View record for "California" lithograph of mining scene at base of hill
The Gold Rush Materials
In 2023, the Bancroft Library digitized a large selection of its rich California Gold Rush-related holdings, with a focus on records dating from approximately 1847 to 1860. What began as an effort by Director Elaine Tennant to digitize all of Bancroft's Gold Rush letters, has expanded to include a diverse array of collections, materials, and formats, including autobiographical manuscripts, diaries, maps, and pictorial items such as lithographs and drawings. In total, we digitized 2,121 unique items from 376 different manuscript collections, totaling over 29,000 pages of unique materials that are now available online.
You can browse the entire collection here: Berkeley Library Digital Collections - Gold Rush Materials Project
The California Gold Rush radically transformed the territory and resulted in the largest migration in U.S. history, forever changing California and its population. It greatly expanded developments in agriculture, commerce, communications, and industrial activities but also had significant negative impacts on native peoples, immigrants, and the environment. The materials in this collection shed light on those histories through many personal narratives of the settlers who came to this region to make their fortunes, as well as business partners, and family members across the United States. The materials also provide insight into the fraught relationships between white settlers and existing Indigenous communities in California and the West, as well as the presence of Chinese immigrants in the region, documenting this challenging history.
This guide will explain how to search and browse through the collections.
While the project began back in 2019, the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting library shutdown put the project on hold for several years. Digital Collections Unit staff at the Bancroft Library picked the project back up in 2022 following the completion of two multi-year grant-funded digitization projects. Bancroft staff identified and prepared materials for digitization. Due to the age and characteristics of the materials, some particularly fragile items required conservation treatment prior to digitization. This project was a collaborative effort involving multiple areas of the Library, including curatorial, preservation, digital collections, information technology, and digitization staff to ensure that as many relevant collections that could be imaged at the time were digitized successfully.
Special thanks to Curator of Western Americana Theresa Salazar who curated the selections and Associate Director Mary Elings who conceptualized and led the project; Hannah Tashjian, Erika Lindensmith, and Martha Little of the Preservation Department who conserved the materials; technician Chris Moua and production manager James Wolff from Backstage Library Works who did the digital capture; Tim Converse at NRLF for supporting the flow of work; Lynne Grigsby and David Trebwasser of Library IT who worked with us to publish the materials online; and to the Digital Collections Unit staff of the Bancroft Library who managed this complex project over the span of several years: Julie Musson, Marissa Friedman, and Adrienne Serra. Many thanks to University Librarian Jeffrey MacKie-Mason and the University of California, Berkeley Library for funding this project.
Our Gold Rush materials reflect the time period in which they were created and may include language or descriptions that are outdated, biased, or offensive. They largely represent the perspective of settlers. We are actively developing policies and guidelines to help inform our work and to revise our descriptions to align with reparative descriptive practices and to provide respectful, inclusive, and accurate context. However, users may still encounter problematic language in the archival descriptions. We appreciate your understanding as we undertake this important work.
