Re-creation of Sam Brannan: "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!" Narrator: On May 12, 1848, an ambitious merchant named Sam Brannan shocked the tiny port town of San Francisco, California with an electrifying announcement: It transformed obviously California, but more importantly, it transformed America. Holliday, Historian: Next to the Civil War in the 19th century, no other event, had a greater impact, more long-lasting reverberations, than the Gold Rush. and a blacksmith from New York, who wrenched himself away from his wife and children, and risked all that he had in the hopes of securing a more prosperous future. a California school teacher with dreams of becoming a land owner, a sea captain's son from New England with everything to prove. Narrator: Lured by the promise of gold, by the chance to change their lives in an instant, they would come: an impoverished aristocrat from Chile, anxious to recoup his family's fortune, and a strong-minded pioneer woman, who refused to be left behind in Missouri when her husband came down with gold fever. We can look to that as a pivotal event in human history where you see created for the very first time a world class, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-cultural society. James Rawls, Historian: The Gold Rush was the first time people from all of the continents came together into one particular place. Isabel Allende, Writer: Gold represented the possibility of starting anew, of being a new person, inventing a new self. Brands, Historian: What the gold rush did was to give people permission to take risks, to gamble on life, in a way that they hadn't been willing to gamble before. Almost overnight, tens of thousands rushed off - obsessed with striking it rich. Narrator: The news was astonishing, and it traveled swiftly around the world: gold - precious gold - had been discovered in California.
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