it was the first fair to use the environment as a theme, and it followed close on, i believe it's 1972 was earth day, the very first earth day. and there was a great consciousness around the world about environmentalism. and it became the theme and arguably the obsession of expo 74. >> we'll visit the childhood home of spokane native bing crosby. that's saturday at 7:30 p.m. eastern on c-span2's book tour. working with cable affiliates and visiting cities across the country. up next on lectures in history, we take you to emory university where patrick allitt teaches a class on the 1800s. this is just under an hour.

the topic of our lecture today is the history of the gold rush. i will talk mainly about california in the years immediately following 1848. but gold has played a very important role in american history. if you think back to the conquistadors, one of the things they were fascinated by was the quest for gold. and the history of their conquest, first of the aztecs and then of the incas, is an unquenchable desire for precious metals. gold and also silver. when the first english settlers came to jamestown in 1607, what they were hoping to find was the same kind of supplies of gold that had been found by the spaniards. it was a source of bitter disappointment to not to find gold in what's now virginia. they brought with them jewelers and goldsmiths. but america's first gold rush took place close to where we are now in georgia in 1829. this was the georgia gold rush in north georgia. if you have been about 100 miles north of here you will have seen

the old county courthouse has been converted into a gold mining museum. it's about 100 miles up the road. the first gold was discovered and then suddenly people started pouring into the area in huge numbers because of the intoxicating possibility that gold would make them wealthy quickly. until then this had been an area really beyond the line of settlement. but suddenly now the white settlement catches up very quickly. here is the governor, george gilmore, describing what it was like meeting the georgia miners in 1829. many thousands of idle people flocked into georgia from every point of the compass whose pentup vicious propensities made them like the evil one. in other words, the devil, in his worst mood. after waiting all day in the rivers, picking up particles of gold, they collected around light wood fires at night and

played on the ground and on their hats at cards, dice, push-pin and other games of chance for their day's findings. whiskey carts served them too. hundreds of combatants were seen at fisticuffs. striking, swearing, gouging eyes as frontiermen only can do these things. frontiersmen used to fight until one of the men gouged out the other's eye. the army was sent to restore order to the chaotic scene. the major -- the army major sent to keep order reported this. upwards of 200 persons who presented a motley appearance of whites, indians, half-breeds and negros. boys of 14 and old men of 70 and indeed their occupations appeared as various as their

complexions. diggers, shop peddlers, thieves, gamblers. to colonels of the georgia militia, two candidates for the legislature and two ministers of gospel. all no doubt attracted by the love of gold. se making the most of it there with those lovely twos. this is a very rich site of gold and a large quantity of gold was drawn out of the mines there between 1829 and into the 1870s and '8s. for a while it was minted into federal currency. the coin on the left is a united states of america coin. on the right, after the confederate secession in 1861 the confederate bank also used georgia gold for minting. just by living here you have all seen an example of the gold on the state capitol building five or six miles from here. the dome is thinly coated with that gold. this is a very important source. now, the people who already lived there and who already lived in the area where the

georgia gold rush took place from the cherokees. ever since the maureamerican revolution the federal government had been trying to integrate the native american nations into the united states saying, learn to become christians. learn literacy. learn to become farmers instead of hunters and gatherers. become integrated into our society. that was the federal policy in the first three or four decades of the republic. now it turns out the cherokees are living on land for which the whites are very hungry indeed. what principle would prevail? unfortunately the principle of racial exclusion would prevail. the whites just wanted to get rid of the indians one way or another. in the election of 1828 which immediately preceded the georgia gold rush, in their successful candidate, andrew jackson, they had found somebody who also wanted to get rid of the native

americans any way he could. this is john ross, one of the cherokee chiefs. if any community of native americans had lived up to the hopes that the federal government had, it was clearly the cherokees. they had to read, a vocabulary to enable them to write down the cherokee language, the bible had been translated into the cherokee language, many of them had become christians, many of them now wore american dress. this was a highly integrated community. but nevertheless, the principle prevailed, we've got to get rid of them. the indian removal act signed by andrew jackson, saying the five civilized tribes should move from their current lands out on to a place that was then called indian territory. the five groups they had in mind were the creeks, cherokees, seminoless, choctaws and the

seminoless. and there would be a resettlement, this is now oklahoma, and was then called indian territory. the georgia state government passed a law specifying that the lands up in this northern tier of georgia should be reallocated by a land lottery to white settlers, in order to dispossess the former inhabitants and to hand it over to the whites instead. so this was the prelude to the trail of tears, where the cher cherokees were shifted west and this was one of the great human rights violations in american history, and particularly in the state of georgia itself. last time in talking about the spread of american settlement

and also the spread of american political power, we talked about the mexican war. this was the war fought between mexico and the united states in the years 1846 to '48. although the american armies were not particularly well led, they were much more effective than the mexican armies, and as a result they were able to win a spectacular series of battlefield victories and by late 1847, the leader of one of the american armies landed on the eastern coast of mexico at veracruz and they actually were able to overrun mexico city itself. you can see a picture of general scott's army marching triumphantly into mexico city. and this was the treaty of guadalupe hidalgo, who's geographical significance was

that a vast area of mexico was now handed over to the approximate united states, nearly all the land which current comprises california, utah, nevada, arizona and parts of new mexico and colorado, which is today the southwestern quarter of the united states. now certain things about it are important to remind you of. this is now an area with a high population, but then it's population was extremely low, only a few thousand spaniards actually lived there. it was mainly unoccupied territory and the reason it was unoccupied is because it's so dry. nearly all this land has got very, very low rainfall, with a few exceptions like on the northern california coast, most of it is too dry for ordinary agriculture, so not many people could live there. just to give you an idea how how low it's population was, who's

been to san francisco? as you know, it's a fantastic natural harbor, you sail in through the golden gate, which was a fairly narrow entrance and now of course one of the great cities of the world is right there. but this is what it looked like in 1946-47. just a handful of huts and a few streets, it was a very, very quiet and sleepy little place, and it's significance was unimaginable at that time. this is a settler, this is a man called johan sutter, and he lived on what was called sutter's site. i mentioned in one of the previous lectures that americans had been moving into texas even when texas was still a mexican territory, and american settlers were moving into california even when it was still mexican

territory. one of those was johann sutter. there it is in the upper picture, it's very different from a shop and the fact that he had to have a fort, was a sign of how politically volatile the area was. he was expecting to be attacked so he took precautions against that. he was in sacramento and one of the things he wanted to sell was lumber, but the lumber was going to come from up in the foothills of the sierra nevada mountains which is east of new mexico. and so he sent one of his assistants, called james marshall up the american river and asked him to design and build a saw mill. and this was just a place where the american river is flowing fast enough that the water can turn a water wheel and the wheel is attached to circular saw blades so the wood could be cut and send down the river to

sutter himself. and one thing you have to do to make an effective saw, is divert the river down the mill race, can you picture this, a designed flume which carries water fairly rapidly to turn the water wheel. in the mill race there, he found little metal flakes of gold. he reported back to sutter his boss saying i found gold and sutter said, don't tell anybody. but you know how bad everyone is keeping a secret. the only way to actually have a secret is no never tell anyone, because somehow has soon as you tell anyone, the secret gets out. and that's what happened in this case, and it wasn't long before the news got back east and it spread very rapidly all around the world, with the result that

a massive incursion of people into california began to take place. this is the area where the gold was discovered. this is sacramento and sutter's fort was right there. and he had sent his assistant marshall, upriver, up the american river to here where the gold had been discovered. we now know from extensive geological work is that the gold area is about what's shown there in yellow and the richest area, the area where most of the gold was found, is about here, this is called the mother lode. and those little boxes are where the mining camps sprung up and they correspond very closely as you would expect to the lode itself. and if you look at a very simplified version of the coast of california, i'm just going to do this for reasons of simplicity. here's san francisco bay, one

river is flowing south, and this is the sacramento river. and eventually it flows into the san francisco bay. and it's parallel with the coast, about 100 miles inland, there's a coastal range here, and then a big central valley, and another flowing north is the san joaquin river and it also eventually flows into san francisco bay. so this is the central valley. and over here is much higher mountains, what are they call, jenny? >> i don't know, actually. >> there's a clue. >> oh, well, the sierra nevada. >> that's right, just means the snowy mountains, that's right. so as you can tell from the map, lots of rivers flow out of the sierra nevadas and the northern ones join the sacramento river and the southern ones flow into the san joaquin river. so that's kind of the schematic of southern california.

so it's important that you get a sense of what that looked like, and the gold is here, sort of in the foothills of the valleys. okay? now let's just first of all here, about the how the news got back east. allen, can you come up and read first of all -- have you all heard of william sherman? he was a famous union general during the civil war, you see him on the right as a young man, at this point he was a lieutenant in the u.s. army and witnessing what was happening when the gold was discovered. so here is lieutenant sherman. >> as the spring and summer of 1848 advanced the reports came faster and faster of the gold mines of sutter's mill. everyone was talking of gold, gold until it assumed the character of a fever. soldiers began to dessert. we heard of men earning $50, $500 and of thousands of dollars per day and for a time, it

seemed someone would reach solid gold. >> here's an army lieutenant reporting back to his seniors what was going on. and then the president made a speech. you've got the president here, james k. polk, so this again, this is just a few months after the initial discoveries were made by james marshall. >> it was known that mines of the precious metals existed to a considerable extent in california. recent discoveries render it probable that these mines are more extensive and valuable than was anticipated. the accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory is of such extraordinary character is beyond belief. there are those who have visited mineral district and derived facts.

the explorations already made warrant the belief that the supply is very large and that gold is found in extensive districts of the country, mines of quick silver is being mined in the area of the gold region. one of those is now being worked and is believed to be the biggest in the world. the discovery of these rich mineral deposits have produced a surprising change of the state of affairs in california. all other pursuits but that of the precious metals are abandoned. nearly the whole of the male population of america have gone to the district. ships arriving on the coast are deserting their crews. soldiers cannot be kept in public service without a large increase of pay, desertions in this command have become frequent and he recommends those that with stand the strong temptations and remain faithful should be rewarded.

this pursuit of gold have already caused in california an unprecedented rise in the price of the necessaries of life. >> thank you very much. that's president polk and he's making this declaration that the population of california is already being changed. ships arrive in san francisco, the crews all dessert because they want to go up to the gold areas. and the curious thing about gold is that it isn't really particularly useful. i don't know if you have thought about this very much. today it's possible in things like semiconductors, there are some uses for gold, and in heat shields on spaceships, but then it was mostly for decoration, you make coins out of iron, eventually they rust away, but a gold coin persists, but it's not really useful. nonetheless it was incredibly

valuable. gold and tobacco on which great fortunes were made, even though they weren't actually essential. worth thinking about. now people started pouring into california from all over, and back east and even around the world in england and in france and in germany and in south america, even in china, there was an enormous amount of enthusiasm about finding ways to get to california. and lots of handbooks like this began to be published. this was published in california. an account of the wonderful gold regions and routes to california and the ancient and modern discoveries of gold. in other words help for travelers on how they're actually going to get there. and there were essentially three ways of getting there, and one they had in common is that they were all incredibly difficult.

by our standards, incredibly difficult. this is 1849 so still another 20 years were going to pass before you could get there by railroad. the first railroads had been invented but so far they were very short linings, one of the ways for going is by going in a clipper ship, this was a type of ship that was capable of sailing very fast. so one possibility was to sail down the east coast, all the way down to the south atlantic, and around cape horn, what's that like is? horrible. the stormyiest waters in the entire world. it can take weeks to get around and get ship wrecked along the way. lots of people tried that. this is an ad for it, the ship called the california with it's commander henry barber, what he implied is that you can actually see the gold digging from the coast, and the artist rearranged the topography for that. that's one possibility. the second possibility was to go

by steam ship, instead of going all the way around, to go to the caribbean, panama, to actually go across by land, across the isthmus, the narrow part and second a second ship, which would also take you up to san francisco. the advantage of doing it that way was that the journey was a great deal shorter. but the disadvantage, is that just about the best place in the world to die of malaria or yellow fever, it was there. this was an incredibly difficult place even to live. just a few decades earlier, they tried to build -- they died of yellow fever.

but people were trying because the insent ty was so great. from california direct. nicaragua, the quickest, cheapest and safest, that's what they claimed, whether it's true is another matter. the third way to go on the overland trail, and of the three routes taken this was the one that was done most frequently. as we know, the oregon trail had really opened up in about 1843 or '44 so five or six years previous to this. from trial and error they found out the best way was to go up the missouri river, up to the plant river, across the rockies across the lowest point at south pass, then pick up the head waters of the snake river and go in order until it meets the columbia river and down the colombia as far as portland and that's where the great oregon

farm land was. it was at this point that various cutoffs were established, particularly the california trail with a cut off down here towards sacramento itself. so this is approaching it over land rather than going by sea. but the oregon trail intrinsically very difficult itself. and thrown if you took the california trail, it was even worse, because you would have to go into nevada to the humbolt sink. this is usually a dry river, it only has water in it a few days a year. most of the time it's just bone dry, so you have to cross this incredibly hot, pitiless desert. so all along the way people died from various things, then to make things worse, you then have to cross the sierra nevadas itself. it was hard crossing the sierra nevadas than crossing the rockies.

and already by then, one of the most famous incidents in the history of american cannibalism had taken place there. the donner party was a group of immigrants who set up from independence, missouri took the california cutoff, were partway up the sierra nevada mountains when a very, very severe blizzard snowed them in. they weren't capable of going forward any further, but neither could they get down the mountains because the snow was too thick, many of them died, and the survivors ate the bodies of their relatives who died in order to survive. and news of this traveled quickly, and those who go over the donner route, you still take this way, they knew this is the kind of territory they were crossing.

and so, very, very rapidly, between the first discovers between early 1848 and early 1849, thousands of people poured into this area, the area of sacramento and the migration carried on for the next five or six years. here's the thing that's easy to forget. it was only in 1848 that california became part of the republic. most americans didn't know where it was. and suddenly it becomes part of america. and then this gold had been discovered. how galling for the mexicans, they hadn't known that they were sitting literally on a gold mine. that's one of those historical ironies on the nature of good fortune.

now we need to talk about rivers. i said in drawing in diagram, it's in the foot hills of the sierra nevadas that most of the gold was found. in other words it's in the place where rivers flowing rapidly down hill are beginning to flow out into the plains, or into the flatter land of the central valley, so if you imagine the same thing, that's a bird's-eye view, now think of it looking at it from the side. it's something more like this, if this is the central valley, and that's the high sierras, the area where the gold was found was kind of this area. now why should that be? tell us why you think it's found here? >> maybe because that's where the mineral deposits were. >> well it started in the river. the place where they started

looking for gold was in the river itself. what happens to a river when it's flowing out of the mountains and into the low lands? >> it deposits sediment? >> why does it deposit it there? >> because that's the most level part, that the sediment can't move with to the water. >> which carries more sediment, fast moving water or slow. >> fast? >> the river starts to slow down, and as it does, it starts to drop the sediment it's carrying, does it first drop the heaviest or the lightest thing? >> the heaviest. >> rocks? >> the gold, because gold is very, very dense. fast flowing rivers carry a lot of sediment, but as they slow down as they flow into the low lands, they lose some of this

energy and they begin to deposit their load, they deposit the gold first because it's the heaviest element. that's why it's such a good place to dig. and sure enough if you look at that map with the red and yellow things it was, now look at this photograph, the river is meandering, they hardly ever flow straight, so when the river is flowing around curves, is the current faster around the inside or the outside? >> the outside. >> the outside, why? >> i'm not quite sure why it flows faster on the outside. >> you're absolutely right, it's because the water flows in a straight line until something stops it. it flows straight downhill until it hits the bank, and then it flows in a straight line until

it gets stopped again. what's happening all the time in the rivers is that the bends are tending get more exaggerated. if you have window seat in an airplane and you look down, you can see where the river used to be. there's things called ox bows, it used to be there, it used to be a huge bend and then eventually it was cut off and the river straightened itself and then the process starts again. so then think about what this means in terms of the deposit of gold, it means not only that in this transitional area coming out of the mountains, it's also that the very, very best place to look is on the inside of the bends. because that's where the current is flowing more slowly. that means that's where it's going to be dropped. you can actually see on the photograph here, there's a little beach, isn't there, on the inside of the bend where the

water is hardly flowing again, and you can imagine paddling across and see it flowing more rapidly. so the best place to stake a claim was on the inside of the bend on the place where the river leveled out and sure enough that's where they found a lot of gold. now one of the great things about the early days of the california gold rush is that it was a very democratic kind of thing, anybody could do it. you have to get there, which is hard, but once you were there, all you needed was a shovel and a pan, a pan that look like a wok, anybody ever pan for gold? just like this miner is holding, what you do is you shovel into the pan some of the sediment from the river bank and put in water and then gradually swirl it around so you make a suspension of the lighter particles with the water, and allow that to flow over the site of the pan, you needed a lot of care and patience. what you're left with is a bed of gravel with gold flakes and you could actually pick out the

flakes of gold, and that's the way it was done. so it was a very, very low tech business. but when we look at the history of who got rich in the california gold rush, it's not those who actually dug, but those who sold shuffles and donkeys and who sold tents and food. that was the way to make a fortune, because whether or not the diggers actually found the gold, you would get paid for to provisions, and you would get paid a high price, the stuff had to come a long way, it was in incredibly high demand and so you could get higher pricings for it. this is a more sophisticated device, it's called a rocker and a mixture of gravel and water is poured through the top and it filters down a series of sivs, the coarser gravel gets caught in the top and then at the bottom, you have some rough

burlap sacking, so after you have slushed the water across it, you were left with part kls of gold that you could pick out. and this became the actual currency in the gold district. now eventually, of course, it starts to occur to some people that, if the gold is there, it must have been have come from further upstream, so doesn't it make sense to go upstream to actually find it. and of course the answer was yes and here's how that works. so back to the diagram of the hillside, you found lots of it just lying about in the water

down here, that means that somewhere up here there's actually a vain of gold or a vain of gold bearing rock, which is exposed to the surface, and as the water flows over it, it's being eroded a bit at a time over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, the gold itself has fall on deep into the earth under extremely holt pressures, but when you get tectonic thrust sometimes you get to the bottom of the rock starter. that's why gold is usually found in mountain districts because of the irregularities of the earth's crust. so let's imagine that this is where the gold vain is. so if you're actually -- if you decide to look for the gold vain itself, here's how you do it. you go upstream and you test the water here, and then you go

upstream again, and test it here, then you go upstream again and you test it here. now in each of these places, you find some gold, but les than you had down here, because of the pace of the river. but eventually you get to a place where you find none at all, why do you find none? because you're gone above the vain, so that tells you, so you do some much closer testing, here and here, it's hardly ever self-evident, it just looks like work, but you can work out where it's come in. then you come to the possibility of digging out the gold itself. that's very difficult to do, but that's the idea that the miners came to. that's why we have so many photos up here in the mountains. >> it's called a vein or a drift, there's lots of miner's terminology, and it depends on which mine you're in there tends to be a different rhetoric to go with it. all the techniques for digging

for gold actually required water. some entrepreneurial miners found that water supply was required. and they would divert the river from where the miners were digging. they would divert like a plume. it would guide the water to places where people were digging. in other words, the very first strikes are here, on the river, on the main part of the river. but eventually people start saying, look, for a long time the river flowed here, that's a great place to dig, but we can't do it if it's dried up, unless we have a water supply. but the flume, building a flume down to this area, so lots of very enterprises men were building flumes to diverse the rivers to bring it down to the

gold bearing country. and in this picture, you can actually see the process going on. there's a small stream here, they built a very, very primitive rock dam, but it's good enough that they can carry it into the rock flume that carries it down into the area where they're going to be exploring for the minerals. then it occurs to somebody, if it is good on the side of the river, think how good it's going to be if we actually dig into the bed of the river itself. how can we do that? we can only do that by damming and diverting the river. there were actually some photographers taking pictures of this going on. this was called murderer's bar, and maybe that's because somebody was murdered there. that's my deduction anyway. they built a dam across the river itself, here we are in the foothills and they built a diversionary channel.

so what was once the bed of the river has now become dry, so they can dig down in it and get down to the sediment that's been there for thousands of years, and when the water flows faster, you get a lot of water that's bringing up mechanically the stuff that's being produced and there was a steam engineer. so there's some technology that's been brought in. but as you can imagine, this is all expensive. a guy with a shovel can't afford this. it's only people that have got capital who can do work like this, so very early on, already

by 1851, '52 it's people with capital that are making the money because they can build these things where money is -- they actually become employees of mining companies working for wages in projects like this and they realized the value of going quite a long way down into the earth, so you can see here that it's literally becoming mining, but they're still mining into the gravel that is underneath the bed, although the old bed of the river itself. now it wasn't long after that before somebody invented this method, a hydraulic method, this is an invention of the 1850s. they said look the river has been gradually eroding the mountain, let's speed up the process, by firing against the mountain side a very, similar high pressure jet of water to in effect accelerate the erosion process over and over. so again, it's a matter of getting a flume upstream, and guiding the water down until you bring it into these, they're like big scale fire hoeses, if you have ever seen fire hoses at

work, it has a very high pressure. you shoot it out of nozzles with great pressure against the mountain side. when this washes down sediment, out of which it's possible to gather the gold in the same way, hydraulicing, the very first environmental laws in the 1870s was to ban this practice, so the sediment was coming down to stifle the farms. but in the early 50s and 60s and 70s, the mining was more important than the farming. then when all this is exhausted, then it becomes a question of actually digging into the mountain side and following the vein into the mountain itself. and the result of that is hard rock mining, and you're bringing

big rocks, mainly quartz, and people tried it, but then eventually people with more capital did it on a large scale. so this is what the big mines looked like by the 1860s and 70s. and the topography was good enough that we have pretty good pictures of what it lookedlike so again 49ers become mine laborers. here's what happens inside a working hard rock gold mine. you usually have teams of two working at a technique called double jacking. this is where one guy's holding a chisel against the rock face, and the other one's hitting it with a sledgehammer, it means a very high degree of trust among

friends, one hits it with a sledgehammer, and the other holds the drill and turns it slightly. and you're working against a rock face, you cut one there, one there, and so on all the way around, then fill them with gunpowder, lead fuses to each one of them, light the fuses, retire to a safe distance and then let them explode. and if you have done it right, if the holes are this deep, an arc of explosions will dislodge the rock in that arc and when the dust and smoke clears, you bring up the hard rock and repeat the process again, it's incredibly dangerous work, i think maybe right up to the present, being a miner is the job in which you're most likely to be killed at work. you can imagine that the roof can cave in, you can get caught by charges which didn't explode, which then sparks from a hammer

will set off. methane gas will sometimes explode. sometimes there's suffocating gases that you can't breathe and you will die in the mine. it was a horrible, horrible environment, so in every way a very deplorable way of life. gradually improvements were developing, one was the invention of an improved explosive called nitroglycerin, if it gets too hot, its spontaneously explodes. then the invention of drills, in which high pressure water is this power source, instead of simply guys with hammers. the problem with those is they also create showers of dust so that the miners tend to be breathing in a very dust heavy atmosphere, and tended to die

early of mining related diseases, horrible way of life. little underground railroads built so that you can load the ore on the wagons, take the wagons to the pit shaft and then have them drawn up to the surface. when the ore gets to the surface, how do you get the gold out of it? it's no good to use the panning techniques and there's not much gold and a lot of rock, you had to use -- well, there are various names, but they used a crusher, fast flowing water turns the wheel, and it's attached to this device, which is an axle bearing cams, and as the cams go past these rods, these are attached to great stamps, great heavy weights so the ore itself is fed through here on a conveyor, and these devices stamp it to reduce it to

powder. that's the way that a stamping bill works. and then the next thing to combine the pounded ore with mercury. what is mercury? it's a metal that melts at room temperature. we know it's very toxic. because it's very dangerous. but that wasn't known at the time. one man said it appears from this report that quick silver has found in the area of the gold mines, so this becomes as important as gold mining because this is the standard process for separating the metal from the ore. what happens is you mix the powdered ore with water, make a kind of sludge, then you pour in mercury and the mercury and the

gold combine chemically and they're very heavy and so by sending it across a gently sloping gradient, you'll cause this gold and mercury compound to fall to the bottom. then you heat the whole thing, and because the mercury is already so volatile, it gets vaporized and driven off and you end up with gold, in a highly concentrated pure form. so you can turn it straight away into gold bars, so that's the way it's done in a commercial mining operation. i wanted to show you this lovely, lovely photograph. this is about 20 years after the first invention of photography, but it perfectly illustrates the point that general sherman made, this is san francisco bay in 1850, ships would come in from all over the world, but they would never set sail again because most of them were deserted, because there's gold in them there hills. so the whole harbor was littered

with these abandoned ships. so much so, that one of the things that shopkeepers started to do was to drag the ships up on land, see this one and this one, they have just converted them into stores because they're big containment areas, ideal. that's one thing, but there's other interesting things, there's also good chromeo lithographs. >> you see a lot of people inside and i can't -- >> is this a bar or a gambling saloon? >> people are trading for gold, i think? >> that's right.

>> what are you meant to be surprised by as a viewer? look at the clothes. >> everyone's pretty well-dressed? >> not just well dressed. who do you think these guys are? >> farmers? >> no, what country do they come from? look at the hats. >> i can't really tell. >> they're chinese. and how about these who? >> another asian country? >> those are mexican. in other words, what the artist is doing here is showing us the traditional dress of all the different groups of people that have come from all around the world. in other words this is the world's most multicultural environment. and it's very unusual. people weren't used to that kind of thing. who's this one? it's a stereotype?

>> irish. it's the irish drunk. people come from all over the world and when the irish get here, what do they do? they get drunk. here's an illustration from the artist's imagination. chinese life, three exclamation points. wow, the idea of chinese people living here in america. that's what the artists are getting at. this was meant to be a horse market in sonora. and then you see in the back of the line there's a saloon. you can see the mexican here, the anglo guy who's buying the horse, african-american over here. southerners would take their slaves to the gold mines, a great concentration of people coming in from all over the place around the world. and the idea of pictures like this is to say, what a weird world is that?

nymph, it's had the result of very, very rapidly populating what had previously been a very sparsely populated place. this is above the president's speech in the handout. this is a historian about 40 years ago writing about the way in which gold accelerated the settlement. >> established a front line of civilization along the rocky mountains and drew men from the east, farther out on to the arid plains, the glittering prize lighted the way illuminating the darkness of earlier obstacles. after the men came their baggage, most material and cultural. freight wagons brought not only necessities but the trappings of civilization, printing presses, the refinement of books and other objects. when the family unit came or was locally assembled.

permanent assembly was assured. those who were serious about the new land settled down to extract their own kind of gold, grain or cattle and another section of the united states was commence ed. >> he makes the point that they started out as agricultural and later on became urbanized, but in the west, in his mining camps, it was the other way around, they started out as concentrations of people all in the same place building these mining settlements then after the mines played out, then gradually people started disburse and the farming population of california is an after thought. that's the way in which normal civilization was reversed. next time we'll talk about the

origins of the history of the oil industry. thanks very much, readers, that's great. you're watching american history tv on cspan 3 and we'll continue our look at the american west in just a moment. tonight we'll have more lectures in history and prime time. tonight we'll focus on the 1950s, with programming on the korean war, pop culture and the development of suburbs across the country, join us right here at 8:00 eastern right here on cspan 3. >> sometimes we agree on something on both sides of the aisle in this body because there's nothing to it. it's national peaches week or something, and everybody's for that. when it's something big, and when it's something consequential, that's where difficulties begin to emerge. >> congress returns from its

summer break on tuesday. and among the list of issues on their plate, racing the debt ceiling, tax reform and federal spending, which includes funding the federal response to hurricane harvey. we'll have a detailed look at the congressional agenda for the fall tonight. that's at 8:00 p.m. eastern on cspan. >> at 8:00 jonah goldberg. >> conservatives shouldn't place all of their hopes in any politician. they say this over and over and over again, that you should have a healthy distrust of any political leader. sometimes particularly the ones that say they are speaking for

you. six corporations own much of the american news media, and the digital revolution has meanwhile transformed the economy. networks and daily newspapers no longer set our national agenda. instead, many of us find information niches that reinforce our opinions. growing polarization has seemed to split us into two nations. watch this tuesday on c-span and cspan.org. sunday night on q & a, we take a look at anthony clark's book the last campaign, how presidents run for history, and enshrine their legacies. >> every single comment i have received, is one of either two topics, how angry people are to learn what's happening or how

flabergasted about what's happened. >> especially for the most recent ones, the records won't be open for 100 years and instead we're paying for celebration and legacy building. >> sunday night at 8:00 eastern on cspan's q & a. >> and now providence college professor jeffrey johnson teaches a class about the 1916 bombing of a parade in san francisco. the bombing took place on what's called preparedness day, organized by provigilance groups. it remains the worst act of terrorism in san francisco history. this is about 50 minutes. well, good morning, thanks for coming, i appreciate you all