Other enterprises even more productive, and the state had outgrown its gold-rush childhood. Within a decade or two of the Forty-niners' arrival, California boasted not only large quartz and hydraulic mines, but a host of Some former miners-successful and disappointed alike-remained in California and joined other newcomers in starting ranches, farms, stores, banks, factories, water companies, and steamboat and stagecoach lines. Most Argonauts returned home or voyaged on to new diggings out of state, but after the early 1850s, as the ore was rapidly depleted, those few who chose to stay founded mining companies, which grew ever larger and more complex, searching for gold with huge machines and forces of industrial laborers, new immigrants to the mines from Great Britain, Ireland, Mexico, China, and other far-off lands. ," Dame Shirley reported with her knack for seeing to the core of her world, "received the same step-mother's treatment from Dame Nature, in this her mountain workshop." Dreams of riches were fulfilled for some in the early days of virgin diggings, but most miners discovered only short supplies, high prices, overcrowded river bottoms, body-breaking labor, elusive gold, and loneliness and longing for home. Visions of golden fortunes had lured thousands of modern-day Argonauts to California, forsaking the company and comfort of loved ones and gambling what money they had in the high cost of passage and outfit.
In the early years, most headed directly for the gold fields of interior foothills and mountains, where they started small placer mining operations as individuals and in small partnerships. The early 1848 population of 10,000 persons, excluding Indians, swelled by hundreds of thousands within only a few years and by 1880 reached nearly one million people from across the globe. In the weeks, months, and years following Marshall's fateful gold discovery, "the world rushed in" on California.
In January 1848, in California, one of the most remote and primitive of all North American frontiers, James Marshall noticed a glimmer in the bottom of a millrace, and changed the history of the world.
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