California Gold Rush (Boyer, 2008)

Nine days before the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, however, an American carpenter discovered gold in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada range. The California gold rush began within a few months. A San Francisco newspaper complained that the "whole country from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and from shore to the base of the Sierra Nevada, resounds with the sordid cry to gold, GOLD, GOLD! while the field is left half-planted, the house half-built, and everything neglected by the manufacture of shovels and pickaxes."...Arriving by sea and by land, gold-rushers drove up the population of California from around 15,000 in the summer of 1848 to nearly 250,000 by 1852.