009 - Expression: From Rags to Riches / The California Gold Rush

Go! Go! Go! Once it became clear, the rumors of gold were for real. Nearly everybody in California thought, "Can I drop what I'm doing and make a fortune, mining gold?" A whole lot of people decided, "Yeah, they could." And off they went. Hi everybody, my name is Shawna and this is the American English Podcast. My goal here is to teach you the English spoken in the United States. Through common expressions, pronunciation tips, and interesting cultural snippets or stories, I hope to keep this fun, useful, and interesting. Let's do it! Hello and welcome to this new podcast episode. That snippet you just heard was from the American Gold Rush History Documentary. And the Gold Rush is what we're going to talk about in today's episode. Before we do, let's begin with the joke. The question is, what did the leprechaun say when I asked him for a dollar? Answer? Sorry, I'm a little short. This one's actually funny. A leprechaun is a character from Irish folklore. We usually think of a short, little bearded man who usually wears a green coat, a green hat, and partakes in mischief. So, he is short. So did you get the joke? Short can mean the opposite of tall, but it can also mean that you don't have enough money. If you go to the store and try and buy something, but realize you don't have enough money, you can tell the cashier, "Sorry, I'm short. I need to run to the car to get more money." So the joke one more time, what did the leprechaun say when I asked him for a dollar? Today's expression is "rags to riches." So let's go through the definition of each individual word first. Rags. A rag is an old piece of cloth used for cleaning things. If the house needs to be scrubbed or cleaned thoroughly, I'll look for a rag. We sometimes use rags to describe the humble clothing that someone who is poor might wear, clothing that might give the impression that they are in poverty. Two is a preposition that means in the direction of, riches refer to wealth or capital. The definition of the expression, Well, rags to riches refers to a situation when someone rises from poverty and becomes wealthy. They earn a lot of money. We often use this term with stories afterwards. For example, he's a rags to riches story. In other words, he was poor, but he got rich or he became rich. Here are a few other examples of how to use this. Example number one. Henry Ford grew up on a farm in Michigan and could have spent his whole life working in agriculture, but he didn't. He eventually invented the Model T Ford and a new way to mass produce products with the assembly line. And that made him one of the most famous rags to riches stories in American history. Example number two. I think we all know Walt Disney. Walt Disney was also raised on a farm. And had a few low points in his life before making his millions. He couldn't get hired and ended up working and advertising to support himself. That's when he started animating his own cartoons. Right? Mickey and Minnie. Now we see him as the perfect rags to riches story. Example number three. Oprah Winfrey. Do you know her? She's a very famous TV personality and talk show host in the US. But she actually grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. Mississippi is one of the states in the US. She was on welfare and her family had a hard time making ends meet. But in the 1970s, she was the first black female news anchor and her career just kept getting better. She went from rags to riches in a very short period of time. In other words, she went from being very poor to very rich very quickly. The origin of the expression is unclear, but the first sighted use of it was by Horatio Alger, a man who wrote about how poor boys could become rich if they had a great work ethic. Let's go ahead and do some listen and repeat exercises. She's. She's a. She's a rags. She's a rags too. She's a rags to riches. She's a rags to riches story. All right. First of all, she's a. Right, we connect those two words, she's a. She's a rags to. To. We don't say to. Emphasis on rags, riches and story. Next, let's go ahead and conjugate. I went from rags to riches. You went from rags to riches. She went from rags to riches. He went from rags to riches. We went from rags to riches. They went from rags to riches. It was a rags to riches story. Because we need someone who goes from rags to riches, it's most common to hear it the way I said it in the last sentence. So today we're going to learn a little bit about the gold rush. So in order to understand this magical story, we have to flash back to the year 1848. In 1848, a man named James Marshall saw a piece of gold in the American river near his home in Coloma, California. This is a city northeast of Sacramento, about 36 miles from the capital. James Marshall worked for a man named Sutter who owned a lot of land. And he had great plans to use the land for an agricultural empire, he called it. And so he wanted to keep the gold a secret. So they kept it on the DL or on the down low. They didn't tell people, but it was impossible for the secret to not get out. Someone in town named Sam Brandon, a store owner, let the info leak. He went to San Francisco, which is about two hours south of Sacramento and told everybody that gold was found in Northern California in the American river. Rumors spread in lots of Californians, Native Americans, and just anyone in the general area came to Coloma to strike it rich. The first miners who pan for gold got all of the easy to reach gold and they did get rich. They struck it rich. And these are the rags to riches stories that were published in the newspapers. In fact, they were sensationalized. Rumor had it that in just six days you could earn as much as in six months working a full-time job. People started reading about these regular, you know, average Joe's who one day started picking through the dirt and made thousands. And in the beginning that was true. By December of 1848, the president at the time, Polk, confirmed that gold had been found in California. The following year, 1849, was crazy. It was the largest mass migration that happened in US history. And all of it was coming to California. According to the documentary on the gold rush I mentioned in the beginning, 90,000 people arrived in 1849. Three force of them from other American states and nine out of ten were men, half of them in their 20s. We called this group the 49ers. And the 49ers is also a name of the football team from San Francisco. And this is the time when California became known as the golden state because we had a lot of gold. So hundreds of boats started docking in San Francisco, in the San Francisco Harbor. Boats came in from Chile, the East Coast around the tip of South America, and some boats even made it through Panama. A lot of these people came to test their luck. The many of them were very unlucky. Right, I mentioned before that in 1848, a lot of people found gold. But in 1849, a lot of the rocks had already been turned over, and there wasn't much to find. In their frustration, a lot of the anglos or the white Americans started blaming the other races for taking the gold that was what they thought rightfully theirs. So they blamed the Latin Americans. They blamed the Native Americans. They blamed the Chinese. These groups suffered from extreme racism. In fact, after California officially became a state, a foreign miners' tax was placed on all of the foreigners. So they needed to pay extra fees in order to mine where the white Americans were mining. And that drove a lot of the Mexicans out, almost overnight, three-fourths of the Mexicans left because they couldn't afford the miners' tax. Some of them didn't leave. One of them being Joaquin Moreta. You probably already know Joaquin Moreta without recognizing his name. He was a very successful Mexican miner and horseman. And as legend has it, he and his family were greatly mistreated in the mining camps, mostly because they were Mexican. They looked different. One day, some miners falsely accused Joaquin's brother of stealing a mule. A mule is a kind of a combination between a donkey and a horse. And as a result, they hanged him. He was falsely accused and they hanged him. Immediately afterwards, Joaquin created a band of miners to seek revenge. They wanted to get back at the people who killed his brother. And they did. Afterwards, Joaquin and his band were on the run. He was infamous. He was an outlaw. He was probably blamed for a lot more than he actually did. In fact, signs were hung all around that said, Joaquin Moreta wanted dead or alive. And the reward for his capture was $1,000. Eventually, someone did capture him. And as proof of his death, they cut off his head and put it inside of a jar. Sounds like something you would see in a movie. And maybe you have seen it in a movie before. Joaquin Moreta is the character, Zoro. So if you've watched the movie Zoro, you probably recognize a lot of similarities between this true story of Joaquin Moreta and the character of Zoro. Another group that was greatly mistreated that I mentioned before were the Native Americans. Native Americans inhabited a lot of the territory along the rivers. The white Americans decided that there was not in a room. And so they killed off 120,000 Native Americans. That's four fists of the Native Americans that were in California. In fact, this was legalized murder. This was after California was an established state. It's a very, very sad and horrible time in California history. Others also got some of the diseases that were going around. Calera, typhoid, measles, malaria, smallpox. There were also a lot of mining accidents. So it wasn't the best environment to stay in. Interestingly, the people who actually made it rich after 1849 were not the miners. The miners weren't finding as much goals as they had in 1848. The people that made it rich were, you know, maybe you recognize the name Levi Strauss. Levi Strauss created genes. And he created genes for a lot of the workers of the gold rush. And other men got rich from making wheelbarrows to lift dirt, from making shovels. Merchants also made a lot of money. These were the people that actually sold goods and products to the miners. There were a lot of women also who opened up boarding houses or hotels where the miners could stay and maybe get a little bit of food. And they also made a good fortune. And last but not least, the corporate investors. These were some people that opened up mining companies throughout the 1850s. What was California like then? And now. There's one crazy thing I didn't mention. After the Mexican-American War, California became property of the United States. In just a few days earlier, gold was found. So Mexico was very unlucky in that circumstance, right? Because gold is what made California rich and kind of what it is today. Another thing, because the United States was a little unorganized in the beginning. When they received California, there were no rules, no taxes, no government. And so you can imagine the chaos in San Francisco. After about one year, wealth exploded there. A lot of these men who made their fortune also needed products. So a lot of people, lots of producers, lots of imports started coming into Fisherman's Wharf. That's the Bay of San Francisco, where the boats park. Now, so what about today? So today, San Francisco is the most expensive city in the United States. Sacramento still has an old town that looks very Western, definitely worth visiting if you come to California. Kalloma, the area where gold was found, is sort of a ghost town. Although I don't want to offend anyone by saying that, but there are only about 500 people living there. It's worth visiting, though, also. I went there a while back with a few friends and we panned for gold in the river at the site where gold was originally found. Now, what about people panning for gold in California? Yes, people in California are still looking for gold, but instead of just pans and picks and shovels, they use metal detectors. So my brother has one. And so does my parents' friend, who actually goes looking for gold about every other weekend. So that's it for today. Hope you enjoyed and see you next time. Bye. (upbeat music) Thank you for listening to this episode of the American English Podcast. Remember, it's my goal here to not only help you improve your listening comprehension, but to show you how to speak like someone from the States. If you want to receive the full transcript for this episode or you just want to support this podcast, make sure to sign up to premium content on AmericanEnglishPodcast.com. Thanks and hope to see you soon. (upbeat music)