California gold rush

James Marshall's find at Sutter's Mill in Coloma on January 24, 1848, drew about 300,000 people to California, from the rest of the United States and from Latin America, Europe, Australia and China. San Francisco grew from under a thousand residents to about 25,000 by 1849, and California became a state on September 9, 1850. The cost fell on Native Californians, whose numbers, by widely cited estimates, fell from roughly 150,000 in 1848 to about 30,000 within one to two decades through epidemic disease, starvation and killings. Chinese miners faced violent racism and the Foreign Miners Tax. San Francisco, Sacramento and the foothill towns of the Mother Lode are the rush's lasting map.