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The Gold Rush Character Analysis

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Jainie Mcgraw Hanna World Lit 2 Lesson 19 The Ugly of The Gold Rush When the gold rush started individuals rushed to California in hopes to strike gold and get rich, “Live The American Dream.” It was exciting, intriguing and the news brought over 300,000 people to California; it started when James W. Marshall found gold, January 24, 1848. However, the gold rush like everything had its cons; The California Gold Rush initiated the California Genocide which killed over 100,000 Native Californians. Entire indigenous societies were attacked and forced off of their land by, “Forty-niners” who were seeking gold. With the Gold Rush came, Racism, Greed, and violence, In the Novel ‘Daughter Of Fortune’, Author Isabel Allende captures both the positives …show more content…

In the Novel Daughter of Fortune, Isabel writes of Tao Chi’en who is a Chinese man that uses natural remedies to aid people out of kindness. Tao helps Elize get to California, and after a while of being in California Tao cuts his hair and changes his appearance, he now wears, ‘a dark suit with a frock coat, a three-button vest, and flared trousers. Tao realizes that the only way to make it in California is to look American. Tao states in the book, “In America, you have to dress like an American.” Other social effects of the gold rush included sudden population explosion in areas where governance had little time to catch up to the many people flocking to those areas. San Francisco got the reputation as a ‘barbarous city’ of miners, prostitutes and thieves who settled there.The Treasure of Sierra Madre, “Gold's a devilish sort of thing. You lose your sense of values and character changes entirely. Your soul stops being the same as it was before.” To the Native American tribes living ‘in the heart of the mother lode’ the gold miners were murderers, and the gold rush was seen as a nightmare as well as a mini

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