On the morning of January 24, 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall climbed into a ditch beside a half-finished sawmill in the Sierra Nevada foothills, stooped down, and found gold. He crawled out clutching his hat to his chest like a hurt child, showed the men a teaspoon of yellow flakes, and said "I have found it." Within a year, fifty thousand people from all six continents were racing to California. Within a decade, 848 tons of gold had been ripped from the earth, nearly five times the amount Spain had extracted from the Americas in 150 years. Within two decades, the nation had been torn apart by civil war and four Sacramento shopkeepers with no engineering experience had built a railroad across the continent using twenty thousand Chinese laborers.
Today's guest is Nathaniel Philbrick, author of The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World. We discuss how California went from a sparsely populated Mexican territory to the most diverse place on earth within months, and how its explosive admission as a free state in 1850 shattered the balance between slave and free states and set the nation on a path to civil war that two California senators, one from Mississippi and one from New York, fought out in miniature before one of them was killed in a duel. We look at how the Rush created the template Americans have been following ever since: the conviction that wealth is there for the taking if you move fast enough, that the rules can be written after the money is made, and that whoever gets there first wins, a logic that ran straight from the hydraulic mines that blasted apart mountainsides through the four Sacramento shopkeepers who built the transcontinental railroad to Leland Stanford's horse farm at Palo Alto, where the same culture of speculative risk and ruthless speed became Silicon Valley.
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