California Gold Rush: Sutter's Mill

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (California Gold Rush mini-series, episode 242) is a short documentary about the discovery that started the California Gold Rush. In January 1848, a carpenter called James Marshall was building a sawmill, a place where a machine cuts trees into wood, next to the American River, for a rich farmer called John Sutter. One morning he saw something shiny in the water and hit the tiny pieces of metal with a stone: they didn't break, they only went flat, so it was gold. Sutter wanted his men to finish the mill and asked everyone to keep the gold a secret, but a few months later the news was in the newspapers. In 1849, tens of thousands of people, the forty-niners, arrived in California to look for gold. The episode ends with a twist: Sutter's workers left, strangers came onto his land, and the two men at the start of the Gold Rush both died poor.

It is a listening comprehension episode in the past simple: learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app, 7 on facts and 3 on vocabulary (sawmill, rush, forty-niners). The closing question (Why do you think Sutter wanted to keep the gold a secret?) opens a short class discussion where learners give reasons with because and so.

Materials & prerequisites

The folder holds the audio, the slideshow and the script; there is no lesson plan. The pupil pack and the teacher pack (answers highlighted) are one A4 page each, with the text, three pictures (the real Sutter's Mill about 1850, gold flakes, a painting of San Francisco in 1849), key words and the 10 questions; a one-page pupil sheet and a teacher sheet with the answer key are also included. Learners should know the past simple and the past continuous (was working, was building). The script explains its new words as it goes (sawmill, rush, forty-niners). The old portraits of Marshall and Sutter and the 1848 newspaper are shown on screen.

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c4-travel-and-migration ("Voyages et migrations"), Cycle 4. The episode targets CEFR level B1-.