Go West Young Man...Woman and Child?: Investigating Shasta County's population during the Californian Gold Rush
Author(s): Heidi A Shaw
Year: 2013
Summary
The gold rush brought many things to California, including statehood, wealth, and prominence, but most noticeabley it brought people. Before the gold rush, California only boasted a population of 162,000 people, but by the end there were more than 380,000 people, the majority being immigrants from different states and countries. The majority of the literature concerning the demographic flux of the gold rush is focused on the area known as the Mother Lode, where gold was initially discovered. It is not clear from the literature whether the population trends are charachteristic of all Californian mining communities, though. This paper aims to identify whether or not the general characterization of mining communities extends to other regions that hosted the gold rush, namely Shasta County. In order to assess the typicalness of Shasta County’s gold rush population, this paper will examine census records and historic cemetery records.
Cite this Record
Go West Young Man...Woman and Child?: Investigating Shasta County's population during the Californian Gold Rush. Heidi A Shaw. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Leicester, England, U.K. 2013 ( tDAR id: 428732)
This Resource is Part of the Following Collections
Keywords
General
Demographics
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Gold Rush
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Shasta County
Temporal Keywords
Gold Rush
Spatial Coverage
min long: 112.952; min lat: -43.648 ; max long: 153.606; max lat: -10.71 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 589