Indian Lands with Gold

Sutter attempted without success to acquire control of the land the gold was in by signing a treaty with the Indians and by leasing the land for three years. However, the American military govenor in Monterey, Richard Mason, turned down his claim.

Sutter also tried to mine the gold by using Indians and Kanakas, who were the natives of the Sandwich Islands he had brought to California and asked them to work with him as laborers. However this attempt did not prove to be successful and almost all of the gold that was obtained was used to pay off most of the debts he had.

A good number of the men returned to their jobs when winter came around and by April 1849, there were only a couple men and some Indians left at the fort while the gold rush kept going on with force.

The inhabitants that had gone to the mountains in 1848 were all mainly from California. These people (known as forty niners or 49’ers) were all over the place and they had taken over Sutter’s land, robbed his cattle, and seized his land without payment. Then a new town, named Sacramento City started up merely a few miles away from Sutter’s fort and flourished.

Sutter tried to make a yield out of the gold rush that was going on but he ended up losing everything in the end. He moved to a small town in Pennsylvania and the state of California gave him a small allowance, which he then lived on. John Sutter passed away in 1880 in Washington, DC, while attempting to gain some justice from the United States government.

The outcome that the gold fever had on the state, nation and the world throughout that time is a little complex to comprehend. Nonetheless there are records of some of the inhabitants that lived through the whole thing and were able to witness it with their own eyes. Mr. Buckelew, who was a publisher of the Californian, stopped publishing on May 29 because there were no longer any citizens remaining in the town to read it. In his last, summarized issue he states: “The majority of our subscribers and many of our advertisers have closed their doors and places of business and left town.... The whole country, from San Francisco to Los Angeles and from the seashore to the Sierra Nevada, resounds with the sordid cry of ‘Gold! Gold!! GOLD!!!’ while the field is left half planted, the house half built, and everything neglected but the manufacture of shovels and pickaxes.” As soon as he could, Mr. Buckelew also joined in on the gold fever and went to the mountain to have a look around in order to do some prospecting as well.