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)

Keywords

General
Demographics Gold Rush Shasta County

Geographic Keywords
AUSTRALIA Oceania

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