‘Forty-Niners’

Among those hundreds of thousands of people who came to California searching for gold were the forty-niners, named for the year in which they arrived. In 1849 alone, roughly 90,000 people immigrated to California, with half braving the distance across land and half by sea.

The sheer number of people who made the journey may suggest that it wasn’t an arduous one, but don’t be fooled.

The above photo shows a gold miner standing on an aqueduct while placer mining at Brown’s Flat in Tuolumne County, California.