The first miner must have been shocked when, after a hard day’s work, he was greeted by a monkey with a red jacket playing a hand organ. During the California Gold Rush era of the late 1840s and 1850s, most who traveled west had only seen animals like these in books or traveling circuses. As they settled into life on the West Coast, many of the newcomers became attracted to exotic animals—monkeys, parrots, and kangaroos—for entertainment and companionship.
‘Gold, Gold!’
On Jan. 24, 1848, carpenter James Marshall made a shocking discovery while he was building a water-powered sawmill near Coloma, California, at the base of the state’s Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. He found gold flakes in the American River. At first, Marshall and his boss, John Sutter, tried to keep the find a secret. However, word got out when some of Sutter’s employees used gold dust to buy products at a store in Sacramento owned by entrepreneur Samuel Brannan.The word of the gold discovery started to spread, but most in San Francisco were skeptical. But then one day, Brannan walked down the city streets with a vial full of gold dust, shouting that gold had been found nearby. Brannan owned a newspaper in the city, but he couldn’t break the story with a front-page headline, because all of his staff had already headed to the mountains to find gold. By mid-June 1848, most of San Francisco’s shops and businesses were empty; about three quarters of the city’s male population had headed for the gold mines.
