James Marshall was crafting a sawmill for John Sutter along a river when, suddenly, he discovered tiny specks of gold in the water. Word soon spread, and thus the Gold Rush commenced.

Your life in a boomtown would differ depending on the job you had. If you were a miner you'd usually make extremely low profit due to inexperience with mining and being irresponsible with the little money they had as well. Merchants, however, were very rich from charging a lot of money for their products.