| For this activity, begin by circling the city of San Francisco on
your globe. San Francisco's location is 38N/122W. Just over forty years
after the Lewis and Clark expedition, gold was discovered at Sutter's
Mill in California. Sutter's Mill was located about 120 miles east of
San Francisco. As a result of this discovery, thousands of people from
all over the world raced to join the gold rush to California. So many
people traveled to the state in 1849 that all the new people coming to
the gold fields were soon collectively referred to as forty-niners.
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| For the thousands of would-be prospectors living in the eastern
portion of the United States, most had only two options for traveling to
California. They could travel to Missouri where they could then join
wagon trains headed west by way of the Oregon Trail, or they could book
passage on ships that departed from eastern ports and sailed south
around the southern tip of South America and then north to San
Francisco.
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| Use your globe to compare the lengths of these two routes. We will
use New York City as the departure point for our would-be gold miner.
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| For the overland option, use your globe's mounting ring to draw a
route from New York City at 41N/75W, to a location in Missouri at
39N/94W (site of Independence), to a site in Idaho on the Snake River at
43N/114W, and then on to San Francisco. Measure the length of each
segment and add them together to get the total distance. What was the
distance of the overland route? (1.)
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| For the sea option, use the globe's mounting ring to draw a route
from New York to a point just off the easternmost tip of Brazil at
6S/31W, to South America's Cape Horn at 56S/68W, and then to San
Francisco. What is the distance of this route? (2.)
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| Which method of travel from the east coast of the United States to
California do you think would have been the fastest? (3.)
___________________________ Most sea voyages from east coast ports to
San Francisco took about five months, but some of the fast clipper ships
did much better. One clipper ship, the Flying Cloud, twice made the trip
from New York to San Francisco in just under 90 days. Use the distance
you measured above to determine the average daily sailing distance of
the Flying Cloud on these two voyages. (4.) ____________________________
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