Rarely does a single person create a demand for a new coin, but perhaps James Marshall did so unwittingly in the early days of 1848. His discovery of gold on the Sutter ranch in California was the onset of the famous 1849 Gold Rush, with tens of thousands going to the land of riches.
For some men it was the way to instant wealth but for most the long voyage proved no more than a path to a different job. The work of all these people tore great quantities of gold from the earth and soon the Philadelphia Mint, aided by enterprising private minters in California, was striking a large number of gold coins.
The quantities of gold taken from the streams and hillsides of the gold region soon flooded the Eastern markets of the United States as well as nations of Western Europe. Coupled with equally large discoveries of gold in Australia, the world banking system was soon awash in gold coinage while that of silver remained stagnant. This meant that silver became undervalued with respect to gold.
By late 1849 bullion dealers were using gold to buy up silver coins, which were then melted into bars and shipped to Europe and the Orient. This in turn created a shortage of coined silver, leading to public complaints about a rapidly growing coin shortage. At first the Mint stepped up production of copper cents and the new gold dollars
