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Up The Road: The Gold Rush Grows The Dream

Wayne Hsieh
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Flickr Creative Commons

Historian Carey McWilliams wrote California: The Great Exception, first published in 1949, to commemorate the Golden State’s first 100 years of statehood. In it, he explained why the “rules” that guided the development of other states rarely applied to California.

One reason was all that overnight wealth—the innovation it took to mine it, and the innovation the wealth itself encouraged.. According to contemporary historian Donald Elder, in just five years the California Gold Rush boosted the U.S. economy with 370 tons of gold, more than 16 billion dollars in today’s dollars. Golden State indeed.

How the gold rush boosted the development of California agriculture is a case in point. All those miners needed food as well as clothing and equipment, and had the money to pay for it.

But farming would not follow the homesteading pattern typical of westward U.S. settlement, with the federal government making land available for free. Miners and settlers discovered that the best agricultural lands were already privately owned.

The federal census of 1850 reported just 872 California farms, with an average size of 4,465 acres—the legacy of Spanish and Mexican land grants, but also land speculation and fraudulent acquisitions. There was very little land available for those wagon trains of settlers.

Thus California agriculture would become yet another exception—as fabulously rich as the state’s gold fields, with a diversity of crops and farming enterprises unseen anywhere else in the world. Diversity of soil types and topography and climate created an agricultural industry that still is the envy of the world.

Credit Art Siegel / Flickr Creative Commons
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Flickr Creative Commons
Almonds were just one of the crops that Bidwell pioneered on his 20,000 acre ranch.

And yes, the state’s agricultural wealth reaches back to the gold rush, though the Spanish missions introduced the first wine grapes and olives and citrus trees. As Carey McWilliams put it:

“The owner of a single peach tree in Coloma, which produced 450 peaches, sold these peaches in the mines for $3 each. An orchard of fifty trees produced $2,800 for the owner in a single year. The combination of people-plus-gold acted as a most powerful dynamic in forcing a rapid expansion of agricultural production and, in the years since the gold rush, an ever-increasing tide of migration has continued this dynamic.”

There’s no better place to appreciate the richness of post-gold rush agriculture than Bidwell Mansion State Historic Park in Chico, which tells the story of Annie E. K. Bidwell and her husband General John Bidwell, one of California’s earliest and most innovative farmers.

Bidwell was in the right place at the right time, in many ways—working for John Sutter when gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill on the American River in 1848. Shortly thereafter he noticed similarities between the American and Feather Rivers, near his Butte County ranch.

Exploratory panning led him to a very rich find at Bidwell’s Bar, just upstream from today’s Oroville, on July 4, 1848. Assisted by area Indians he hired, Bidwell became a very rich man—rich enough, a year later, to buy Rancho del Arroyo Chico, more than 20,000 acres of the richest farmland in California.

Bidwell soon created the most admired agricultural enterprise in the state. He pioneered all kinds of crops, including walnuts, almonds, raisins, and Cassava melons, and also grew wheat, other grains, and olives—altogether more than 400 crops—and was an active industry leader for 60 years.

 

Kim Weir is the founder of Up the Road, a nonprofit public-interest journalism project. She researches, writes, and hosts Up the Road, a radio show and mini-podcast about California co-produced by North State Public Radio. Kim got her start as a travel journalist in 1990 with the publication of the first and original Moon Handbooks Northern California, a surprise best-seller. Six other Moon books on California soon followed. She is a member, by invitation, of the venerable Society of American Travel Writers (SATW). Kim earned a BA in environmental studies and analysis, with an emphasis on botany and ecology, and also holds an MFA in creative writing. She lives in Paradise.