San Antonio College Library

In the two years after the discovery of gold as Sutter's Mill in 1848, one hundred thousand persons made the difficult trek to California in search of quick wealth. One thousand of them were blacks. By 1860 there were five thousand. They formed the largest voluntary migration of American blacks before the Civil War. Yet few whites then or now have been aware of the part that blacks played in America's epic adventure. Most black Forty-niners went west...