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It is estimated that 70,000 North American people traveled overland or by sea to California's gold fields in 1849. A persistent view of the Gold Rush is that as forty-niners encountered hardship and competition in the gold fields and vice in burgeoning cities, they divorced themselves from values and norms thy left behind. Participation in teh Gold Rush, however, was not the result of a utopian experiment where men (for they were primarily men) actively abandoned former beliefs and values in order to achieve antinomian goals. What these men sought was financial gain, wheter through trade or through exploitation of a natural resource - goald. Executing plans to achieve success necessitated reliance on the values and preconceptions that the men carried with them as they traveled to the gold fields. This study posits that in going to California, forty-niners were not escaping the social and cultural worlds they left behind, but were instead expressing those values through enterprise in a new context.

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