The California gold rush was an important part of not only California history, but the history of the United States. The gold rush brought settlers from all across the country to California to try and get rich. These 100 photographs of the California gold rush tell the story of the settlement in California and the wild west in the late 1840s and 1850s. The wild west was alive and well in California during the gold rush, with gold miners, gold panners, and a host of other people who all stood to profit from the discovery of gold. These photographs range from 1848 to 1855, the height of the excitement about gold in California. The photographs shown are daguerreotypes, the first widely and spread publicly available form of photography.