P3 - Photo - George H. Johnson - 1852

A young man stands squarely for the camera around 1852, pan and pick in hand, dressed in the rough clothes of the diggings. He is a California Gold Rush miner, one of the roughly 300,000 people who poured toward the Sierra foothills after gold was found at Sutter's Mill in 1848. They came from the eastern states, from Mexico, Chile, China, and Europe, crossing oceans and the continent on the gamble that a river might make them rich. Photographers like George H. Johnson set up in booming San Francisco to sell miners a keepsake to send home, proof they had made the journey. The rush exploded California's population so fast that it applied for statehood almost overnight, and that request detonated in Congress. Admitting California as a free state upset the balance between slave and free, forcing the Compromise of 1850. A prospector's hopeful pose, it turned out, sat on top of a national fault line.