The gold rush is often likened to the conquest of the West in the United-States. Pioneers were men and women who left their home towns to discover and conquer wilderness, and who, at the risk of their lives, built houses and towns over the course of their peregrinations.

The gold rush started in 1848 in the US. After James Marshal discovered gold in California, 300 000 prospectors arrived in the area to make a fortune too. These men, who arrived in 1849, were called forty-niners because of the year 49. Actually, it is to refer to the prospectors that the American Football team from San Fransisco is called the “49ers”.

The major problem at that time was that California was still under Mexican ownership. After the Mexican-American war (1946-1848), California became part of the US, but only became a state ruled by American laws in 1850. Up to then, the place was under military control. People followed their own principles, mixed with some Mexican legal obligations, and some American principles. At first, it was those pioneers who therefore set up rules concerning the gold mining processes, getting inspired by some Mexican laws.

At that time, there were no taxes of the State upon gold discovery, no land value taxes because the land was not the property of the State. Miners only respected a simplified code, which consisted in something like first in first out, and new prospectors had to wait till their predecessors stopped working in an area to start working there.

Some of them made a lot of money: it is said that one little group of prospectors made 1.5 million dollars in searching for gold on the Feather River.
Levi-Strauss also benefited from the gold rush, by inventing his famous blue-jeans, hard-wearing trousers which prospectors wore while they worked on their knees in rivers and on rocky terrains.