Yesterday we installed the 2.3G hard drive and a 36x CD drive. This meant that my modem, which doesn't like to talk to this version of Win95, went into a funk and wasn't working till late morning. B-b-b-b-ut I'm n-n-n-ot ad-d-d-dicted, n-n-n-ossir! It d-d-d-didn't b-b-b-other me at all. I c-c-c-coped b-b-b-beautifully.
(I figured I could do a lot of file maintenance, but fortunately Rich got things running again.)
The scanner is now not working, and I've misplaced the installation software. This isn't anywhere near as bothersome, though.

Last night we went to the first of a series of 15 lectures about the Gold Rush, sponsored by CSUS. This is the sort of thing I WANT my local university to be doing, not building roads and funky bridge ramps. The lecture coincided with the annual meeting of the Western History Association downtown at the Hyatt, so we went there. I remembered when they valet- parked my dirty, dinged, disgusting old van, for free, and the 6th-graders and I swept into the lobby under the bemused eyes of some Japanese businessmen. Bernadette's class was there to sing Christmas songs, and the parking was free. Anyway. Last night Rich and I parked on the street. We still swept into the lobby and followed the noise to the Grand Ballroom where the lecture was.

The speaker was Malcolm J. Rohrbough, a professor at the University of Iowa. His new book, which I just happened to buy after the entertaining lecture, is DAYS OF GOLD: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation. His topic was "We Will Make Our Fortunes -- No Doubt of It!". I didn't know quite what to expect that was going to make this different and interesting. What he did was talk about the various foreigners who joined the '49ers from the United States:

• Sonorans. Gold was discovered in January of 1848. By September the news had reached Sonora and by December there were 3000 Mexicans heading north. These miners were seasonal, going home in the winters. They mostly concentrated in the southern Sierra (near the town of Sonora, oddly enough.) Their immigration peaked in 1850, and ended by 1854. The Anglos had imposed a foreign miners tax of $20/month to mine, and it got too expensive.
• Hawaiians. The news reached the Sandwich Isles June 24, 1848. The "Kanakas" came soon after, bringing agricultural products and miner's fuel, coffee. However, once some actual gold arrived in the Islands, eight times the number of miners came to California. This led to a labor shortage in Hawaii. There was a decline in the production of sugar and inflation was rampant. One missionary lost his congregation to the mines, so he packed up and came with them.
  These were the days when it was cheaper to send one's laundry to Hawaii to be done than have it done in San Francisco. Hence, a lot of dirty miners!
• Chileans, Peruvians. The news reached Valparaiso in August. The newspapers claimed it took "only a knife to earn $40 a day." Therefore, there were 1000 Chileans here by January of 1949. There was a riot against them in San Francisco in the summer of 1849. One of the things this group imported was prefab houses, along with the miner's tools.
• Australians. Sydney received the news in December. They first sent goods, such as dray horses, nails, etc. The miners came later, in August of 1849.
• Chinese. The news arrived in China in the summer of 1848, but the Chinese weren't interested till the Tai Ping Rebellion in 1850 made conditions at home unbearable. They spent little and sent most of their earnings home, and went back to China as soon as they could.
  At first the Anglo miners welcomed the Chinese. They were amused and intrigued by them, not hostile. However, by 1852, though the foreign miner's tax had been reduced to an easier-to- collect $3/month, the Chinese were beginning to be discriminated against. In 1855 the most tax was collected from the Chinese, and by 1860 they were well established in California.
• Western Europeans. 1848 was a bad year in Europe. The Irish still had the Potato Famine, and there was a grain famine going on. The people were moving from the farms to the cities. There weren't enough jobs for the new urbanites. By 1848 conditions were miserable.
  The London Times was skeptical of the news, but the largest number of Europeans to the mines were from the British Isles and Ireland. Tin miners from Cornwall and Wales brought some professional knowledge to California. By 1851 there were 200,000 Irish in the mines.
  Germany had a revolution in 1848 and the people also came. Most came to farm or trade, not to mine. They planned to stay, unlike the French who didn't assimilate.
  Rohrbough said "the French preferred hardship and penury in France to ease anywhere else." When they came to California, it was always planning to return to France. The Revolution of 1848 (Think Les Miserables) left 12,000 dead in the Paris barricades, 25,000 arrested, many of whom were later executed, and 5,000 deported. Therefore, many of the defeated saw hope in the gold fields. The papers talked of "oriferous fields 800 miles long and 100 miles wide." (It's all true. In the summer the grasses turn golden yellow.) The first 50 Frenchmen arrived in California in November of 1849, after setting sail in February.
  The French also set up Societes, or joint stock companies, to send people to the mines and incidently make huge profits. There were 85 of these.
  Rohrbough pointed out that the French thought of California as a third world country, though of course they didn't have that terminology at the time. It cost 1000 francs to come to the mines, and the emigrants inteded to go back. However, they knew California was exotic, (though backwards) and Paris had La Californie restaurant. The French mania for all things California collapsed with the Lottery of the Golden Ingots. There was a 2 million franc profit for the company that conducted it, and then the Societes stopped providing return tickets. The French government dumped their undesirables on the mines, with a one-way ticket, rations for two weeks, a bedroll, tools, and the clothes they travelled in. By 1853 "California was the most populous of the French Colonial Outposts."

The lecture concluded that the gold rush made California a cosmopolitan place. It became a Garden of Eden in the world's imagination, and that has shaped California ever since.

Afterwards we were asked to the reception, which was mostly for the WHA. We had some cheese and crackers, and veggies and dip, and some wonderful tartlets. I bought the book and Professor Rourbough signed it. You can tell academics aren't asked to do this very often. In a cramped left hand, he wrote "To Jan, with warmest best wishes from the author" and signed and dated it. Signing more than three books that way would give one writer's cramp for a week!