the plains some 350 miles west of St. Louis, captioned "I neither borrow nor lend". The print mocked the gold fever that pulled thousands of men across the continent toward San Francisco.
  5. - French satirical cartoon mocking the rush for California gold. An illustration published in the Paris journal Le Charivari, held in Harvard's Houghton Library. The paper treated the gold fever reaching Europe as a subject for caricature, evidence of how quickly the California strike became international news.
  6. - Joseph Goldsborough Bruff draws himself on the trail to California. A self portrait made by Bruff during his overland expedition to the goldfields. He was a trained draughtsman who kept an unusually full pictorial record of the journey, and lived a further forty years after making it.
  7. - Bruff's canvas mountain camp in the Sierra Nevada. Joseph Goldsborough Bruff painted his own mountain lodge in the Sierra Nevada, a cluster of joined white canvas tents around a conical centre tent. A man with a gun stands at the right, with a small yellow dog and tools scattered on the ground. Bruff led a company of overland emigrants and kept an unusually detailed visual record of the crossing.
  8. - Satirical lithograph on the defence of the California bank. A hand-drawn political caricature published as the gold rush began, using the imagined 'California Bank' to mock the international scramble for the new wealth. The cast includes send-ups of James K. Polk, Napoleon the Third and Isabella the Second of Spain. Prints like this carried news of the strike to audiences who would never see the diggings.
  9. - Engraving of a miners' encampment in the Sacramento Valley. J. H. Richardson's engraving of tents and prospectors in the gold country appeared in Holden's Dollar Magazine in New York in 1849. Pictures like this were how East Coast readers first saw the rush that turned San Francisco from a village into a port city within a year. The magazine is preserved in the Internet Archive.
  10. - Currier lithograph mocking the rush to California. A comic print published by Nathaniel Currier in the first year of the gold rush, showing the far-fetched means by which hopefuls proposed to reach California, rockets among them. It belongs to the Library of Congress collection of popular graphic arts and is one of the period's best-known satires on gold fever.
  11. - Gold Rush satire lithograph titled Things as They Are. A hand-printed lithograph satirising the California gold fever, issued as the rush drew tens of thousands west. The sheet belongs to a wave of political caricature that mocked both the prospectors and President James K. Polk, whose message to Congress had confirmed the gold discoveries. The print is held by the Library of Congress.
  12. - The place we hear about, a gold rush lithograph. A satirical lithograph on wove paper issued in 1849 as news of the California strike reached the eastern states. Prints like this fed and mocked the rush in equal measure; the sheet is held by the Library of Congress.
  13. - The California Gold Rush cartoon 1849 (The Wild West). Not many Americans lived in California, but that soon changed. By 1849 thousands upon thousands of people arrived in search of gold. Support the cartoons on patreon: Get your copy of Simple History: The Wild West today!
  14. - The California Gold Rush. What was the California Gold Rush and how did it change the United States during the era of Westward Expansion? In 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill, setting off one of the largest migrations in American history. This video introduces key events, people, and impacts of the Gold Rush in a c
  15. - Inside the California Gold Rush of the 1800's. Want to help support Me? Subscribe to my 2nd Channel! ⬇️ Thanks for Watching! Inside the California Gold Rush of the 1800's | Full Documentary
  16. - America the Story of Us: Gold Rush | History. Discover how the Gold Rush led to the creation of California. Own America: The Story of Us on DVD or Blu-ray! #HISTORY Don't miss a video! Subscribe NOW: ABOUT THE HISTORY CHANNEL: The HISTORY® Channel, a divisio
  17. - The History of the California Gold Rush and the 49ers | FOR KIDS!. LESSON PLANS: The California Gold Rush was the capstone of American westward expansion in the nineteenth century and fulfilled its Manifest Destiny. In this History For Humans for kids episode, students learn the amazing st
  18. - Buried Secrets of the Gold Rush (Full Episode) | National Geographic. Winners took all in the race to get rich in the California and Klondike gold rushes; unearthing the ships involved reveals the risks taken to go west. Explore the World with National Geographic subscriptions: ➡ Subscribe: ➡ Get more Nat
  19. - Three men and a woman panning for gold at a creek. A rare Gold Rush image showing a woman working a pan alongside male miners. Women were a small minority in the diggings that supplied San Francisco's boom, and pictures placing them at the water's edge are uncommon.
  20. - California gold miners with long tom, ca.. 1850-1852; Daguerreotype, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
  21. - California gold miners with long tom, ca.. 1850-1852; Daguerreotype, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
  22. - River mining, North Fork of the American River, California. 1850-1855; Daguerreotype, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
  23. - River mining, North Fork of the American River, California (cropped). River mining, North Fork of the American River, California, ca.1850-1855; Daguerreotype, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
  24. - L. V. Helms - Drawing of San Francisco, California, August 1851. A painting of San Francisco, California by Danish adventurer, merchant, emissary and author Ludvig Verner Helms. The painting was likely created in August, 1850, although it is labeled as 1851; his book "Pioneering in the Far East" (1882) and other records record the visit occurring in 1850. Helms states the view was
  25. - Lithograph depicting the seens mining for gold during the Gold Rush.
  26. - Sailing card advertising the clipper California for San Francisco. A printed sailing card for the clipper ship California, run by the Merchant's Express Line out of Pier 13 on New York's East River under Captain Henry Barber, with gold rush scenes worked into the design. Cards like this were handed to shippers to book cargo for the fast passage around the Horn. It was printed by G.F. Nesbitt and Co.
  27. - Comic print of a gold hunter buried under useless gear. A Kelloggs and Comstock version of the Independent Gold Hunter cartoon, in which the prospector staggers under every appliance imaginable and regrets not sailing around the Horn or crossing at Chagres in Panama. The joke turned on the overland route being the harder way to reach California.
  28. - Cartoon of a gold hunter buried under useless equipment. A satirical print from the gold mania of 1848 and 1849, showing a prospector loaded with every conceivable appliance, most of it worthless in California. The figure regrets not having taken his grandmother's advice to sail around the Horn or cross at Panama instead. The Kellogg and Comstock lithograph is held by the California State Library.
  29. - A Native woman panning for gold in the diggings. An illustration of a Native American woman working a pan at a California claim during the gold rush. Native labour was widely used and widely coerced in the early diggings, though the artist and exact origin of this image are not recorded. It survives as one of the few period depictions of an Indigenous woman at the workings.
  30. - Californio woman photographed at the height of the gold rush. A black and white portrait of a Californio woman, made in August 1850 and looking directly at the camera. Californios were the Spanish-speaking residents of California from before American annexation, a population rapidly outnumbered by the gold rush influx. The photograph is held by the Oakland Museum of California.
  31. - Lithograph of miners at work in the California gold fields. A lithograph of daily life at the diggings, printed on blue paper and worked up from a photograph by Fishbourne and Gow of San Francisco. Joseph Britton, later a leading San Francisco lithographer, is credited as the artist. Images of this kind were sold to eastern buyers hungry for scenes of the rush.
  32. - Sailing card advertising the clipper ship California. A printed sailing card issued to advertise berths and cargo space on the clipper California, running from Pier 13 on New York's East River to San Francisco. The card promises a very quick trip and urges merchants to book at once, competing for gold rush traffic. Its border carries scenes of the California diggings; the ship was built by Samuel Hall of East Boston and printed matter came from G.F. Nesbitt and Co.
  33. - Portrait of a California Gold Rush Miner, by George H.
  34. - Newspaper column reporting gold found at Sutter's Mill. Page two, column four of The Californian, carrying the notice of the discovery on the American River. This short item is among the first printed reports of the find, and word spreading out from it emptied San Francisco of workers before drawing tens of thousands back.
  35. - Ships rotting at anchor in Yerba Buena Cove. One plate from William Shew's five-part daguerreotype panorama of the San Francisco waterfront, taken from Rincon Point. The vessels were abandoned where they moored when their crews walked off for the gold fields, and are shown in varying stages of decay. Shew's panorama is one of the earliest photographic records of the harbour.
  36. - Miners working a claim on the American River. A whole-plate daguerreotype by George H. Johnson showing miners at work on the American River near Sacramento. The river was where James Marshall's 1848 discovery began the rush that turned San Francisco from a village into a port city. Photographs made on the diggings this early are rare, since the daguerreotype process demanded equipment few miners carried.
  37. - German engraving of gold washing in the California diggings. A steel engraving of miners washing for gold in California, published in the fifteenth volume of Meyer's Universum, a German illustrated survey of the world's sights. It was cut by the engraver Anton Rottmann for the Bibliographisches Institut at Hildburghausen. The plate shows how the rush was pictured for European readers who would never see the goldfields.
  38. - Portrait of a Cantonese gold miner in California. An 1853 likeness by Isaac Wallis Baker of a Cantonese miner working the California diggings. Thousands of men from Guangdong reached San Francisco in the Gold Rush years, and the city became the entry point and commercial base for Chinese labour across the state. Held by the Oakland Museum of California.
  39. - Lithograph of the gold camp at Springfield, Tuolumne County. A view of Springfield in Tuolumne County, drawn by George Henry Goddard and printed on blue paper by the San Francisco lithographers Britton and Rey. Britton and Rey were the leading printmakers of Gold Rush California, and their views carried images of the mining districts back east. The print is held by the Library of Congress.
  40. - A mining town street with the Rancherie House hotel. Robert H. Vance made this daguerreotype of a California mining settlement, its false-fronted buildings including a hotel and the Sweata and Francis premises. Vance was the leading daguerreotypist of the gold country; the plate is in the J. Paul Getty Museum.
  41. - A Case of Real Distress. A plea for charity in the (London) Jewish Chronicle for a Esther Solomon Levy, a woman with six living children and a seventh on the way, stranded in Gold Rush SF after her husband's death at sea near Panama.
  42. - "The Bummer", illustration from "A Peep at Washoe" by J.. 's Monthly Magazine, December 1860. A "bummer" was a man who had made his fortune mining and was now at leisure. This would be in California at the start of his story, before Browne journeys to other gold and silver mining areas.
  43. - "Going to Kern River", illustration from "A Peep at Washoe" by J.. 's Monthly Magazine, December 1860. This would be the Kern River, California gold rush of 1853.
  44. - "Returning from Kern River", illustration from "A Peep at Washoe" by J.. 's Monthly Magazine, December 1860. This would be the Kern River, California gold rush of 1853.
  45. - "Returning from Kern River", illustration from "A Peep at Washoe" by J.. 's Monthly Magazine, December 1860. This would be the Kern River, California gold rush of 1853.
  46. - Bandits ambush a traveller in the gold country. George du Maurier drew this scene for the story "Of a Man Who Fell Among Thieves" in the London weekly Once a Week, published 19 October 1861. It depicts an attack by bandits during the California Gold Rush, a staple of the lawlessness British readers associated with the gold fields. The engraving was cut by Joseph Swain's workshop.
  47. - Engraved figure of a prospector setting out to look for gold. An illustration of a miner named Aubert departing on a discovery trip, engraved by Gustave-Adolphe Chassevent-Bacques for volume five of the French travel journal Le Tour du monde in 1862. European periodicals carried images like this to readers who followed the California rush from a distance. It belongs to a body of Gold Rush art rather than to photography.
  48. - Miners digging and washing sand from a riverbed. An engraving of placer work in the California diggings, showing crews lifting sand from the bottom of a river and washing it for gold. It was published in the French travel journal Le Tour du monde from a drawing by Gustave-Adolphe Chassevent-Bacques. The rush that drew these men through San Francisco turned the port into a city within a few years.
  49. - An arrastra grinding gold ore under a dragged stone. An engraving by Gustave-Adolphe Chassevent-Bacques published in the French travel journal Le Tour du monde, showing the mill Anglo miners nicknamed the Mexican merry-go-round. The device, brought north by Mexican miners, crushed ore by dragging heavy stones in a circle around a central post, and it was widely used in the California diggings before machinery arrived.
  50. - Engraving of hydraulic washing at a California gold claim. A wood engraving by Gustave-Adolphe Chassevent-Bacques showing gold being washed out of a hillside by hydraulic method, published in volume five of the French travel journal Le Tour du monde. High-pressure water jets let operators strip whole slopes, and the debris they flushed downstream reached the bay and the rivers feeding it. The plate presented California mining to European readers.
  51. - Engraved scene of daily life in a California mining camp. Gustave-Adolphe Chassevent-Bacques drew the working life of the California miner for the French travel journal Le Tour du monde. Illustrated journals like this carried the diggings to European readers who knew the gold country only by report. The plate appeared in volume five of the series.
  52. - Miners raising gold ore up a shaft. An engraving of shaft mining in the California goldfields, published in the French travel journal Le Tour du monde. It illustrates the shift from surface panning to dug and timbered workings that followed the first rush years.
  53. - Engraving of miners crushing ore by the old Mexican method. An engraving by Gustave-Adolphe Chassevent-Bacques showing gold ore being crushed by the method Mexican miners had long used in the region, published in the French travel journal Le Tour du monde. Mexican techniques and labour shaped the early California diggings before industrial mills arrived. The plate appeared in volume five of the journal.
  54. - Chilean mills grinding gold ore. An engraving of the heavy stone mills used to crush ore in the California diggings, published in volume five of the French travel journal Le Tour du monde. The image is by Gustave-Adolphe Chassevent-Bacques and depicts the industrial phase of gold extraction that followed the early years of panning.
  55. - Portrait of a Californio miner working the diggings. An image by the illustrator Chassevent of a Mexican or Californio miner during the California Gold Rush. Spanish-speaking Californians and miners arriving from Sonora were among the earliest to work the gold fields, and were then pushed out by foreign miners' taxes and vigilante pressure. Held by the Oakland Museum of California.
  56. - Marie Suize Pantalon (Gravure cropped). Marie Suize, aka Marie Pantalon, came from France to California during the Gold Rush and ran her own business as a goldminer and winemaker. She was arrested several times for wearing pants.
  57. - Book illustration from an account of sailing to the gold fields. An engraving from Samuel C. Upham's memoir of his 1849 voyage to California by way of Cape Horn, published in Philadelphia in 1878. The surrounding text recounts prising forty-five dollars in nuggets from a crevice in the rock and keeping quiet about it. The volume was issued for the Associated Pioneers of the Territorial Days of California and digitised from a Library of Congress copy.
  58. - Sketch of San Francisco in 1849 by Ludvig Verner Helms.. "Pantaloon" on an unsuccessful trade mission. The sketch was drawn from Flagstaff Hill, which no longer exists. Helms was a Danish adventurer, merchant, emissary, and author associated with th
  59. - Miners working a long sluice to separate gold from gravel. Titled 'The Sluice', this Henry Sandham illustration shows crews running water and gravel down a wooden trough so that gold settles behind the riffles. It appeared in The Century illustrated monthly magazine in January 1883, part of a set on gold-rush mining methods. The Library of Congress holds the print.
  60. - A miner rocking a cradle to wash gold from gravel. Titled 'The Cradle', this Henry Sandham wood engraving shows the rocker box, a hand-worked wooden trough that let a small party wash far more gravel than a pan alone. It ran in The Century illustrated monthly magazine in January 1883 alongside other studies of gold-rush technique. The Library of Congress holds the print.
  61. - The Monitor: a hydraulic nozzle blasting a California hillside. Henry Sandham's print shows hydraulic mining, in which high-pressure water cannon known as monitors washed whole hillsides apart to reach the gold. The method moved enormous volumes of debris downstream and became one of the most destructive industrial practices in the state. The image was published in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in January 1883.
  62. - Mining and Scientific Press 1885 nameplate. Nameplate of the Mining and Scientific Press, a former mining and miscellaneous science newspaper published in San Fransisco, California
  63. - Engraved portrait of the lumberman Samuel Penfield Taylor. Samuel Penfield Taylor came to California in the gold rush and built a paper mill on Lagunitas Creek in Marin County, north of San Francisco. This likeness was engraved for the 1888 county history 'Pen Pictures from the Garden of the World'. The land around his mill is now Samuel P. Taylor State Park.
  64. - Cartoon drawing of gold miners headed by boat for California.. "Ye High Seas Showinge Ye Vesseles Bound for Calyfornya." A caricature of the time from "Punch" by Richard Doyle. From the Center for Sacramento History
  65. - Gold Rush Miners' Ball. "Miner's Ball," 1891 etching by Andre Castaigne that imagines a men only ball during the 1849 California Gold rush
  66. - The mock forty-niner camp at the Midwinter Exposition. The California Midwinter International Exposition, staged in Golden Gate Park, included a reconstructed gold rush mining camp as one of its attractions. It presented the 1849 rush as heritage to fairgoers barely forty-five years after the event.
  67. - Studio portrait of Ralphine North McDonald. A formal portrait of a woman from a California family with mining business interests dating to the gold rush era. Neither the photographer nor the studio is recorded.
  68. - Alvin Aaron Coffey Sr.. (1822–1902) American miner, the only Black member of the California Society of Pioneers
  69. - Gold Rush engraving from a world history volume. A plate from John Clark Ridpath's multi-volume history of the world, published in Cincinnati by Jones Brothers and digitised from a University of California copy. The archive files it with California in the 1850s and Gold Rush art; the accompanying text on the page concerns the United States and the Mexican War rather than the illustration itself.
  70. - Delegates to the mining engineers' convention pose in three rows. A newspaper group portrait of members of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, printed in The San Francisco Call, which names every man from Charles Janin and Mark Kerr to Charles G. Yale and Charles W. Goodale. The accompanying report covered the institute's discussion of California's wealth in gold and land.
  71. - Ships abandoned in the harbour during the gold craze. Two engraved views of the waterfront crowded with vessels left at anchor after their crews walked off for the diggings. The plates come from John P. Young's history of San Francisco as the metropolis of the Pacific Coast; some of the hulls were eventually run ashore and built over as the city expanded onto its own harbour.
  72. - Gold rush scene engraved for a popular world history. The illustration appeared in Ellis and Horne's multi-volume The story of the greatest nations, published in New York in 1913, and derives from work by the artist William de la Montagne Cary. It shows the California gold rush as it was pictured for readers two generations after the event.
  73. - Cartoon showing how they went to California in forty-nine. A Nathaniel Currier cartoon on the improbable contraptions imagined for getting gold seekers to California, including craft in the air as well as at sea. This copy is a glass negative from the Harris and Ewing collection at the Library of Congress.
  74. - Redwood cross-section with its growth rings dated by plaque. A cut section of virgin coast redwood, labelled as 864 years old, with small markers pinned to individual growth rings to align them against historical events. The annotations reach from the Battle of Hastings and Kublai Khan through the Declaration of Independence and the California Gold Rush. The photograph comes from the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information file at the Library of Congress.
  75. - Three-cent stamp marking a century of California statehood. Issued on 9 September 1950 for the hundredth anniversary of California's admission to the Union. The central vignette shows a miner panning for gold and a pioneer couple beside an ox-drawn wagon; the side panel carries a citrus tree and the ship that brought word of statehood. Engraved by the Bureau of Printing and Engraving.
  76. - Madams of the Barbary Coast Documentary Trailer. Madams of the Barbary Coast is an award winning historical documentary, recently broadcast for Women's History Month, about some of the more colorful and provocative Madams, courtesans, and other women pioneers who settled the wild frontier town of early San Francisco. Told through a series of poi
  77. - Sin, Fire & Gold: The Days of San Francisco's Barbary Coast | KQED. Watch excerpts from KQED's documentary on San Francisco's Barbary Coast Trail - a walking tour of San Francisco from the Gold Rush through the 1906 earthquake and fire. Hosted by historian Daniel Bacon and Greg Sherwood. KQED serves the people of Northern California with a community-supported alter
  78. - Panorama notorious 'Barbary Coast'. A film by the Edison Company showing the devastation of the April 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. This film is part of the Sulphur Springs Collection of Pre-Nickelodeon Films held by the the G. William Jones Film and Video Collection, which is part of Southern Methodist University's Hamon Arts Lib
  79. - Joshua Norton, the Only United States Emperor. Try Wix now: ________________________________ I wonder who would win if Joshua Norton and John McAfee got in a fight. ____________________________________ Check out my other channel, Sam O'Nella Vlog! Follow me on
  80. - EMPEROR NORTON: San Francisco celebrates the 200th birthday of Emperor. San Francisco celebrates the 200th birthday of Emperor Norton
  81. - San Francisco's Hidden History: The Trail Most Tourists Miss. Today, I spend six hours exploring San Francisco's Barbary Coast Trail. It is an urban hike that takes you from Downtown SF and walks you through some of the most historical sites in the city. The walk is steeped in the city's fascinating history starting in the Gold Rush Era to 1906; when it went
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