A priest once asked me how California got to be the morally decadent place that it is, and my answer — the Gold Rush — took him by surprise. I think he was expecting one of the usual conservative pieties about radical universities and the 1960s, or the political effects of immigration, or corrupt Democratic one-party rule.
There's a lot of romance associated with the California Gold Rush, but it's hard to overstate how wicked that whole sorry chapter really was, and how its godless shadow still oppresses the culture of this state. Our favored narratives rarely go back far enough. The politically useful story may well be untrue, or at least incomplete. History is more complicated than pieties allow.
