By Geoffrey Saunders Schramm

  Like many who made the perilous journey to California in 1849, Hiram Pierce hoped to strike it rich. By the time the blacksmith from Troy, New York, arrived in California on July 26, he had traveled by ship to Panama and trudged twenty-four miles across its malaria-infested isthmus, only to wait thirty-five days for another ship that would ferry him to San Francisco. When he finally arrived, he found an unexpected world.

  "Went ashore and found such a wild state of things as almost to intoxicate a person without giving fifty cents a glass," he wrote to his wife Sara. "The pedestrians and laborers with their peculiar costumes and fixings present a singular and unique appearance. As much of a mixed Congregation as Peter ever preached to."

  San Francisco was populated by a multihued cast that included Sonorans, Chileans, Frenchmen, and Germans. Clearly, word about the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in January of 1848 had already traveled the world.

  The multicultural dimension of California mining life and the tensions that came with it are explored in The Gold Rush, an NEH-funded film by PBS's American Experience that airs November 6. By telling the stories of individual forty-niners, the film attempts to humanize an event that made California the diverse place that it is.

  "People often assume that the Gold Rush was an American experience," says producer Randy MacLowry. "A lot of people think of white prospectors with big, long beards, floppy hats, and these jaunty grand adventures that they went on. The reality is that in Gold Rush-era California you have this first embodiment of what America would become-a multicultural place. It was the beginning of the nation's internationalization."

  Among the foreigners who came were Chilean adventurer Vicente Perez Rosales and Antonio Franco Coronel, a Californio and former officer in the Mexican army. Coronel, the luckier of the two, was a native of Mexico City who moved to Los Angeles with his parents in 1834. He was struck early with gold fever and headed north to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in the summer of 1848. Upon his arrival, he discovered that the incredible stories he had heard about the abundance of gold were true.

  "Soon after a little digging we came to the gold deposits and everyone who was working was happy with the results," he wrote. "I recovered about forty-five ounces of coarse gold. All the others, about one hundred and some odd persons, had brilliant results."

  Success stories such as Coronel's were common in 1848, and because the surface gold was still easy to find and conditions were uncrowded the five thousand or so miners in California generally labored peacefully.

  Word of bountiful gold quickly spread to Europe, Chile, Peru, China, Australia, and the eastern United States. By 1849, an estimated ninety thousand people had arrived in California to make their fortunes. Three-quarters of the newcomers were from the United States.

  As the population of miners spiked and gold became more difficult to find, tensions arose, particularly between Spanish-speaking miners and the newcomer Anglo-Americans. With these new arrivals came their long-standing attitudes and beliefs about race.

  More than just a spoil of the recently ended Mexican War, California proved for most Americans that the nation was preordained to occupy the North American continent. "The Anglo-American people of the United States were convinced that God had placed his hand upon this nation in a special way and that the Promised Land lay to the west," historian James Rawls says in the film.

  This premise of Manifest Destiny, as the journalist John O'Sullivan called it in 1839, impelled Anglo-American miners to treat other gold seekers as foreigners who were cashing in on something to which they had no right.

  "Most Americans came in on the heels of the people coming from South America, Mexico, or other areas that were closer," explains MacLowry. "They felt that they had rights to this land and this gold, and these foreigners didn't. They believed they had every right to throw them out."

  This divisive attitude greeted Coronel when he returned to the foothills in the spring of 1849. "In this place there was already a numerous population of Chileans, Peruvians, Californians, Mexicans, and many Americans, Germans, etc.," Coronel wrote. "The camps were almost separated according to nationalities. All-some more, some less-were profiting from the fruit of their work. Presently news was circulated that it had been resolved to evict all of those who were not American citizens from the placers because it was believed that the foreigners did not have the right to exploit the placers." Anglo-American miners also urged the state's legislature to enact a foreign miners tax with the intent of driving foreign miners' out of California.

  "It really was a prohibitive tax," explains Rawls in the film. "It was not designed to raise revenue. It was designed to prohibit the mining of Mexicans and other Latin Americans in California." Rather than pay the tax, thousands of Mexican miners left California. A few years later when the tax was levied onto incoming Chinese miners, they chose to pay, providing the state with approximately a quarter of its revenues.

  After a mob of drunken whites hanged two "foreigners" for allegedly stealing gold, Coronel, who had already made a tidy sum, ceded his claim. Troubled by his experiences, Coronel returned to southern California and became active in local politics. In 1853 he was elected mayor of Los Angeles, the only Latino to hold the office until Antonio Villaraigosa in 2005.

  Perez Rosales and his companions were also threatened, but, instead of retreating home to Chile, they looked for new ways to make money. They sold dry goods, ran a hospital for malaria patients, and dug graves. Then, they opened a hotel where they "hired a famous French cook named Monsieur Michel, who in addition to room and board earned a total of $8,400 a year, a good deal more than a minister of state earns in Chile; and setting up over the door a large sign that read Citizens' Restaurant, we opened for business."

  Unfortunately for Perez Rosales, fire spread through San Francisco and destroyed his business. After losing everything, he and his brothers returned to Chile. He recalled, "Like so many others, we went out for wool and came back shorn."

  Such stories of individual luck-or lack thereof-thread through The Gold Rush along with the stories of prejudice.

  Pierce wrote several times to his wife about his difficulties: "Ten months since I left home & have not made a dollar. The Lord must open something entirely unexpected to enable me to do much of anything."

  Sara, who had taken on all the family responsibilities, including seven children, responded, "My dear husband, if I can get you back, I should be willing to live on very small fare. Your presence here is better than gold."

  Anxious to succeed, Pierce decided to try a different way of mining. Some miners had switched from wooden bateas, or pans, to cradles that could sift lode-bearing soil more efficiently. Others, like Pierce and a group he joined, began to create makeshift flumes to divert rivers so that their silted beds were easier to search. While these adaptations helped in the search for gold, there was no escaping the reality that the precious commodity was becoming more difficult to find.

  While Pierce floundered, others prospered. With thousands entering California every month, demand for equipment and basic necessities far outweighed the supply. Prices began to skyrocket. Second-hand shovels started to go for eight dollars and food became equally steep.

  "Flour $6 to $12 per bbl. Choice Cheese $6 per lb. Salaratus $12 per lb. Eggs $12 per dozen. I paid $1.50 for breakfast," Pierce wrote in his diary in astonishment.

  Among those who began to strike it rich were entrepreneurs such as Sam Brannan, a Mormon elder who had immigrated in 1846 to Yerba Buena-renamed San Francisco in 1847-to avoid religious persecution. Brannan was partly responsible for spreading gold fever when he sent a special Gold Rush edition of his newspaper, the California Star, to St. Louis in 1848. In fewer than three months, Brannan's general store had logged more than $36,000 in profits. By 1849, he was well on his way to becoming San Francisco's first millionaire -without ever panning for gold.

  Stories such as Brannan's have led historians to emphasize that the most enduring fortunes made during the Gold Rush came not from mining, but from "mining the miners." Free enterprise soon became the fastest and most certain way to strike it rich in mid-century California. Away from cities and towns with established infrastructures, the gold seekers had little choice but to rely on the few privately owned businesses for mining supplies.

  The high ratio of men to women in California-a staggering nine to one, according to most studies-also meant that miners had to look elsewhere for the comforts of hearth and home. The few women who made the trek to California were highly sought out. Foreign women, including Californio and French women, were often available in saloons for miners to solicit for card games and conversation. Suddenly, female companionship became a burgeoning industry.

  Although some of these solicitations would have been deemed salacious back east, the lawlessness of unsettled California permitted Anglo-American men to bend-or sometimes even discount-social mores. Anglo-American women who followed their husbands west, however, continued -or at least were expected-to remain within the bounds of propriety. Some capitalized on the absence of domesticity in the diggings.

  "The women who had domestic skills suddenly found that they could be paid for them," notes writer JoAnn Levy in the film. While some men set up camp and fashioned their own domestic arrangements, others patronized provisional hotels or boardinghouses run by women. One of these proprietors was Luzena Wilson, a Missourian who arrived in the California mining town of Nevada City in March of 1850 with her gold-seeking husband.

  "I bought provisions at a neighboring store, and when my husband came back at night he found twenty miners eating at my table," she wrote. "Each man as he rose put a dollar in my hand and said I might count him as a permanent customer."

  Spurred on by her early success, Wilson soon opened a hotel that she named El Dorado, after the legendary Spanish city made of gold. Within a matter of months, she had raked in a tidy sum and opened a general store with ten thousand dollars worth of goods. When the family left Nevada City and headed for the California coast in 1851, Wilson had amassed a small fortune and knew that the state's impending settlement would mean even more.

  Within the Chinese community, there were successes as well. Wah Lee made a fortune with his laundry; Yee Fung Cheung had an herbal medicine business, and Yee Ah Tye became a mine owner.

  Even as the Gold Rush came to a close in the mid 1850s, people continued to arrive from all corners of the world. The miners and business people who decided to stay sent word for their wives and children to join them. As families reunited and started to put down their roots, California became more settled.

  Pierce, like thousands of other forty-niners, never did find his fortune in California. After two years laboring in the gold fields, he decided to leave none the richer. He wrote to Sara saying, "I have made an honest effort but the Lord has for some cause unknown to me ordered it otherwise. I will no longer sacrifice all that is dear on earth or worth living for, for the hope of gain."

  He soon returned to Troy and took up blacksmithing again, hoping that he would eventually save enough money to return to the Golden State with his family. But on May 19, 1866, seventeen years after his journey west, he died. His dreams, however, did not. Four of his seven children, stirred by his rousing tales of life out west, eventually moved to California.

WGBH received $500,000 in NEH funding to create THE GOLD RUSH, which airs November 6 on PBS.