Or did they? According to this link http://www.pbs.org/goldrush/discovery.html “Sutter’s undoing began 50 miles northeast of his fort on the American River. In late 1847, James Marshall and about 20 men were sent to the river by Sutter to build a sawmill – to provide lumber for Sutter’s growing ranch. The sawmill was nearly complete when a glint of something caught Marshall’s eye. It was January 24th, 1848”.
So gold was so plentiful in 1848 that it was lying about in streams. Did the Native Americans living in the area know about the gold but not care? Did they have no need for gold? Certainly it would have been something they could have used for trading purposes.
You seem to be assuming that the native population would have valued gold as much as Europeans.
By the 1850s, most native populations had been decimated, and native nations were in a constant state of war versus the US Government. By that time, they should have known the value of gold, but were not in a position to permanently settle and mine. Even if they had, it would have been stolen with no recourse for the natives.
I’m not assuming that the native population valued gold as much as Europeans… but I assumed they would have noticed it laying around and since it is so malleable (sp?) they might have used it for jewelry etc. like the Mayans and Incas did (I think). If they had showed it to the settlers at some point that might have created a gold rush a few years earlier.
From what I read, in the 1840’s California was still pretty much an outpost so while the missionaries decimated the local populations on the coast with disease there might have been some tribes left in the foothills who would have contact with streams that had gold in them.
It seems that there are at least 3 possibilities:
Either they didn’t know it was there, or they did know it was there and they didn’t care, or there were no Native Americans to notice it in the first place… so I guess that’s my question. Which is it?
Looking at where the settlements were I can see why the Spanish and Mexicans might not have stumbled over it… they tended to be nearer the coastline than the mountains.
Didn’t the Incans and the Maya also already know of some types of metalworking? California Native Americans didn’t work any type of metal, if I recall correctly (I might not), and were still using obsidian for arrow and spearheads at the time of European arrival in the 1500s. Then the CA natives might not see any need for gold, not being into metal working.
The Spanish and the Mexicans thinly populated the state, and mostly in the coastal regions, as dolphinboy points out. So they were unlikely to have discovered it.
I kind of think the natives probably knew but didn’t care, the Spanish and Mexicans didn’t know, and then the Americans found out, but I can’t rule out the idea that the natives didn’t know.
Well, I’m a California archaeologist and I’ve excavated sites as far north as Modoc County and as far south as Los Angeles County. I can say that in all that time, I have encountered exactly two pieces of gold (a Spanish coin and a filling) and neither of which was in a prehistoric context. I would, therefore, surmise that the Native Californians knew it was there but didn’t care.
It is an interesting question. It isn’t like the Native Californians didn’t have valuable decorative objects. It is just that they were made of highly valued shells, stones, feathers, furs, etc.
In any case, gold (like anything else) is only valuable if others recognize its value, i.e. it is only valuable if I can trade it for something that I deem equally valuable. I would guess that the tribes around the central Sierra may have had a hard sell trading small yellow rock chunks for anything of value.
In order for gold to be useful, you need to be able to work it. Metalworking skills generally only come about in more advanced societies. The nomadic NA natives didn’t have metalworking skills, and so would have been unable to use the gold for much and so it wouldn’t have had much use.
Before the Spanish conquest, the Aztecs were probably the nearest civilization that valued gold and knew how to find it and to work it. However, their trade network doesn’t appear to have reached as far as central California, which is pretty well walled off from the rest of North America by the Sierra Nevada.
The pueblo settlements of Arizona and New Mexico were closer to the gold fields, but when Coronado visited them in the 1540’s (in search of gold, naturally) he found no gold at all. The Pueblo Indians traded with the Aztecs, but apparently had no independent access to gold and didn’t know much about it or use it in any way.
After the Conquest, the Spanish didn’t push their string of mission settlements up the California coast until the 1770’s. Between that time and 1848, I do find it a little surprising that the Spaniards never got wind of the gold fields. They interacted a lot with the area Indians–that was the purpose of the missions, after all–and they would have gone apeshit if any native had ever mentioned gold fields. Obviously none of them ever did.
For that matter, Sutter and Marshall had Indians working for them on their sawmill, and none of them knew of the gold. Apparently the Indians of that time and place just didn’t know how to look for it–they certainly knew that white people valued it, and didn’t hesitate to pan it themselves once the gold rush started.
Thanks everyone. That makes perfect sense to me. The Native Americans around at the time had no need for gold so they wouldn’t see any reason to collect it or even mention it to the Spaniards, Mexicans or settlers they traded with. As far as they were concerned it was probably just a shiny yellowish rock and nothing more. I assume the same thing goes for copper and silver deposits that were also fairly abundant at the time.
Now how the Spanish managed to settle CA and not stumble over it is a little surprising given their natural inclinations to look for and find it in the New World. I guess they simply didn’t look in the right places. Lucky us Americans.
I would add that the Spanish colonization of california included the Mission system, in which the local indians were enslaved/bound to the missions. This began a huge die-off of the native peoples. I heard an estimate that the missions caused the depopulation of many areas. So, nobody was around looking for gold-they were too busy working the mission farms, and dieing off due to malnutrition and diseas.
Right… the Native Americans were dying off… not the Spanish (I don’t think). So the Spanish settlers could have fanned out and looked for it, but apparently they didn’t… or at least they didn’t discover any major deposits.
This is partly true, but the situation was more fluid than you make it sound–it’s not as if every Indian in California was either bound permanently to a mission or dead. H.W. Brands, in The Age of Gold, describes the situation as follows:
One giveaway that the interior wasn’t entirely depopulated was that Sutter’s settlement near what became Sacramento was a fort–it had to be defensible against Indians that might at some point turn hostile. Sutter employed Indians at his settlement, both as farmers and laborers, and his agent Marshall even employed some in constructing the sawmill under which he discovered gold.
So throughout this era, contacts between whites and Indians were substantial–and many of the Indians had to have spent time hunting and fishing in the gold-laden foothills and streams. Furthermore, I can’t believe that any Indian could spend any amount of time around white people–whether Spanish padres, Mexican rancheros, or American pioneers–without understanding that white people valued gold. Once the gold rush started, they became avid panners, at least until whites chased them away–General Sherman reported that almost half the panners in 1848 were Indians, and Brands states that “Local Indians soon joined the hunt, once they discovered what the whites would pay for gold”.
But I can’t believe that the Indians didn’t know that beforehand. So why didn’t they pan it and bring it to whites on their own before 1848? I can only conclude that, because gold was never part of their culture, they had never developed the trained eyes and the habits of mind necessary to spot it.
Agree with 'most everything that’s been said so far. Three other things. First, gold nuggets in a stream bed isn’t as obvious as you might think. There are several on display here in museums. They don’t scream out “Gold!” Second, the natves of northern California were stone-age cultures. They had no metal working of any kind. So, no frame of reference from which to suspect one could do anything useful with those pretty pebbles. Third, as for Europeans, understand that in 1847, when the US “liberated” California from Mexico, SF was a teeming metropolis of about 500 souls (both the Spanish and Mexicans hated it here, too cold). And almost no one was off stomping about in the foothills of the Sierras.
Native Americans knew about gold and was surprised by the Europeans’/Americans’ interest in it. They used it for trading with the immigrants sometimes, and it was also used by children in games, which of course, in turn, surprised the Europeans/Americans.
Bit of a hijack:
I would also like to point out that it is a myth that native american cultures were a bunch of nomadic tribes. In fact, there were cities in North America as big as most cities in Europe at the same time, there were large areas of cultivated land, orchards and parks (the latter likely for hunting). These areas were the first sign of civilization and often amazed the first imigrants/soldiers before they reached the town.
It is known that many settlements wouldn’t have survived their first year in the new land if it wasn’t for the native americans’ surplus of grain, and their generosity.
The reason we still believe in the native american cultures as mainly consisting of few, nomadic societies, is that if they didn’t cultivate the earth, they didn’t own it. This was very central philosophy in Europe at the time and was used as an excuse to justify the treatment of the native cultures. This is also the reason scientist for decades tried to prove that the “natives” also “just arrived”. They are few, move around, just arrived – so what’s the big deal? – we cultivate the area.
So the image of the noble, nomadic primitive is – to use a modern word – propaganda that we still buy.
I think this is important to point out, because the native americans today still suffer from this “misunderstanding” and lack of recognition.
Do’h. :smack: Should be “gold nuggets … aren’t …” (“nuggets” was added to the sentence in Preview). Also, if you want a source, especially for that population figure, I got it from Rand Richards’ Historic San Francisco (2005). He mentions the trading, btw, of which he says, “Indians … had, on accasion brought specks of gold with them to the missions. But these small quantities had not been enough to get anyone terribly excited.”
Well, I still find it fairly anomolous. I think that it’s pretty well acknowledged that gold is almost universally valuable and has been throughout the ages. This is because of its scarcity and because of its almost universal appeal. It is pretty, easy to work with, doesn’t corrode or wear out, and lots and lots of cultures have valued it. I’m sure there are some that have not, but they must be in the rare minority, or the economics of this resource would not have developed as they have. And I also wonder why it never became, to oversimplify it, popular out west among the natives. I don’t think that you need a lot of sophisticated metalworking skills to deal with something as malleable as gold. Hell, you bang it with a rock. So it still is a good question that I don’t think has been answered well here. Maybe they did notice it, but they weren’t particularly drawn to it. Why? I don’t even think we have a number of decent hypotheses, do we? Aside from, well, they just weren’t. I’m still curious.