The discovery of gold in California on the western coast of North America in 1848, and the resulting migration of people to the region, had a great impact on newspapers. Throughout the gold-mining districts, almost every boomtown had its paper. Most of the mining-district papers, of course, were not published for very long, partly because of the mobility of their subscribers.
As gold poured into San Francisco, the city's financial and cultural wealth multiplied. No one made a fortune in journalism in this period, but that was largely because so many tried. By 1859, just ten years after the gold discovery, 132 periodicals were started in San Francisco alone, and the total number of their proprietors, editors, and reporters was more than 1,000. They were printed in six different languages and represented eight religious denominations and seven political parties. In 1859 there were 12 San Francisco daily newspapers, most notably the Alta California, the Herald, the Call, and the Bulletin.
Poetry, short stories, and other literary pieces often appeared in the early newspapers. The scenes of California, and the experiences of getting there and living there, were so often extraordinary and dramatic that they cried out for description. A literary weekly, the Golden Era, flourished from its first day of publication in 1852 and soon had more subscribers than any other paper on the Pacific coast. Much of its success was due to the enthusiasm of one of its young editors, Rollin M. Dagget, who traveled throughout the mining districts to sell subscriptions and also wrote many of the sketches describing the miners’ lives. Though it paid nothing for poetry and only five dollars a column for prose, nearly every writer who achieved any reputation in California during this period had taken the opportunity of publishing in it. The tone of the Golden Era was informal to the point of breeziness, and this gave it a popular appeal that enabled it to outlast a number of its competitors, including several that aspired to higher literary levels.