Clash of Cultures & the Discovery of Gold      123456

News of the discovery of gold in 1848 quickly reached foreign ports along the Pacific Coast, including the Chilean city of Valparaiso. California gold lured Chilean prospectors just as it did their American counterparts in the eastern and midwestern United States. While the Americans and Chileans had the same goal — to strike it rich in the goldfields — there were some important differences between them, and that meant that each group had very different experiences when they arrived in California.

Chilean and American mining parties were very different. Most Americans traveled alone or come as part of hastily arranged companies of men. Many Chileans imported groups of laborers, while most Americans hired free laborers or banded together with others to work the goldfields for mutual profit. Chileans labored in a caste-stratified system where a land-owning patrón would have two classes of laborers working beneath him: tenant laborers and peónes, or indentured servants. When a Chilean patrón arrived in the gold fields, he would have brought with him many laborers who had little chance of personal gain.

Historian Susan Lee Johnson has reported that Chileans migrated largely to the southern mines, or to the goldfields straddling the Merced, Tuolumne, Stanislaus, and Mokelumne rivers. There they panned for gold in the streams alongside Miwok Indians, Mexicans, French, Chinese, Anglo Americans, and a small number of blacks.