In 1848, James Marshall, a New Jersey-born carpenter, discovered flakes of gold in the American River, gilding California in layers of dreams and promises. Tens of thousands from around the world soon made their way to San Francisco, seeking their fortunes and sealing that of the small port town beyond the Golden Gate. These new arrivals included countless Chinese, who called California by another name: gam saan, or “Gold Mountain.”

Intro music:

Oh my darling, oh my darling Oh my darling, Clementine You are lost and gone forever Dreadful sorry, Clementine

SO: Hi Anne!

AM: Hi Sabrina! What have we got going today?

SO: Well, in our last episode, we talked about the misconception that the Gold Rush inspired the Golden Gate Bridge’s name. Today, I thought we could talk more deeply about the Gold Rush itself, and the people who sailed through the gate for it… which leads me to my first question. Were you watching Huckleberry Hound when I got here?

AM: [laughs] I was not watching Huckleberry Hound! I was listening to the song he sings, “Oh My Darling Clementine”? [SO: hm] Growing up, most of what I knew about the Gold Rush came from it – like the bit about “the miner, forty-niner.” Now, the song has made me see the Gold Rush in a whole new light. Plus, it has an interesting history.

SO: Was it written during the Gold Rush?

AM: The song as we know it, no. The lyrics were written in 1884, some 30 years after gold mining peaked in California. But it’s said that the melody comes from an older ballad that Mexican miners made popular. And the story in that ballad is a Spanish romance dating back to the Middle Ages.

SO: That sounds like a research rabbit hole I would so jump into. And I thought I was the one who came here ready to share songs!

AM: More songs about the Gold Rush?

SO: To be precise, they’re called Songs of Gold Mountain.

AM: Gold Mountain. That sounds like a rabbit hole I have jumped into.

SO: Maybe we should take this one song at a time. Shall we start with Clementine? Break music In a canyon, in a cavern Excavating for a mine Lived [Possibly dwelt?] a miner, forty-niner And his daughter, Clementine. Ruby lips above the water Blowing bubbles, soft and fine Alas for me, I was no swimmer So I lost my Clementine AM: Clementine drowned in a river. I never realized the lyrics were so tragic.

SO: Or so rich in detail for talking about the Gold Rush.

AM: Right? The part about the “miner, forty-niner” is just one jumping point. Today, we refer to all those who came to California in search of gold as 49ers. That’s because 1849 was when the majority of people from all over California, the U.S, and the world started leaving their homes, trying to strike it rich.

SO: Those verses also speak to how they did that. If Clementine and her father were living “in a cavern, in a canyon” and he was doing excavations -- he likely wasn’t one of the first miners to arrive in gold country. If he was, he would have been panning for gold in a river or a stream.

AM: Right! That’s how individual fortune-seekers started, before larger mining operations took over. They put a mixture of river sediment and water in a shallow pan. They swirled the pan so the water and lighter particles spilled out, which left behind heavier gold flakes. Nuggets, if you were so lucky.

SO: It sounds simple, right? If that’s all you had to do -- or thought you had to do -- I understand how people caught gold fever. As you know, James Marshall, the guy who essentially kicked off the Gold Rush, he found flakes simply by seeing them in a river.

AM: Yes. James Marshall was a carpenter from New Jersey. Did you know that? [SO: Nope.] In 1848, he was building a sawmill near the American River, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains, for the Swiss rancher John Sutter. This was some 130 miles northeast of San Francisco. On January 24th, Marshall saw flakes glittering in the water. He thought they were gold, but he wasn’t sure. So he scooped them into a rag, then took the shining dust to his boss at Sutter’s Fort. Once Sutter confirmed it, they tried to keep it under wraps, but failed. Dramatically. [SO chuckles] A sawmill worker told Samuel Brannan, a store owner in Sutter’s Fort and the founder of San Francisco’s first newspaper, the California Star [SO: mhm]...and, well...remember that vial of gold at the park’s Visitor Center?

SO: The one that’s actually filled with liquid and lit up like gold, yes.

AM: Brannan filled a bottle like that with real gold. When he got back to San Francisco, he stepped off the ferry shouting “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” In the next seven months, 75% of San Francisco’s male residents had gone up to Sutter’s Creek. There were 4,000 miners in the area by August 1848. That’s months before President James Polk himself confirmed the abundance of gold, triggering the full-blown rush of ‘49. Ironically, Marshall never struck it rich himself. After his discovery, workers largely abandoned Marshall and Sutter to seek their own fortunes and the sawmill ultimately failed. Marshall was said to carry a great deal of bitterness for the rest of his life. And they were far from the only ones who hoped to find their fortunes in rivers of gold and never came close to their dreams.

SO: I guess it just wasn’t easy, even at the start. The best panner could only clear about 50 pans in a 12-hour work day. This is how one of Marshall’s workers, a member of the Mormon Battalion named Henry William Bigler, describes a few days of panning in his diary. It’s just after Marshall’s discovery on January 24: Sunday, January 30th- clean I has been all the last week. Our metal has been [tried] and proves to be [gold] it is thought to be rich we have pict up more than a hundred dollars worth last week. Sunday, February 6th - the weather has been clean and warm the past week. Today myself & Mr. Bargen went over the creek to look for gold. I found $6 worth. Saturday, February 12th - this afternoon I did not work being tired not very well. I took the gun & went a long way down the creek to hunt for ducks. So there’s a lesson for you, Anne. When you hit a wall at work, go hunt for ducks.

AM: [laughs] Hunting for ducks. I like it better than “gone fishing”!

SO: Do you think we can get a sign for the office?

AM: Sooo, to go back to a question from last episode...and as a side note, yes I hope so. [SO laughs]--who really made money in the Gold Rush? Early miners did. From 1849 to 1852 -- when the Rush peaked -- they found $207 million worth of gold. That’s about $644 million today. [Hm] But as surface gold ran out, larger-scale mining companies, which had the tools and equipment to get gold underground, ran in. By 1855, when the Gold Rush ended, individual miners were earning not from their discoveries but from wages working for these companies.

SO: And speaking of large companies, we know who else struck it rich: merchants -- and they weren’t even looking for gold! A man named Levi Strauss saw workers needed durable clothes, so he made pants which became Levi’s pants. Henry Wells and William Fargo saw the people could use banking services -- they founded Wells Fargo. And attorneys like Frederick Billings also made their fortunes offering legal services.

AM: And Samuel Brannan -- remember him? [SO: mhm] -- he was California’s first millionaire. He accomplished that by buying and reselling prospecting equipment. His store sold $5,000 per day to miners, or $155,000 per day by today’s standards.

SO: I bet Amazon can do that. But anyway...I’ve always associated the Hearst family with major mining operations. But I assumed they made their fortune with the Gold Rush. Turns out it was mostly silver ore, later on, in Utah. Still, George Hearst came to California in 1850 for gold at Sutter’s Fort. He found some small success in prospecting, and combined that income with running a general store, raising livestock, and farming. [AM: Wow.] His only son, William Randolph, was born here and he would become the publishing giant who owned the San Francisco Examiner, among other things.

AM: It seems relatively few found the fortunes they sought in the gold rush…

SO: Maybe even fewer in the ways they expected...

AM: But perhaps the more enduring legacy of the discovery at Sutter’s Mill was that so many more cultures, personalities, and identities became part of California.

SO: You know, given that, maybe there’s another answer to “Who won the Gold Rush?”

AM: Oh, yeah? Who?

SO: San Francisco.

[“Conde Olinos”]

SO: Until the Gold Rush, San Francisco was just this quiet, if strategic, trading post for ships visiting the bay. In fact, it didn’t even have the name San Francisco till 1847. This happened amidst the Mexican-American War, as the U.S. claimed California for America. Before that, it was called Yerba Buena -- and this only referred to the settlement around present-day Portsmouth Square in Chinatown. Following the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Fort, San Francisco’s population BOOMED with fortune seekers. People came from elsewhere in California, Oregon, the East Coast of America -- not to mention Europe, Russia, Hawaii, Mexico, Chile, Peru, China, it can go on and on. [AM: Wow.] In 1850 alone, the population of San Francisco went from 18,000 to over 90,000. That’s a 500% increase in a single year.

AM: Wow. It did have the perfect location. While people had made the journey west over land, traveling by sea was still the fastest way to California from the east coast. And just as small mining towns spread through the region, supporting miners with shops, laundries, saloons, and other businesses, it made sense that the port town would become a new metropolis. In fact, the Gold Rush boom helped fast-track California into statehood. It makes me wonder: what if the Gold Rush hadn’t happened to San Francisco?

SO: What if? Did you know that James W. Marshall wasn’t the first person to discover gold in what is today California?

AM: NO! Tell me more.

SO: I didn’t know till working on this episode either! But rumors of gold in California circulated as early as the 1810s. And in 1842, a rancher, Don Francisco Lopez, found gold in Santa Clarita Valley, near Los Angeles. That story’s become a fairytale in itself. Supposedly, Lopez fell asleep beneath a magnificent oak tree and dreamt he was in a pool of liquid gold. [AM: Hmm] When he woke up, hungry, he saw a wild onion growing nearby. He dug it out… and, lo and behold, there was gold on its roots! It’s more likely Lopez was looking for gold, knowing tales of secret mines found by native Indians and Spanish friars, but the point is: there was a mini-gold rush before the Gold Rush. Between 1842 and 1847, hundreds of hopefuls tried their luck and found an average of 260 pounds of the metal each year. By 1847, it seemed that the area had been mined out, so attention soon turned to the sensationalized discovery farther north in the Sacramento Valley. [music break]

AM: And so it was that the world came to San Francisco. The people who came to seek gold in California were called argonauts after the myth of Jason and the search for the golden fleece. [SO: mmhmm] In order to retrieve the fleece of a golden-woolled winged ram, Jason sailed the ship Argo from--I’m going to mess up these Greek islands--Iolchos to Colchis. His crew became known as the Argonauts.

SO: But, unlike Argo, which was christened by Poseidon and placed in the stars after her successful journey, the ships which brought miners to California had a far more, let’s say, earthbound fate.

AM: [laughs] That’s true! To tell us more about those ships and their enduring legacy in San Francisco, we’ve invited Richard Everett, the former curator of exhibits at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. Here are excerpts from our conversation.

SO: He spoke with us about how Gold Rush ships came to figuratively and literally form some of the foundation of the San Francisco we see today.

AM: Here are excerpts from our conversation:

AM: Could you tell us where the ships for the Gold Rush came from?

RE: In 1849 and 50, up to 1000 ships came to San Francisco…. 75% were from North American ports, a third of those from New York, 18% were from Central America and 7% were from Europe. I must add that of the 18% coming from Central America they would be ships largely from European ports that were trading on the West Coast of South America. Almost all the ships from the East Coast would stop in Valparaiso, Chile. The Chileans had been hard-rock mining for years for the Europeans, years and years and years, their talents and skills at drilling into hard granite and all were in great demand in the Sierras for looking for gold and they came up on spec to see how much money they could make, uh, hard-rock mining up in California. They had a whole neighborhood along there the Gold Rush waterfront. Aboard all these ships coming to San Francisco during the Gold Rush beginning, um heck, even in ‘48, ‘49 were many Chinese. The Chinese were seeking labor in large ways all over the world from Cuba to South America. They were already out there,when news of the Gold Rush hit. Um, many, many Chinese coming in, uh, to San Francisco from--as we said--all over the world, different ports, but primarily from Canton in China. There are fascinating, uh, newspaper ads for such-and-such a ship arriving from Canton all through ‘49 and ‘50 listing all the wonderful amazing cargoes that were for sale that these ships carried on board. The cargoes from all over the world and people created a great need for mercantile activity and how to sell these cargoes. There was so few buildings and so little wood in SF, ships like Niantic made a great convenient warehouse and also a business model for other store-ships, like the Apollo and the Gen. Harrison that were operated in the same manner.

SO: Am I right in remembering that among the supplies they sold there were picks and other equipment for Gold Rush Miners?

RE: You are exactly right, Sabrina. [chuckles] The Gold Rush was about getting gold, and so the miners, of course, everyone knew that they would need pickaxes and pans for sifting the gold and shovels and Niantic had quite a bunch of these things on board. Remember, she was a whaler caught midstream by the Gold Rush and came rushing up here with people on board. Some of the 250 passengers might have had some of these things with them so they were found with the ship, but more likely they were cargoes from other ships bringing in hardware for the miners.

AM: And so, our next question is, why are there ships buried under San Francisco?

RE: Why are there ships... [chuckles] Everyone wants to know that and it’s, uh, very interesting, of course! One thing you need to know is that one of the important dates in SF’s history is the May 3rd 1851 fire. One of six or seven fires that plagued SF in its early years during the Gold Rush. This was the most devastating fire. It started the night of May 3rd and burned all the next day, May 4th. It took out over 2,000 buildings as I recall, and this fire also, since the piers extended out from the city and the city extended out into the piers, it obliterated, burned up many of these ships and the piers as well as the buildings along the waterfront. And so, after the fire you have this giant mass of wreckage of blackened ships poking out of the mud everywhere. And many people already had their eyes on gaining land in San Francisco. This was the perfect opportunity to push the sand hills and cart them down to the edge fill the cove in out to deeper water, obliterating the cove and burying the remains of all those ships.

AM: When looking for evidence of buried ships, we don’t even have to leave the park. In addition to a display in the Visitor Center of artifacts found during the excavation of buried ships in what is today San Francisco’s Financial District, there is a sizable piece of the Niantic on display in the Maritime Museum. Here, Richard tells us more about the history of the Niantic and her different jobs in Gold Rush California.

RE: The Niantic was a ship originally built for the China trade carrying teacups and porcelains and silks and teas between NY and Canton. She did that for quite a few years and was one of the last ships to get out before the Opium War took hold and the Chinese closed the port. Well, she gets back to New York and she’s bought by new people and turned into a whaler for the Pacific. And the new captain, Captain Henry Cleveland, finds himself approached at a port in Peru by some merchants who wanted to appropriate his ship and purchase it...its services to get 49ers. And that’s how the NIantic got up to San Francisco from Peru as a former whaler and then as a passenger ship, hauls herself on shore, was repurposed into those three different uses--the warehouse, the saloon, and the hotel.

AM: The Niantic stands out as an example of versatility and adaptability. In researching this episode, we’ve discovered that not only was there not just one path to success in SF, but no path was guaranteed or straightforward...of course, if you want to go anywhere in San Francisco, you’re going to have to navigate the hills. Here, Richard talks a little more about the role the Gold Rush had in shaping the San Francisco and California we see today.

RE: The biggest impact the Gold Rush had was jumpstarting San Francisco into a city… with a massive economy, businesses and railroads need to be built out here…it turned San Francisco into a world port overnight and it just kept going with great impact over the rest of the world. The development of California basically begins in spades, with the development of San Francisco.

AM: I mean, the truth of it is the Gold Rush jumpstarts the development, but so many other trades and businesses come into SF that really change it into what we know it as today. None of our ships that are still in the water were directly associated with the Gold Rush, but they wouldn’t be in San Francisco without it.

RE: Your words really help, Anne. It’s one of the biggest impacts, probably overall, is the impact of so many different people from all over the world coming here and deciding to stay. And so, beginning with the Gold Rush, you have...some people have said it was the first collection of so many people from all of the world to ever occur in one place at one time.

[Audio pause / music break]

AM: Okay, we’ve talked about caverns and lost loves, buried ships and booming towns. Now can we talk about Gold Mountain?

SO: Gold Mountain sounds so mythical, right? It could certainly fit in with lost loves and buried ships. But we’ve been talking about Gold Mountain the entire time. [AM: Huh.] Gold Mountain, or Gum Saan, was how the Chinese referred to California once word of gold made its way past the Golden Gate and across the Pacific. I’ve always wondered what they must have thought, coming here--with all that ocean between them--to this faraway, unseen place of riches.

AM: You’re not the only one! In creating the “Ancestors in America” PBS series, the documentary creators used --among other things--third person accounts, newspaper clippings, and census records to reconstruct the perspective of a Chinese laborer traveling to Gold Mountain.

SO: Cool.

AM: He may have said something along the lines of “All the world has gone to California for the Gold Rush. We Chinese, too. I do not fear slavery as has happened to others. I will not be whipped like they were on the ships or herded like so many pigs in its hold. No. I go as a free man, with a ticket on credit. And I will surely pay it back. Others from our village are already there. They will greet me. I will not be alone... “I will do my best remembering who waits for me. Returning joyously with the gold. With a family. For the village. We leave now for Gold Mountain.”

SO: That sounds so inspiring, if I may say so. [AM: Mhmm] And I guess many did follow the call. Because by 1851, Chinese laborers made up one-fifth of the workers in the mines. Besides the promise of the fortunes of Gum Saan, many came to America seeking any opportunity greater than the flood-ravaged fields of a country still reeling from the First Opium War. After the gold ran out, they stayed behind -- partly because it was difficult to get back home, partly because they pursued the work opportunities they had here. And others kept following, too. That’s how Chinese laborers became a major force in the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. By the time that was completed in 1869, Chinese made up over 90 percent of the Central Pacific Rail’s workforce.

AM: And that was due in no small part to the Burlingame-Seward Treaty of 1868, which established formal friendly relations between China and the United States and gave China the status of, quote, “most favored nation” in trade with the US. On paper, equality was established between the nations. This lent towards freer immigration and the protection of Chinese citizens in the United States, as well as the steady flow of migrant workers for US businesses. But, as you know, legislation and reality wouldn’t be so friendly.

SO: Last episode, we talked a lot about John Fremont, who named the Golden Gate Strait as the golden gate for trade with the Orient. It seems like his prediction was correct. With the railroad and the treaty connecting continents, the golden vein through the golden gate finally fell into place.

AM: And it wouldn’t have been possible without the cooperation and contributions of the Chinese on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

SO: But let's never forget, it's not like California was just there for Americans, Europeans or Asians to live and work in.

AM: That’s true.

SO: Native American tribes who had thrived in what is today California suffered violence, disease, outright genocide. They lost freedom, property, and opportunity with the influx of foreign settlers. Going back to Sutter’s Mill -- John Sutter, who was born Johann Suter, was a Swiss shop owner who left his debts, country, and family to pursue fortune in the United States. After arriving in California in 1841, he converted to Catholicism and became a Mexican citizen. This was to convince the Mexican provincial governor to grant him nearly 50,000 acres, which became known as Nueva Helvetia. But, of course, this land wasn’t unoccupied.

AM: Of course not. Initially, it seems Sutter carried on friendly relations with the Nisenan people--the terms of his land grant required it--but over time, he was said to treat them as militia and laborers, interfere with tribal marriage customs, and he was accused by another Swiss in his employ, Heinrich Lienhard, of molesting Native American girls. He was brutal and violent. A visitor to Sutter’s ranch, James Clyman of Virginia, recalled that Sutter kept, quote, “600 to 800 [Native Americans] in a complete state of Slavery and as I had the mortification of seeing them dine I may give a short description. 10 or 15 troughs 3 or 4 feet long were brought out of the cook room and seated in the broiling sun. All the labourers great and small ran to the troughs like so many pigs and fed themselves with their hands as long as the troughs contained even a moisture.”

SO: As if that wasn’t enough, if they weren’t technically enslaved, the Natives were paid in currency which was only recognized at the store on Sutter’s property. [AM: Wow.] With the discovery of gold there, miners overwhelmed the Sacramento Valley. Disease, brutality, and loss beset the local tribes. By 1870, only 30,000 native people were estimated to remain in the state of California, most without access to their ancestral land.

AM: And all that so other people could have stronger claims to new lands and new lives to call their own.

SO: My heart hurts now. [AM: Mhmm] But, that history keeps repeating itself. Anytime, anywhere, any civilization, but also, right here in San Francisco, in California.

AM: Yeah... we need not look farther than Gold Mountain again. Immigrants from different places are targeted and abused in their new countries, but the Chinese bore the brunt of it during and after the Gold Rush, as they were seen as competition for money and jobs. Just take this account from the journalist Samuel Bowles’ book, “Our New West”, published in 1869: “To abuse a Chinaman; to rob him; to kick and cuff him; even to kill him, have been things not only done with impunity... but even with vain glory… Had the Chinaman a good claim, original or improved, he was ordered to ‘move on,’--it belonged to someone else. Had he hoarded a pile, he was ordered to disgorge; and, if he resisted, he was killed... they have been wantonly assaulted and shot down or stabbed by bad men, as sportsmen would surprise and shoot their game in the woods. There was no risk in such barbarity; if [he] survived to tell the tale, the law would not hear him or believe him. Nobody was so low, so miserable, that he did not despise the Chinaman.”

SO: Do you think Clementine, or her father, or the guy in love with her -- what do you think their relations with the Native Americans or Chinese were like? I mean, I know what society at large was like, but I always want to think there are individuals who don’t just fall into those lines.

AM: That’s true. But also hard to say. By the time the song as we know it was written, in 1884, all the anti-Chinese sentiment had already come to a head with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Like the PBS documentary, we can only reconstruct potential thoughts from the texts we do have.

[Audio break] Then the miner, forty-niner Soon began to droop and pine Thought he oughter join his daughter So he's with his Clementine.

Oh, my darling, oh, my darling Oh, my darling Clementine You are lost and gone forever Dreadful sorry, Clementine. [End of Audio Break]

SO: This has all gone so much darker than Huckleberry Hound.

AM: It was one of the realities of the Gold Rush, though. People separated from their families -- and they often strove to reunite with them. Not in the way it goes in “Clementine,” of course. Or so I hope.

SO: True. There was this distinction, at least where Gold Mountain was concerned. Many of its seekers considered themselves sojourners, not settlers. The idea was that they weren’t moving to Gold Mountain to live there forever; they just wanted to earn enough to send home, then eventually return home. The flip side is this helped contribute to the idea that these people, who had mined gold, built railroads, worked fields, and done so much other work for California and the US, were not quote-unquote “real” Americans.

AM: But, of course, there were settlers, too. And where others would have wanted to reunite with their families back in Asia, these settlers wanted to bring their families over here, to their new home.

SO: I can imagine. It must have been so lonely, both sides of the ocean. There wasn’t email, Zoom, or a dependable international mail system. [AM: mhm] How did they keep a sense of home? How did they keep in touch?

AM: Unfortunately, there are very few letters in the public domain between Chinese miners and their families. The creators of the PBS “Ancestors in America” documentary series I mentioned earlier [SO: Mhm] combined research history with storytelling to bring to light the point of view of a Chinese man who had left his family behind to work in gold rush-era California. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d love to share one more excerpt.

SO: Oh, I love excerpts! Go ahead. But only if I get to share something after.

AM: [laughs] Deal. “You know how we send money home? First, you look for a letter-writer on the street or in the Chinese store. Tell him to write only good things. Nothing bad happened. Then give the letter and money to the head man at the Chinese store here who does business with the Chinese store in our village. Chinese merchants all know each other from business, even across the ocean. Somebody knows our family there. Somebody will read the letter to our family. And if we do not send money, our family tells them to find our kinsman here to scold us. Their letter to us, last words always say, ‘When are you coming home?’”

SO: Wow. That’s...Well, the piece I actually wanted to share is a Cantonese folk song. It represents the perspective of a wife left behind in Guangdong during the New Year, which is a time of reunions. In English, the title translates to “Laments of the Wife of a Gold Mountain Man”. She says this: So comes the New Year; Still I must wait for you. Red paper coins decorate houses everywhere; New Year scrolls proclaim good fortunes. Images of the Three Immortals of Happiness, Longevity, and Prosperity grace the front door. All over the place, thousands of flowers are sweet and candles bright. Families are together as husband and wife unite. In abundance, chicken and pork are prepared; Loud firecrackers burst off clouds of smoke. And for me A time for reunion means a solitary retreat. The taste of honey now is not at all sweet.

AM: We began this whole conversation talking about songs and verses and there’s this underlying idea of how history runs through them. Did you know, when you found that Cantonese folk song, that the melody in “Oh My Darling Clementine” is now used in a Chinese New Year children’s song?

SO: No, I did not!

AM: It seems that adaptation is fairly recent. “Clementine” has had so many in so many languages since Bing Crosby and Huckleberry Hound. So the miner’s ballad might have nothing to do with it. I mean, the song itself basically keeps saying, “We are singing, we are dancing, happy new year to you all!”

SO: That sounds hopeful and innocent.

AM: Yeah!

SO: So far from the tragedy of Clementine or of separated Gold Mountain families -- or, for that matter, the original lovers in the Spanish ballad. According to the research rabbit hole I did get into, they couldn’t marry because of, guess what? Exclusionary laws about royal blood.

AM: How surprising. It’s the exact same melody, with the exact same space for words, but because of the circumstances, the stories and emotions are different. Songs could be reversed that way. It also makes me think, what if Clementine had been left behind? What if she couldn’t follow her father to the cavern in the canyon? Would “Oh My Darling” have been a song about Clementine missing her father instead?

SO: It’s funny you mention that. Another Cantonese folk song around the Chinese New Year seems to be from the point of view of a child whose father has gone to Gold Mountain.

AM: Oh, dear. I both want to hear this and am not sure I’m emotionally prepared.

SO: It’s a hopeful one this time.

AM: Okay…

SO: Swallows and magpies, flying in glee: Greetings for New Year. Daddy has gone to Gold Mountain To earn money. He will earn gold and silver, Ten thousand taels. When he returns, We will buy a lot of land.

AM: [chuckles] You’re right. That was hopeful! And it makes me wonder--how easy was it for Chinese families to be reunited in California?

SO: Hold that thought again, I think we have our next episode.

[Outro music, “Xiannan Hao Ya”]

SO: You’ve just gotten a glimpse into a new project we’re excited to bring to your virtual park. “Better Lives, Bitter Lies” is a podcast series focusing on the role of propaganda, trickery, and misinformation in bringing people to the San Francisco Bay in search of better lives since 1849. These discussions are not meant to be comprehensive pictures of historical events, but rather to spark curiosity, discussion, and further exploration. Keep an eye out for our next episode!

Episode music: “Clementine” from the W.P.A. California Folk Music Project, Library of Congress; “Romance del Conde Olinos” performed by Joaquín Díaz; and “Xinnian Hao Ya” by EZY Mandarin.