California Gold Rush | Digging Deeper | 4

American History Tellers

Wondery

Society & Culture, Kids & Family, History, Education For Kids

4.7 • 18.3K Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2023

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the early 1850s, as people continued to flood West, California’s booming cities experienced rapid growth, but also turmoil. Fires regularly swept through hastily erected towns, and battles broke out between lawless miners and new, civic-minded residents who wanted to clean up the burgeoning cities. Meanwhile, women arriving in male-dominated gold country found rare opportunities to thrive in business. And as gold became harder to find, individual prospectors were increasingly squeezed out by those who could employ more expensive – destructive – industrial mining techniques.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, prime members, you can listen to American History Tellers add free on Amazon Music,
0:05.6	download the app today.
0:09.4	Imagine it's a summer of 1852.
0:20.9	Your young mother and San Francisco, whose husband is away mining his claim.
0:25.9	It's late at night and you've just been awoken by the sound of bells clanging loudly.
0:30.9	You're spring out of bed and call out to the nanny, the sleep next door with your infant
0:35.6	daughter.
0:36.6	Sarah, Sarah, it's the fire alarm.
0:39.4	Help me wet the blankets.
0:41.7	Fires are a constant threat in the city, so you have a plan in place that you hope will
0:45.8	save your home.
0:49.1	You grab some blankets from a bureau and raise downstairs to dunk them in a barrel of
0:53.2	rainwater in the kitchen.
0:54.5	All right, let's take these upstairs.
0:56.3	I'll crawl out on the roof and then you hand the blankets to me.
1:02.5	You spread the wet blankets across the shingles, hoping they'll stop the roof from igniting.
1:08.7	When you're done, you scramble back inside.
1:11.6	Grab your daughter and then run out of the house with Sarah following behind.
1:17.0	When you reach the street, you realize how much danger you were in.
1:20.6	Oh, God, the whole street's on fire.
1:23.2	Man, you think those blankets are going to work?
1:25.8	I have no idea, but we need to get away from here.
	...

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