What impact did the Gold Rush have on different ethnic and racial groups, the social environment and ethos, and the economy of California?

Question

By the mid-1850s, which groups and their economic interests had become "the winners," and which groups and their economic interests had become "the losers" of the California Gold Rush?

Answer 1

Answer: An ideal answer will:
1. Discuss how the California Gold Rush ignited a massive wave of prospective miners from all over California and the Oregon Territory to the Sierra Nevada mountainsâ€"Indians, long-time Mexican residents, and American settlersâ€"as well as immigrants from Hawaii, New Mexico, Texas, the eastern United States, and even as far away as Chile, Peru, Australia, and France.
2. Discuss how even though mining camps and mining towns were overwhelming male, a diversity of women of many different countries, classes, and races, including Indian women, were involved in the California Gold Rush. Note how, as word of the gold rush spread throughout the United States, Latin America, and Europe, so did the knowledge of opportunities for women to work in the gold fields and the surrounding northern California towns, sometimes working as "entertainers." Assert how the continuing gender imbalance in California made mixed racial and religious marriages more common and divorce easier to obtain in California than anywhere else in the country.
2. Discuss how northern California's gold camps and small towns soon became overrun with gambling, rampant reports of theft and intimidation, and racial and ethnic conflict among competing miners. Discuss how maintaining any well-regulated law and order became increasingly difficult during the California Gold Rush years and its immediate aftermath.
3. State how within two or three years from the onset of the Gold Rush, most Indian miners and Chinese had been driven from the gold fields, though some Indian miners had been retained to work for subsistence wages mining gold for others. Discuss how the Chinese found other kinds of work, eventually building the western railroads and developing service industries for miners and others.
4. Discuss how the California Indian population was decimated because of disease and outright murder associated with the California Gold Rush; however, African slavery was very rare in California because of the easy ability of slaves to escape in California, as well as miners hatred for all competition.
5. Discuss how the transition from individual miners panning, sluicing, and cradling for gold to large-scale hydraulic mining operations by 1853 reduced most miners to hired labor and meant the possibility of individual miners making a fortune from gold mining had essentially ended.
6. Discuss how people who came to California in the late 1840s and early 1850s as merchants and shopkeepers provided needed supplies, clothes, foodstuffs, and entertainment establishments to the miners. Assert how many of these small and medium-size merchants enjoyed financial success and made a substantial contribution to the growth of the California economy.
7. Write a concise and effective conclusion that analyzes "the winners" and "the losers" of the California Gold Rush.