Cholera- “secret enemy” of the 1850’s Gold Seekers!

~~~Coffins- inside Bodie Morge!

With gold was discovered at Sutter’s mill near Sutter’s mill, California in 1848, a new kind of emigration began. Single men, arriving at the towns of the Missouri river with their possessions packed on mules, followed the “call of the Gold Strikes.” Sometimes the Forty-Niners were married men, who left their families behind in order to travel unencumbered.

~~5,000 emigrants and their families crossed the Trail before 1848. Thirty-three thousand emigrants “crossed the wagon trail in 1849, and 55,000 emigrants in 1850. (September 9, 1850- California was admitted to the Union as the 31st State.)

The “Discovery of Gold” threw the entire Nation- and the World- into a state of “Gold Fever.”

~~The visions of riches that could be had was “pure intoxicating.” Cornish and Australians, Italian and Irishmen came to work the mines. Chinese, Mexicans and Latin Americans joined the “rush for gold and silver.” 

~~Winds and heavy rains soaked the route, and shabbily constructed mining camps. Without experience, both at pioneering and at mining, men suffered through the Winter of 1850 in dismal hovels. Lonesome and wet and cold and sick, they lived in canvas tents and blankets for bedrolls.  

The “secret enemy” of the Gold-Seekers was Cholera.