Forgotten 49ers: Native American Miners in the California Gold Rush

Over the last 80 years, scholars have explored the international, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and gendered dimensions of California’s gold rush, devoting monographs to the experiences of African Americans, Australians, Chileans, Chinese, the French, the Irish, Jews, Mexicans, Mormons, New Zealanders, Peruvians, and women. Still, scholars have largely neglected one of the most important—and in the first year of the gold rush the largest—groups. These thousands of Native Americans were themselves poly-lingual, multinational, and often far from home. They included California Indians, Cherokees, Lenape (Delaware), Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians), Oregon Indians, Salish, Native Alaskans, Wyandottes, Yaquis from Mexico and others, many of whom migrated and all of whom mined gold and helped to transform California.

This paper will build upon the slim body of existing scholarship addressing Native American miners in California’s gold rush to create a more detailed—and reinterpreted—narrative of their rise and fall. Utilizing primary sources, this paper will first explore why, in what labor relationships, how, and where perhaps 4,000 or more California Indians—as well as Kānaka Maoli—were mining by late 1848. The second section will describe the zenith of Native American gold mining—as well as rising violence against California Indians—between 1849 and 1850. The paper will next explore how hydraulic and hard rock mining, increased immigration, and systematic violence drove most Native Americans from the mines between 1849 and 1860 but how Native American migration to California’s mines continued for decades. The conclusion will explore why we do not know more about Native American miners in California’s gold rush, the growing field of Native American labor history in the western United States, and why it is important to uncover the hidden histories of indigenous people’s voluntary migrations to the making of the capitalist U.S. West.