Name: How the Greed of One Man Changed The World
Uploaded: 2026-02-27T21:37:30.000Z
Duration: 14 min 44 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

A bottle of shiny dust sparkles in the shopkeeper's hands as he rushes down the muddy street.

Carpenters abandon half built houses, ship crews, dessert shops close and papers stop printing as everyone runs to the gold fields.

It's May 10, 1848, and one of the largest migrations history has just begun.

For the next years, this tiny village will become the most out of control place on earth.

The man with the bottle, Samuel Brannan, watches the chaos he unleashed.

It's part of a plan that will make him the richest man in California.

The edge of the Map three years earlier Brannan is serving as the highest ranking Mormon in New York City.

The Mormons beliefs are clashing with the values of Protestant America and their leader has just been brutally murdered by a mob in Illinois.

Violence is spreading and many are running for their lives.

Brannan wants to evacuate his group west beyond the reach of the US and he's not the only one.

In early 1846, he and over 200 fellow believers board a ship to sail around the Americas, hoping to build their religious sanctuary.

They don't know that time is against them.

The US government has its eyes on California as a Pacific foothold and trade post for Asia.

Mexico has owned it since freeing itself from Spain in 1821.

And owning is putting it a bit generously.

Indigenous peoples have lived there for millennia, but

in just the last 75 years, forced labor, violence and disease have halved their population from what used to be 300,000.

For the US this is convenient, as a weakened population means less resistance.

In early 1846, U.S. troops cross the Nueces river and start a war.

Meanwhile, Brannan's ship is rounding Cape Horn and after six months they reach the village that will soon be San Francisco.

marines have seized the outpost just three weeks earlier, and

the dream of a Mormon sanctuary in California is dead on arrival.

Other men would be devastated, but Brannan sees opportunity.

Many pass through a key stop upstream where a Swiss immigrant named John Sutter has been carving out his own empire on stolen land, brutally exploiting the forced labor of native people.

An expanding frontier outpost, but short on supplies.

Brannan steps in and opens a general store right at Fort Sutter's gates.

And in early 1848, fate walks into his shop.

A farmer farmhand pays for a bottle of brandy with gold dust this news makes Brannan's brain light up like a slot machine.

If one random farmhand has gold, there's more to be found.

The trail leads into the Sierra Nevada foothills, where one of Sutter's workers has spotted something glittering in the mud of the American River.

It hits Sutter like the gold won't make him rich, but destroy him.

It causes a fever that spreads like the flu and turns workers into, well, literal gold diggers.

He begs his men for six weeks of silence to claim legal rights and finish the mill he just started building.

But workers are already starting to sneak off to pan for flakes in the river.

Overnight, gold fever is spreading, and Sam Brannan catches a brutal case.

He delivers one last sermon to the San Francisco Mormons, because who wants to shepherd souls when there's a fortune waiting in the dirt?

He rides out to the new goldfields, bottles a sample, and

races back to wave his hat and stir up the city.

The news ripples outwards like a shockwave, draining towns like San Jose and Monterey like bathtubs.

Within weeks, Brannan is already three steps ahead in his shop, he's gathered picks, pans, whiskey, everything a miner could want and sells it as an obscene markup.

In the city, he sells a kilo of beef for $2.

Soon his store is turning over $4,000 a day.

Other sellers rush in, charging up to 1,000% over cost and getting it not long.

And Brennan is making more monthly than most miners will see in their digging career.

Instead of gold, Brennan mines the miners.

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Now that we've got you covered, back to California.

The global stampede on December 5, the US president confirms it.

Tens of thousands drop everything and head west.

They call themselves the 49ers after the year they arrive, or Argonauts, like the heroes who chase the Golden Fleece.

There's no Panama Canal and no transcontinental railroad.

By land, it's a 2,000 mile trek lined with abandoned wagons and animal bones across deserts and mountains.

The sea route around Cape Horn is no better.

Five to eight months through storms that eat ships for breakfast.

Sail south, hike through jungle, sail north.

It sounds clever until you're vomiting blood from yellow fever while mosquitoes use you as a buffet.

Meanwhile, the whole Pacific Rim has mobilized.

Every major port from Valparaiso to Guangzhou sits closer to the gold than New York does.

By the end of 1849, over 100,000 souls have flooded California from every inhabited continent, and

nearly all of them funnel through San Francisco.

Digging the dream by 1851, Sam Brannan has opened an office in this boom town and is buying up land in every direction.

He strides through the dusty streets in a tailored suit from the finest imported fabrics, a cigar in his mouth, passing the brothels, saloons and gambling hells.

The people gossip about the many affairs of California's richest man.

The streets swarm with thousands of young men, armed and half drunk, shouting in a dozen languages, chasing the golden fever dream.

In three years, the city has grown from a few hundred to 55,000 people, many of them immigrants.