View of San Francisco: San Francisco before the Gold Rush, March 1847, with Montgomery Street bordering the bay.
environment created by the Gold Rush. In 1846 San Francisco was a sleepy Mexican colony of around 200 people called Yerba Buena. A year later the population had grown to 457, and most of these were men under forty, including one minister, three doctors, three lawyers, and one schoolteacher. On January 24, 1848, a worker found gold nuggets in the millrace at John Sutter's encampment on the American River, setting off a decade-long nationwide wave of "Gold Fever."
From the beginning, physicians were as enthusiastic about seeking their fortunes as most other prospectors. Just weeks after news of the strike reached San Francisco, the town's two resident physicians set out for the gold fields, and within six months more than four-fifths of San Francisco's citizens had rushed into the gold country. Word soon spread up and down the Pacific Coast, and in 1848 alone, 10,000 miners headed for the gold fields via San Francisco. By Christmas of that year President Polk officially declared the gold strike a rich discovery, and easterners hurriedly sought passage by steamer or clipper to the Pacific Coast via the Isthmus of Panama or Cape Horn.
Dr. Richard Beverly Cole (b. 1829, d. 1902) arrived in San Francisco by ship in 1852.
Approximately 25,000 goldseekers traveled by ship to San Francisco in 1849, doubling California's American population. Typical of these seafaring newcomers was a young Philadelphia physician, Dr. R. Beverly Cole, who became fascinated by the gold rush stories he heard in the East and boarded a ship bound for the Isthmus of Panama in 1852. After a harrowing trip where he treated hundreds of fellow travelers sick with yellow fever, cholera, and malaria, he finally arrived in San Francisco. As one observer noted, "it was sheer luck that he reached California at all."
Those who took the overland route to California fared no better. In 1849, 20,000-30,000 people traveled the 2,000-mile overland route from the Missouri River to Sutter's Fort in Sacramento, and thousands lost their lives to cholera, starvation and other epidemics along the way. South Carolina surgeon Dr. Hugh H. Toland joined a wagon train west in search of gold and a healthier climate for his ailing wife. Mrs. Toland died in Stockton just days
Dr. Hugh Huger Toland (b. 1806, d. 1880) arrived in San Francisco via the overland route.
after completing the grueling four-month journey, and her husband took his quartz mill to a stake in Calaveras county where he joined the mining frenzy. After a few discouraging months as a miner, he realized that his medical knowledge was potentially more profitable than his mill, and he sold his claim and headed West to establish a surgical practice in booming San Francisco.
