USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Arriving in covered wagons, clipper ships, and on horseback, some 300, 000 migrants, known as “forty-niners” (named for the year they began to arrive in California, 1849), staked claims to spots of land around the river, where they used pans to extract gold from silt deposits.

Detailed explanation-2: -The forty-niners definition encompasses anyone who left their lives, property, and homes to travel to California in 1848-1849 in search of gold. Gold prospectors, most of them men, had the plan to go to California, find gold, become rich from selling the gold, then return home.

Detailed explanation-3: -Who were the original ‘49ers? The thousands of people who flocked westward to the gold fields in 1849 came to be known as California Forty-Niners. During the fall of 1849 many wagons remained in the vicinity of Salt Lake City because it was too late in the year to risk crossing the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Detailed explanation-4: -The effects of the Gold Rush were substantial. Whole indigenous societies were attacked and pushed off their lands by the gold-seekers, called “forty-niners” (referring to 1849, the peak year for Gold Rush immigration).

Detailed explanation-5: -"Forty-niners” flocked to California during the Gold Rush. Pioneers came to California by land and by sea from other parts of America and the world. The result was new wealth and a dramatically increased and diverse population. Small settlements grew into cities, business boomed, and California became a state in 1850.