To oversimplify, there were two types of people attracted to California in 1849 and in the years immediately following: there were those who spent every dime they had to get there and who planned to make a living if not a "pile" with the sweat of their brow; and there were those who arrived with some money and understood that the clearest path to wealth was to sell things to the first group. The first group did not need to be "destitute, discouraged laborers" to fuel the economic success of the second group. They were making money and they needed to buy things.

For several years, it was possible to make a reasonable wage placer mining for gold. The "mines" in these cases consisted of an expanse of territory along the western slope of the Sierra. Placer mining did not require any particular expertise nor did it require complicated, expensive equipment. It required hard work. With some luck, hard-working placer miners (they usually worked in teams) could reach beyond their daily sustenance and make their "pile" in the parlance of the time. A good haul would mean that a miner could go back home and buy a farm. He (or sometimes she!) would not likely be able to retire with the "pile" but it could mean that one would have a good means to own land and pass on that prosperity to later generations.

If one were truly destitute and discouraged, one could quit the gold fields and find work elsewhere - California was booming in those early years, and finding workers was a difficult prospect since so many wanted to search for gold. So it was easy enough to give up on gold and still do very well if one was willing to remain in the West.

Western mining began to change in the mid 1850s with larger, corporate mines that went underground and hired a labor force. This is how the Empire Mine was founded in Grass Valley, California in the mid 1850s. The industry was rocked at its very foundation with the 1859 discovery of the Comstock Lode in western Utah Territory (soon to become part of the Nevada territory, organized in 1861). The Comstock defined underground mining internationally in the industrial age, and it changed the image of the Western miner from a free-lancing, independent entrepreneur into a laborer working for a corporation. These mines shifted the focus from the "extensive" search for modest surface deposits to the "intense" search for smaller rich veins of gold (or gold and silver). That said, the Comstock is also the site of the first successful miners labor union west of the Mississippi, organized in 1864. The Union demanded a minimum of $4 per eight-hour shift for underground work, making these miners hardly destitute or discouraged: workers in Connecticut's Colt factor, for example, received a remarkable $1.25 per day - for much longer hours, but they were grateful not to be digging the region's canals for 75 cents a day.

At the same time, there were businessmen (and an occasional woman!) who became multi-millionaires during the Western expression of the Gilded Age. It was not initially a matter of monopolies; it was more a matter of delivering the right sort of supplies to the right place at the right time. Later monopolies were part of turning wealth into that sort of obscene excess that defined the time, but initially, anyone who could buy a large load of supplies and deliver them up to the mountain camps could do very well in making a "pile" that would be the envy of any miner.

A good source for this is "The World Rushed in" by J S Holliday (one of the nicest writers on the Coast).