Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities,

the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation,

and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory.

Welcome to backstory. The show that explains the history behind today's headlines.

I'm Ed Ayers.

I'm Joanne Freeman.

And I'm Nathan Connolly.

If you're new to the podcast, we're all historians and each week we explore the history of one topic that's been in the news.

And we're going to start off today in Kaloma, California, a little town up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

170 years ago this month, a man named James Marshall was working outside of Somail.

He saw something about the size of a pad of butter, glinting under the water flowing from the mill.

He called to a man named James Brown who was working on the mill.

Mr. Marshall called me to him. I went and found him examining the bedrock.

He said, this is a curious rock. I'm afraid that it will give us some trouble.

Said I to him. What makes you think so? He said, he had seen the blossom of gold.

That sun struck speck of gold would spark the biggest mass migration of humanity by sea since the crusades.

That's Mayor Ty Mark Yoll just James Delgado. And that mass migration he's talking about?

That's of course the California gold rush.

Over the course of the gold rush, more than 300,000 people arrived from all over the world.

They were trying to strike it rich either in the goldfield or in the new boomtown springing

up across California. And no place saw miners or change arrive faster than San Francisco.

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