“The major impact it had was on agriculture, because the mining involved digging up the rivers and producing all this silt,” Rohrbough says. “People described the California landscape as looking like it had been dug up by giant moles.” Eventually, the effects of mining began to harm a new industry developing in California’s Central Valley during the mid-1800s. “Environmentally, the discovery of gold was a disaster,” he says. They used high-powered jets of water to wash away hillsides in a practice known as hydraulic mining, and burrowed thousands of mine shafts into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Rohrbough, a Gold Rush historian and the author of Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation, the countryside of California was torn up as the newly arrived settlers searched for gold. Though the riches found in the state’s rivers and mines eventually amounted to little more than a flash in the pan, the lingering effects of the massive migration known as the California Gold Rush would dramatically alter the political, social, and environmental landscape of California. Spurred by James Marshall’s discovery of gold in the American River during the winter of 1848, a flood of fortune-seekers came to the California frontier.
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