Yes, crossing the United States from California to the ports on the east coast were faster, but at the time of the gold rush, the continental US had to be crossed by wagon trains, stages, and horses and there were hostile natives to battle to get the gold from west to east. A voyage through the Panamanian canal was still faster and safer once it was built.
The hostile natives called the land belonging to the United States something else in their own language and contested with the US government and their treaties by attacking wagon trains, stages, and riders on horseback when crossing lands that could've once been tribal lands belonging to the hostile natives or land set aside for the natives by US government decree as they moved the natives from their fruitful lands of the east coast to make room for settlements, homes, towns, and cities built by the European immigrants who wanted the fertile bottom land and land close to ports and shipping lanes for themselves. The European immigrants were seeking their fortune in the newly formed United States when they either fled war or persecution for religious, political, and class-based reasons. One might call them the wretched refuse of Europe's teeming shores yearning to be free as is inscribed on the gift France gave to the United States in the wake of their successful struggle for freedom from Britain. No doubt it was wishful thinking on France's part since centuries of warfare between France and Britain had resulted in change of ownership of disputed lands granted as dowry in marriage contracts or conquered in battles that stretched for centuries between the two countries. No wonder France and Britain were among the European nations that built their empires by claiming lands in spots spanning the globe, including the land that is presently called Israel in the Middle East where the remains of Hitler's Final Solution went to live with the consent of the world's nations that agreed to let the Jewish people finally go to their millennia-old home, the land of milk and honey that Yahweh, the invisible god of the Israelites, promised to them and that finally the Christian nations agreed to when the Israelites won from Britain the right to keep their homeland and bring the Jewish people home at last.
The Jews were limited by Britain's rules to how many Jews could immigrate to Israel sparking the struggle for freedom and the right to decide how many Jews would be allowed to immigrate for themselves. The Jews fought the Arabs who refused to allow Jews in their midst in their own homeland and surrounded Israeli soldiers and were determined to defeat them and exterminate the last Jews to bother them. The Arabs were less successful in fighting them face to face than they had been in providing Hitler with the solution to the Jewish problem by being the architects of the Final Solution. The Germans provided the death camps and the gas chambers by rounding up the Jews and sending them to their deaths with their famed efficiency, but the Arabs were the architects of the plan provided for German ingenuity and dispatch that created the Holocaust that exterminated 6 million Jews and nearly 10 million Christians and 4 million gypsies, what the Germans considered as subhumans to be removed from their Aryan Master Race. Neither the Germans nor the Arabs have been successful in eradicating the Jewish people. Is it any wonder the Arabs deny the Holocaust and Hitler's failure to establish his thousand-year Reich that would dominate the world? The Muslims under the Ottomans failed without the need to provide a homeland for the remaining Jews when they sought to create world wide Islamic theocracy and convert the people of the world to Islam once and for all. I imagine their failure is all part of their denial of the Holocaust, especially since they failed to convert the world in their Ottoman colonial phase.
Britain allowed the Jews to go home in reparation for not preventing the Holocaust and defeating Hitler before 6 million Jews were exterminated and their wealth distributed to the conquering Nazis or complicit Europeans who failed to see the danger before Hitler gained power. The British could care less about the 10 million Christians and the 4 million gypsies; they had destroyed many times over those numbers during their wars, transportation of unwanted people, and colonization of wealthy lands in their heydey back when the sun never set on the British Empire. Allowing the Jews to occupy their homeland was a small price to pay. The Arabs wouldn't like it and would fight to the death to eradicate the Jews since their Final Solution failed to pan out with Hitler, but nothing much would change as long as the world could be brought to see that Israel and the Jews were still unwanted even if the United Nations recognized Israel. Once again, the United Nations recognized Israel as a sop to their conscience in the wake of World War II and helped create the country when they mandated a partition of the British protectorate of Palestine to create 2 countries: one Arab and one Jewish with Jerusalem belonging to the world and partitioned between Islam and Israel.
There is no wonder there is conflict between the Arabs and Jews. The conflict began when Abraham didn't believe his barren wife, Sarai/Sarah, would become pregnant and bear his son. That's why Sarah urged Abraham take to his bed, Hagar, her Egyptian handmaiden, so she could succeed where Sarah could not during all their long years of marriage. Hagar proved to be fertile in her youth and bore Ishmael, Abraham's first son by birth. Sarah also became pregnant and bore Abraham's first legal son, Isaac, the patriarch of the Jews and the first of Abraham's offspring. Hagar eventually left Abraham's tribe with an Egyptian soldier, taking Ishmael with her and Yahweh's promise to make Abraham's descendants as numerous as grains of sand in the desert. Yahweh's prediction for Abraham's offspring has provided this world with numerous Arabs from Ishmael's seed determined to exterminate Isaac's seed, the Jews, as half-brothers often do when legacies are to be won. The brothers contend over who will win. The Arabs believe that since Ishmael is the first son of Abraham, they should win, ignoring the fact that Ishmael may be the oldest son, but not the first legal and recognized son of Abraham. If all of Isaac's children can be destroyed, Ishmael will win by default. It's not Ishmael's fault that Sarah and Abraham didn't believe Yahweh's promise to give Abraham a son by Sarah, but Abraham's fault for taking Hagar to bed and impregnate her when Sarah urged her handmaiden on Abraham to soothe her own failure to give Abraham a son. If anyone should pay for the mistake in failing to believe Yahweh it is Sarah for doubting, Abraham for giving in to Sarah's plan and Hagar for being fertile. If only...?
If Sarah had gotten pregnant earlier and hadn't offered her slave to Abraham to bed or Hagar had refused to couple with Abraham or Abraham had refused the nubile slave, none of the struggle between the Jews and Arabs and the rest of the world would never have occurred and Israel would exist and flourish -- as it does already -- in peace and contentment, but human weakness and gods that did not provide a schedule for their predictions or specify dates and times end in errors of global proportions. Since the gods are flesh and share human weaknesses, even with their abilities to see the future, there will always be mistakes.
In the end, it's like strolling through a poppy field and becoming intoxicated on the effects of poisonous poppies. We all fall down. We all sleep. When we wake, danger awaits.
That is all. Disperse.

