Christian History Home > Issue 66 > Forty-Niner Faith
Forty-Niner Faith
Traditional Christianity didn't stand much of a chance in the California gold fields.
Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp | posted 4/01/2000 12:00AM
Standing on a hill overlooking San Francisco in 1849, adventurer Bayard Taylor saw scattered houses, a crowded harbor, distant mountains, and the "restless, feverish tide of life in that little spot." He added, "Every new-comer in San Francisco is overtaken with a sense of complete bewilderment. … One knows not whether he is awake or in some wonderful dream."
What Taylor did not mention was the presence of churches or ministers in this busy scene. Evangelical religion, it seemed, did not figure in the community life of the thousands of forty-niners and others who flocked to the Pacific Coast between 1848 and 1856. Yet the California Gold Rush was one of the most morally significant events of nineteenth-century American life, and it had a lasting influence on the coast's religious expression.
Rocky spiritual soil
When Christians in the East and Midwest heard about the California gold strike, they invested it with great religious importance. To some it signaled the hand of Providence, dictating ...
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