Elliot West: The Beginning Of The California Gold Rush

Elliot West writes, "We can think of western history as one of conflicting narratives. Just as people have fought for control of resources and for dominance of institutions and values, so the West has been an arena where stories have contested to command that country's meaning and thus to influence how the West is treated." In 1860, America was “divided” in two; the eastern half and the western half. For many years Native Americans have lived in the Midwest; it was home to them. It gave them farming land, animals for hunting, land for gathering and a place to build a home, but when European settlers came to America to call it home everything changed. There are many different stories about the west, they all very depending on who wrote it

or experienced it. Most, if not all, Easterners had no clue that the west was, indeed, already occupied. There has always been, and probably always will be, “conflicting narratives” about certain parts of the country; mainly about what the west was actually like. “Westerns did not arise in the West and go eastward to tell the world about the country and its people. They were born in the East, then marched beyond the Missouri and proceeded to change things.” The people from the West have called the West home for many of years; whereas the Europeans that moved from the East coast saw the West as an industrial opportunity.
The western natives “stalked away” as the Europeans took over their land. Maxidiwiac, a Hidatsa Indian, reminisced saying “The buffaloes and the black-tailed deer are gone, and our Indian ways are almost gone…Sometimes I find it hard to believe I ever lived them [her Indian ways].” Many of the natives felt “the changes overwhelming.” The western natives had to adjust their everyday life in order to fit their new lifestyle. The Indians sent their children to “white man’s school.” Maxidiwiac said, “My little son grew up in a white man’s school. He can read books, and he owns cattle and has a farm. He is a leader among our Hidatsa people, helping teach them to follow the white man’s road.” Her son may have become very successful, but she was not proud about sending her son to a white school.
Native Americans were not the only ones effected by the European settlers; African Americans were also affected. During the Civil War, African Americans were treated as slaves, and not equal the European settlers. Charlie Davenport, an African American, stated “Both perceptions – the first of the ‘freedom bug’ as well as [my] later disillusionment – accurately reflect the black experience. Freedom had come to a nation of four million slaves, and it changed their lives in deep and important ways. But for many years after the war put an end to human bondage, too many freed people still had to settle for a view from the bottom railroad.” Even after the slaves were freed, they still were not treated with respect and equality.
The European settlers were described as “progressive people.” The European settlers were making progress on “their transportation, communication and education.” “Farmers were using the land for farmer; whereas gold miners were using the land for nonrenewable resources” The settlers would use anything and everything they could from the land.

They would use “lumber to keep the mines open.” They would use the “creek beds for placer mining, and underground mines for hard rocks.” With the discovery of the gold in California, in 1849, it sparked the beginning of the California Gold Rush. Along with the discovery of gold, came people flocking to California to find their own

gold.
“The land of west of the Missouri has been the special playground of the mass imagination.” Many Easterners, when visiting the west, were astonished because they have never seen such vast and beautiful land before.

An eleven-year-old girl from New Jersey, “won a trip to Yellowstone National Park.” When she returned from her trip so told her class what she had experienced. “The waterfalls are taller than [our] school. Old Faithful is a geyser. Some lakes are hot, which keeps them ice-free so animals can get drinks in the winter…The air is so clear you can see many miles. It doesn’t smell like cars. The West seems to have more stars than New Jersey has people…coyote and buffalo that black the road.” Many others, just like this girl, have never experienced, nor knew of what kind of “utopia,” as they would have probably called it, the west

was.
Not all Europeans had a mindset that the West needed to change. A man named Richard Francis Burton took a trip to the west and later wrote, “Strata upon strata of cloud-banks [to the west]…lay piled half way from the horizon to the zenith…Overhead floated…heavy purple nimbi, apparently turned upside down, -- the convex bulges below, and their horizontal lines high in the air, -- whilst, in the East, black and blue were so curiously blended, that the eye could not distinguish whether it rested upon darkening air or upon a lowing thundercloud.” Burton’s “sense of normal” was different from the rest of the Easterners, because James Davidson “it had been shaped elsewhere.”
Once, the Easterners discovered the West, they brought their ideas and expectations with them. Most of them wanted to change the West to look and feel like as if they were still living on the east coast. Many of the people from the East thought that the West demanded to be changed, when really all the natural born Westerners just wanted it left alone, and like it had been for many of years. The people from the East thought that “the West had no stories of its own, nothing to listen to and learn from, no emotional layering…The frontier was described as ‘free land’…the term implied that no one was in habiting and using the country the pioneers were taking. It also denied the human experience that lay centuries-deep on the plains…” The Easterners called it the “land free of ghosts.” Whereas, the Native Westerners didn’t believe any of that.
Any person today could take a few lessons from this time period and events. One, as being, think before you take action. Another lesson to be learned from these events would be to not believe everything you hear. Any person could write a paper, news article or story about what happened at an event, but the readers don’t know whether the writer had a biased opinion while writing it. I personally believe all these lessons are appropriate ones.