God in the Goldfields

Last Saturday, January 24, 2026, marked the 178th anniversary of the gold discovery in California, an event that caused the largest migration in the history of the world up to that time. What did God think as he watched James Marshall pick up a few shiny flakes from the earth? Hard to say, because no churchman was present to offer an interpretation; in fact, organized religion in California, on that cold winter day in January 1848, was in a state of confusion.  

The United States was already in possession of the territory, having “conquered” this isolated province during the recent war with Mexico. Under Mexican rule, and Spain’s before it, Catholicism was the state religion, but the only houses of worship extant were at the twenty-one missions established by Spain’s Franciscan priests many years earlier. These had been secularized by Mexico City starting in 1834; and by 1848, were in various stages of disrepair, though a few padres still lived in the buildings. There were no churches at all for the almost 3,000 immigrants, mainly Protestant, who had crossed the continent in covered wagons during the 1840s. The faithful practiced their religion at home; California was a pastoral backwater, and life was simple.

All that changed with the gold discovery. Not immediately, because most people believed it was a hoax—but by May 1848, local California residents were swarming into Coloma, the original discovery site. Ships spread the news around the Pacific Rim. By the end of summer, 1848, thousands of treasure seekers from California, Mexico, South America, Oregon Territory, and Hawaii, were busily digging for gold, swiftly spreading out into new areas wherever they found “color.”

In October, 1848, the Reverend Timothy Dwight Hunt, heretofore in the service of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, as the New School Presbyterian missionary in Honolulu, arrived in San Francisco from the Hawaiian Islands—accompanied by his entire congregation. By then, perhaps fearing that those of the city’s population still in town were becoming as recklessly dissolute as the prospectors in the actual mining districts, a group of prominent citizens asked him to stay in the city as its chaplain for one year, at a salary of $2500. Mr. Hunt immediately commenced holding two services every Sunday, at eleven a.m. and again at seven o’clock Sunday evening. He was the first Presbyterian pastor, and the first resident, full-time, non-Catholic clergyman in California.   

Eighteen forty-nine was the year the world rushed in, when men from the United States and Europe sped to the Pacific shores en masse, their hearts aflame with gold fever after the president of the United States had confirmed, in December 1848, the rich and extensive gold deposits in far-off California. And—lest the multitudes who scrambled to the gold fields to make their fortunes succumb to the Devil’s temptations—the religious world on America’s Atlantic Coast rushed vigorous leadership to the territory.

Among the clergy who arrived in 1849 were Rev. Osgood Wheeler (Baptist), Rev. Joseph A. Benton (Congregationalist), Rev. Isaac Owens (Methodist), and Rev. Sylvester Woodbridge (Presbyterian). Reverend S.H. Willey, also a Presbyterian, established himself in Monterey, where later that year he officiated as chaplain to the first state constitution convention. February 1849 A number of Jews came to California in 1849 as well, but to create a better life for themselves, not to save souls. Presbyterian clergy, who were the most numerous, frequently preached in the mines as circuit riders, traveling from camp to camp. The early camps were crude, yet religion was treated with sensitivity and respect, even by the godless.

Father Peter Augustine Anderson, an experienced missionary from New Jersey, was the first Catholic priest sent out ... and unfortunately, the first casualty. He landed at San Francisco in July, 1850, and died of typhoid that same November. In May, 1850, Pope Pius IX had appointed Joseph Alemany, a Dominican missionary, as the first bishop of Monterey, California. Father Alemany arrived in San Francisco in December, 1850, having first visited England, France and Ireland, to raise money for his new diocese and recruit personnel. He was bishop of Monterey 1850-1853, and archbishop of San Francisco 1853-1884. When a contingent of young priests from All Hallows College in Dublin arrived, Bishop Alemany dispatched them to key points in the gold districts: Father Aleric to Sonora, Father Regalle to San Andreas, Father Acker to Downieville, Father Shanahan to Nevada City, Father Magagnotto to Marysville, and Father Ingoldaby to Sacramento.

All these stations—some already grown into real towns—were rough and tumble places, but perhaps Father Aleric’s assignment to Sonora was the most challenging. His parish covered 100 miles of bleak, rocky hillsides and ravines, over which he walked or rode a mule. Sonora was a camp worthy of its reputation as the largest, wickedest, most violent, and richest town in the southern mines. Few of its inhabitants had been to any religious service in several years, nor was there a church; often, a saloon had to make do as a place of worship.

If Sonora was one of the most dangerous camps in the Mother Lode, then Downieville, Father Acker’s parish, was rapidly becoming a place filled with saloons and lawlessness, too. Reverend Robert R. Dunlap, a Methodist, and Reverend William Pond, a Congregationalist, also served in Downieville. The three of them, and other clergy who followed, in time managed to build solid congregations.