Samuel Brannan
American
1819 – 1889
Samuel Brannan was a Mormon elder, newspaper publisher, and merchant who publicized the 1848 gold discovery in the streets of San Francisco and grew rich selling supplies to miners, becoming California's first millionaire before dying in poverty in 1889.
Biography
Samuel Brannan was born on March 2, 1819, in Saco, Maine, and trained as a printer. A convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he chartered the ship Brooklyn in 1846 and led some 240 Mormon colonists around Cape Horn to Yerba Buena, more than doubling the tiny settlement's population. In January 1847 he founded the California Star, San Francisco's first newspaper, and opened a store at Sutter's Fort.
When gold turned up at Coloma in 1848, Brannan grasped its meaning faster than anyone. After quietly stocking his store with every pick, pan, and shovel he could buy, in May 1848 he strode through San Francisco holding a bottle of gold dust and shouting "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!" The stampede he ignited made him rich: his Sutter's Fort store reportedly took in $150,000 a month at the height of the rush, and he is widely counted as California's first millionaire.
Brannan invested heavily in San Francisco and Sacramento real estate, helped organize the 1851 Committee of Vigilance, and was expelled from the LDS church for his vigilante activity. In 1861 he founded the resort town of Calistoga in the Napa Valley. A costly divorce in 1870 forced him to liquidate his holdings, and drink and failed ventures consumed the rest. He died nearly penniless at Escondido, California, in May 1889.