Nightshift – Kurzgesagt after Dark
Nightshift – Kurzgesagt after Dark
Part 1 - Intro
A bottle of shiny dust sparkles in the shopkeeper’s hands as he rushes down the muddy street. The man waves his hat and yells: “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!”
The sleepy outpost goes berserk. Carpenters abandon half-built houses, ship crews desert, shops close and papers stop printing as everyone runs to the goldfields.It's May 10, 1848 and one of the largest migrations in history has just begun. For the next years, this tiny village will become the most out of control place on Earth: San Francisco.The man with the bottle, Samuel Brannan, watches the chaos he unleashed. It's part of a plan that will make him the richest man in California.
Part 2 - The Edge of the Map
Three years earlier Brannan is serving as the highest-ranking Mormon in New York City. But he’s already planning their escape.
#Bagley, W. (1999). Scoundrel’s Tale: The Samuel Brannan Papers. Utah State University Press.
The Mormons' beliefs are clashing with the values of Protestant America and their leader has just been brutally murdered by a mob in Illinois. Violence is spreading, and many are running for their lives. Brannan wants to evacuate his group west, beyond the reach of the U.S. and he’s not the only one. In early 1846 he and over 200 fellow believers board a ship to sail around the Americas, hoping to build their religious sanctuary.
Note: After Joseph Smith was killed in 1844, the Mormon movement nearly split. By 1847 Brigham Young secured leadership and led about 1,600 followers to Utah (then Mexican territory). Samuel Brannan brought roughly 200 by ship to California; though nominal allies, they competed, and Young eventually replaced Brannan as the regional Mormon leader there.
#Bagley, W. (1999). Scoundrel’s Tale: The Samuel Brannan Papers. Utah State University Press.
They don't know that time is against them. The U.S. government has its eyes on California as a Pacific foothold and trade post for Asia. But there's a small problem: It's not empty, Mexico owns it since freeing from Spain in 1821. And "owning" is put generously. Indigenous peoples have lived there for millennia but in just the last 75 years, forced labor, violence and disease have halved their population of once 300,000.
#Starr, K. (2005). California: A History. (A Modern Library Chronicles book). Modern Library.
#Madley, B. (2016). An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873. Yale University Press.
#Cherny, R. W., Lemke-Santangelo, G., & Griswold del Castillo, R. (2021). Competing visions: A history of California (2nd ed.). Saint Mary’s College of California. https://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/book-gallery/1
For the U.S. this is convenient as a weakened population means less resistance. In early 1846, U.S. troops cross the Nueces River and start a war.
#Bagley, W. (1999). Scoundrel’s Tale: The Samuel Brannan Papers. Utah State University Press.
#Brands, H. W. (2002). The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream. Anchor Books.
Meanwhile Brannan’s ship is rounding Cape Horn, and after six months, they reach the village that will soon be San Francisco. But U.S. Marines have seized the outpost just three weeks earlier, and the dream of a Mormon sanctuary in California is dead on arrival. Other men would be devastated, but Brannan sees opportunity. Many pass through a key stop upstream, where a Swiss immigrant named John Sutter has been carving out his own empire, on stolen land, brutally exploiting the forced labour of Native people. An expanding frontier outpost, but short on supplies.
Brannan steps in and opens a general store right at Fort Sutter's gates. And in early 1848, fate walks into his shop. A farmhand pays for a bottle of brandy – with gold dust. This news makes Brannan's brain light up like a slot machine. If one random farmhand has gold, there's more to be found.
#Bagley, W. (1999). Scoundrel’s Tale: The Samuel Brannan Papers. Utah State University Press.
#Cherny, R. W., Lemke-Santangelo, G., & Griswold del Castillo, R. (2021). Competing visions: A history of California (2nd ed.). Saint Mary’s College of California. https://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/book-gallery/1
#Akins, D. B., & Bauer, W. J., Jr. (2021). We Are the Land: A History of Native California. University of California Press.
#Brands, H. W. (2002). The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream. Anchor Books.
#Madley, B. (2016). An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873. Yale University Press.
Part 3 - Gold! Gold! Gold!
The trail leads into the Sierra Nevada foothills, where one of Sutter's workers has spotted something glittering in the mud of the American River.
Back at the Fort, it is confirmed: real, pure gold sitting in plain sight. It hits Sutter like a curse: The gold won't make him rich, but destroy him. It causes a fever that spreads like the flu and turns workers into, well, literal golddiggers.
He begs his men for six weeks of silence, to claim legal rights and finish the mill he just started building. But workers are already starting to sneak off to pan for flakes in the river, and soon entire crews vanish overnight.
#Grabhorn Press (1932). The diary of Johann August Sutter, with an introduction by Douglas S. Watson.
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/gdc/calbk/086.pdf
#Bagley, W. (1999). Scoundrel’s Tale: The Samuel Brannan Papers. Utah State University Press.
Gold fever is spreading, and Sam Brannan catches a brutal case. He delivers one last sermon to the San Francisco Mormons because who wants to shepherd souls when there's a fortune waiting in the dirt. He rides out to the new goldfields, bottles a sample and races back to wave his hat and stir up the city. The news ripples outward like a shockwave, draining towns like San José and Monterey like bathtubs within weeks.
#Bagley, W. (1999). Scoundrel’s tale: The Samuel Brannan papers. Arthur H. Clark/University Press of Colorado.
#Cherny, R. W., Lemke-Santangelo, G., & Griswold del Castillo, R. (2021). Competing visions: A history of California (2nd ed.). Saint Mary’s College of California. https://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/book-gallery/1
Note: At this point (early 1849), the California Gold Rush was still largely a regional phenomenon, not an instant statewide shockwave. Also, Sam Brannan wasn’t just a hype man: he had a reputation as a ruthless operator, including allegations of embezzling funds meant for the New York-to-California voyage. In January 1849, he and other merchants even attacked Sutterville stores and destroyed goods to help Sacramento become the main commercial hub, tied to real-estate speculation.
Brannan is already three steps ahead. In his shop he has gathered picks, pans, whiskey, everything a miner could want and sells it at an obscene markup: While a whole cow costs 4 dollars in the city, he sells a kilo of beef for 2 dollars. Soon, his store is turning over $4,000 a day. Other sellers rush in, charging up to a thousand percent over cost, and getting it. Not long and Brannan is making more monthly than most miners will see in their digging career.
Instead of gold, Brennan mines the miners, and they keep coming.
#Bagley, W. (1999). Scoundrel’s Tale: The Samuel Brannan Papers. Utah State University Press.
Part 4 - The Global Stampede
On December 5, the U.S. President confirms it: the California gold discovery is real.
#Madley, B. (2016). An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873. Yale University Press.
#Starr, K. (2005). California: A History. (A Modern Library Chronicles book). Modern Library.
Tens of thousands drop everything and head west. They call themselves the Forty-Niners, after the year they arrive, or Argonauts, like the heroes who chased the golden fleece.
#Brands, H. W. (2002). The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream. Anchor Books.
#Cherny, R. W., Lemke-Santangelo, G., & Griswold del Castillo, R. (2021). Competing visions: A history of California (2nd ed.). Saint Mary’s College of California. https://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/book-gallery/1
But California is hard to reach. There’s no Panama Canal and no transcontinental railroad. By land it’s a 2,000-mile trek, lined with abandoned wagons and animal bones across deserts and mountains. The sea route around Cape Horn is no better: five to eight months through storms that eat ships for breakfast. Some try the Panama shortcut: sail south, hike through jungle, sail north. It sounds clever until you're vomiting blood from yellow fever while mosquitoes use you as a buffet.
#Brands, H. W. (2002). The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream. Anchor Books.
#Starr, K. (2005). California: A History. (A Modern Library Chronicles book). Modern Library.
#Cherny, R. W., Lemke-Santangelo, G., & Griswold del Castillo, R. (2021). Competing visions: A history of California (2nd ed.). Saint Mary’s College of California. https://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/book-gallery/1
Meanwhile the whole Pacific Rim has mobilized. Every major port from Valparaíso to Guangzhou sits closer to the gold than New York does. By the end of 1849, over 100,000 souls have flooded California from every inhabited continent.
And nearly all of them funnel through: San Francisco.
#Brands, H. W. (2002). The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream. Anchor Books.
#Cherny, R. W., Lemke-Santangelo, G., & Griswold del Castillo, R. (2021). Competing visions: A history of California (2nd ed.). Saint Mary’s College of California. https://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/book-gallery/1
Part 5 - Digging the Dream
By 1851 Sam Brannan has opened an office in this boomtown and is buying up land in every direction. He strides through the dusty streets in a tailored suit from the finest imported fabrics, a cigar in his mouth, passing the brothels, saloons and gambling hells. The people gossip about the many affairs of "California's richest man". What his faith once held back, gold has let loose.
#Bagley, W. (1999). Scoundrel’s Tale: The Samuel Brannan Papers. Utah State University Press.
The streets swarm with thousands of young men, armed and half-drunk, shouting in a dozen languages, chasing the golden fever dream. In three years, the city has grown from a few hundred to 55,000 people, many of them immigrants. And with almost no women around, gender roles bend out of necessity: men dance in dresses as "ladies” or cook and clean – roles unthinkable for white males elsewhere.
#Sears, C. (2008). All that glitters: Trans-ing California’s Gold Rush Migrations. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 14(2–3)
https://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-abstract/14/2-3/383/34602/ALL-THAT-GLITTERSTrans-ing-California-s-Gold-Rush?redirectedFrom=fulltext
#Brands, H. W. (2002). The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream. Anchor Books.
#Cherny, R. W., Lemke-Santangelo, G., & Griswold del Castillo, R. (2021). Competing visions: A history of California (2nd ed.). Saint Mary’s College of California. https://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/book-gallery/1
Brannan strolls past the harbor, barely glancing at the hundreds of ships, left behind by crews who sprinted to the mines the moment they docked. Their dreams are his opportunity. From here shipments bound for Brannan's stores are loaded onto boats and sent upriver to Sacramento, a new, fast-growing city and main gateway to the goldfields, where he aggressively bought up riverfront land.
#Bagley, W. (1999). Scoundrel’s Tale: The Samuel Brannan Papers. Utah State University Press.
#Brands, H. W. (2002). The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream. Anchor Books.
In the foothills beyond, tens of thousands are tearing the earth apart like manic rodents. Hundreds of mining camps have popped up, with poetic names like Murderers Bar or Hangtown. At Indian Bar hundreds of men from the US, France, Chile, Hawaii and Mexico are crammed into a narrow canyon. Winters are harsh, food is scarce, and grizzlies so common that one resident keeps a cub as a pet, because why the hell not.
#California Department of Water Resources & U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. (2017). Sites Reservoir Project draft environmental impact report/environmental impact statement: Chapter 18, Cultural/Tribal cultural resources.
https://sitesproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/18-Cult_Res_SitesDraftEIR-EIS_August2017.pdf
#Cherny, R. W., Lemke-Santangelo, G., & Griswold del Castillo, R. (2021). Competing visions: A history of California (2nd ed.). Saint Mary’s College of California. https://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/book-gallery/1
#Clappe, L. A. K. S. (1922). The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851–52 (T. C. Russell, Ed.). Thomas C. Russell, Private Press.
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services//service/gdc/calbk/146.pdf
You can smell the camp before you see it, as no one bothers with latrines or bathing, using every hour to dig. Men get sick from the filth but there's no one to treat them, as even doctors figured digging pays better than healing.
#Brands, H. W. (2002). The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream. Anchor Books.
The camp is scattered with deep pits everywhere and the once emerald river has been choked with sluices and dams. The miners use pans, rockers, or long-toms, a wooden washing trough worked by multiple men. Shovelers load dirt that passes through a metal riddle into a riffle box where gold sinks and lighter sand washes away. It's backbreaking, repetitive work.
#Clappe, L. A. K. S. (1922). The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851–52 (T. C. Russell, Ed.). Thomas C. Russell, Private Press.
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services//service/gdc/calbk/146.pdf
#Brands, H. W. (2002). The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream. Anchor Books.
#Cherny, R. W., Lemke-Santangelo, G., & Griswold del Castillo, R. (2021). Competing visions: A history of California (2nd ed.). Saint Mary’s College of California. https://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/book-gallery/1
Someone screams. A miner is standing in the freezing cold water grinning like a madman. He just pulled $350 in flakes from one pan – that's years of East Coast wages. The camp erupts with cheering, back-slapping, and someone fires a pistol into the air in celebration, because most miners won’t see a tenth of that today and some won’t see anything for a week.
Next claim over, a white miner accuses a Chilean of jumping the stake marking his mining territory. A punch lands, Spanish curses fly and a crowd gathers and backs the white man. Foreign miners pay special taxes just to dig. Non-white miners get robbed, driven off their claims or killed, and Native Californians face the worst of it.
At first, some Natives work claims on their own terms but as the crowds grow, coercion takes hold. In 1851, California’s governor makes it clear: the plan is extermination. The state pays bounties for their heads and reimburses militia’s campaigns. What unfolds is systematic, state-funded, and meets every definition of a genocide.
And not only lives are destroyed, the land is too.
#Madley, B. (2016). An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873. Yale University Press.
#Cherny, R. W., Lemke-Santangelo, G., & Griswold del Castillo, R. (2021). Competing visions: A history of California (2nd ed.). Saint Mary’s College of California. https://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/book-gallery/1
#Akins, D. B., & Bauer, W. J., Jr. (2021). We are the land: A history of Native California. University of California Press.
Part 6 - After the Fever
By 1855, just seven years after it all began, the easy gold is gone and the dream of getting rich with a pan is mostly dead. In the following years camps are abandoned and mining goes industrial. High‑pressure water cannons blast entire hillsides into slurry while mercury pours into sluices to trap fine gold. Rivers turn brown with sediment, fish populations collapse, and orchards drown under silt.
#Brands, H. W. (2002). The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream. Anchor Books.
#Cherny, R. W., Lemke-Santangelo, G., & Griswold del Castillo, R. (2021). Competing visions: A history of California (2nd ed.). Saint Mary’s College of California. https://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/book-gallery/1
#Starr, K. (2005). California: A History. (A Modern Library Chronicles book). Modern Library.
#U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (2005). Proceedings and summary report: Workshop on assessing and managing mercury from historic and current mining activities (EPA/625/R-04/102). Office of Research and Development, National Risk Management Research Laboratory.
https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi/200069XI.PDF?Dockey=200069XI.PDF
As large mining companies take over, California's economy evolves and the state's richest man evolves with it. Sam Brannan's name is on newspapers, resorts, banks and railroads as he helps shape what people later start calling the Californian Dream. He also dabbles in politics, helping launch a lynch mob militia in San Francisco, and briefly tries to become a state senator.
#Cherny, R. W., Lemke-Santangelo, G., & Griswold del Castillo, R. (2021). Competing visions: A history of California (2nd ed.). Saint Mary’s College of California. https://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/book-gallery/1
#Starr, K. (2005). California: A History. (A Modern Library Chronicles book). Modern Library.
#Bagley, W. (1999). Scoundrel’s Tale: The Samuel Brannan Papers. Utah State University Press.
But in the following years this manic energy tears his empire down. He starts drinking too much and his court records read like a bar fight chronicle: assaulting an police officer, brawling in buildings he owns or skipping bail. In 1870 his wife files for divorce and bad investments are followed by worse ones.
When Samuel Brannan dies in 1889, he leaves his children two dollars each - for his burial, there’s no money at all. He lies in a vault for 16 months before a nephew finally comes to claim the body. Once the richest man in California, he is now buried in an unmarked grave.
#Bagley, W. (1999). Scoundrel’s Tale: The Samuel Brannan Papers. Utah State University Press.
Part 7 - Aftermath
Sam Brannan understood that the real fortune wasn’t in dreaming, but in selling the dream.
The biggest profits went to shippers, bankers, merchants like him, and to large mining companies. Most of the thousands that chased the golden promise of quick wealth and freedom did not find what they came for. One in twelve lost their lives on the way to California, in the mines, or heading home.
#Clay, K., & Jones, R. (2008). Migrating to riches? Evidence from the California Gold Rush. The Journal of Economic History, 68(4)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/abs/migrating-to-riches-evidence-from-the-california-gold-rush/E9487B8243F0F5CB9EE4EE6F120C8570
#Starr, K. (2005). California: A History. (A Modern Library Chronicles book). Modern Library.
But many more stayed. By 1900, California’s population had exploded to nearly 1.5 million, and it became one of the most ethnically diverse states in America.
#Cherny, R. W., Lemke-Santangelo, G., & Griswold del Castillo, R. (2021). Competing visions: A history of California (2nd ed.). Saint Mary’s College of California. https://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/book-gallery/1
The human tsunami also birthed an infrastructure of agriculture, manufacturing, shipping, and finance that became a blueprint: move fast, bet big, reinvent yourself. It's the same DNA that later builds Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
But the prosperity is built on stolen land, exploited labor and genocide. Between 1846 and 1873, up to 16,000 Native Californians were killed. Many many more died from forced labor, starvation, and diseases, or were displaced. Their population dropped further from about 150,000 to just 30,000 by 1870.
#Madley, B. (2016). An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873. Yale University Press.
And the land itself still bleeds poison. Of all the mercury used in mining up to 6 million kilograms were lost and some of it is still polluting rivers, reservoirs and San Francisco Bay. It poisons fish, contaminates soil, and it will do so for the next 10,000 years.
#USGS (2024). New maps identify legacy mercury contamination in California’s Sierra Nevada
https://www.usgs.gov/centers/california-water-science-center/news/new-maps-identify-legacy-mercury-contamination
#Singer, M. B., Aalto, R., James, L. A., Kilham, N. E., Higson, J. L., & Ghoshal, S. (2013). Enduring legacy of a toxic fan via episodic redistribution of California gold mining debris. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(46)
https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/4138?show=full
And yet, the same momentum that destroyed also built. It reshaped a state through waves of migration, laid the infrastructure to connect a continent and fueled an economy that transformed the world. All because we just can't resist digging up shiny rocks.
#Brands, H. W. (2002). The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream. Anchor Books.