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gold rush

 
Dictionary: gold rush
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n.
  1. A rush of migrants to an area where gold has been discovered.
  2. Headlong pursuit of wealth and success: a gold rush on Wall Street.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:

gold rush

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gold rush
Rapid influx of fortune seekers to the site of newly discovered gold deposits. In North America, the first major gold strike occurred in California in 1848, when John Marshall, a carpenter building a sawmill for John Sutter, found gold. Within a year about 80,000 "forty-niners" (as the fortune seekers of 1849 were called) had flocked to the California gold fields, and 250,000 had arrived by 1853. Some mining camps grew into permanent settlements, and the demand for food, housing, and supplies propelled the new state's economy. As gold became more difficult to extract, companies and mechanical mining methods replaced individual prospectors. Smaller gold rushes occurred throughout the second half of the 19th century in Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Arizona, and Alaska, resulting in the rapid settlement of many areas; where gold veins proved small, the settlements later became ghost towns. Major gold rushes also occurred in Australia (1851), South Africa (1886), and Canada (1896). See also Klondike gold rush.

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US History Companion:

Gold Rushes

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For fifty years, from 1849 to 1899, news of gold discoveries and astonishing reports of miners digging their fortunes lured scores and eventually hundreds of thousands of Americans (and foreigners) to boomtowns and born-overnight mining camps, first in the mountains of California and finally on the frigid shores of the Bering Sea. Only the magnetism of gold (often with its geologic ally silver) could have attracted so many greenhorns from their settled lives in cities and on farms to forbidding wilderness regions previously known only to roving fur trappers and indigenous Indian tribes.

Decade by decade new mining excitements promised opportunities to strike it rich--in California in 1849, and then at Gold Hill, Colorado, 1859; Virginia City, Nevada, 1860; Orofino, Idaho, 1861; Virginia City, Montana, 1863; Deadwood, South Dakota, 1876; Tombstone, Arizona, 1877; Cripple Creek, Colorado, 1892; and Nome, Alaska, 1899. These were the places where fathers and sons, husbands and brothers, might make a fortune in a few weeks or months.

The first of the many gold rushes proved to be the most important, for it attracted the greatest number of people over the longest period of time and established the pattern for all that followed; and, too, it had the greatest psychological impact, for what happened in California gave birth to the dream that was pursued for half a century.

It all began in September 1848 when newspapers in New York and other eastern cities published letters from California's newly discovered goldfields, telling of nuggets "collected at random and without any trouble." Through the fall, the news spread across the thirty states. In December 1848 President Polk's message to Congress corroborated "the accounts of the abundance of gold" in that territory so recently acquired (February 1848) by the treaty ending the war with Mexico.

By spring 1849 "Californians" by the tens of thousands had set out for El Dorado. With few exceptions, wives and families stayed at home, comforted by their men's promises to return with "a pocket full of rocks." So many Americans rushed to California (and, too, men from Mexico, Europe, Australia, and China) that, although an average of 30,000 returned each year to their homes, the state's population by 1852 totaled more than 250,000--this in an area where there had been at most 14,000 non-Indians before the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill, January 24, 1848.

Without gold and its corollary industries, California would have evolved slowly, as a territory competing with Oregon for an annual few thousand immigrants. Instead, the Golden State's economy boomed, with industrial and agricultural growth stimulated by the great consumer markets of San Francisco and Sacramento and by thousands of miners in camps and towns demanding basic food supplies and lumber for boardinghouses and flumes, as well as luxuries from champagne to billiard tables.

During the years of California's rambunctious growth, far from the judgments of wives, in-laws, parents, grandparents, cousins, and neighbors, the masculine society felt free to be guided by ambition, even greed; safe to drink and swear and gamble and violate the Sabbath. With San Francisco its dominant image, California seemed to the rest of the nation to be a wild, dangerous place that scorned cherished standards and values. Letters sent back East confirmed families' anxieties: "The independence and liberality here and the excitement attending the rapid march of this country make one feel insignificant at the prospect of returning to the old beaten path at home."

The expectation that each subsequent mining site would be another California greatly strengthened the attraction of later discoveries. In 1859 many thousands from the Midwest hurried to Gold Hill in the mountains of Colorado, near a supply center to be known as Denver. After the initial flush times, however, the area's gold production depended on deep mining that required far greater expense and more advanced technology than the rich placers that had started the rush. In the 1870s silver discoveries, new smelting techniques, and railroads supported a boom that centered at Leadville where silver production continued through the 1880s.

Gold and silver discoveries on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada set off a wild rush to Virginia City, Nevada, in 1859-1860. Most of the men hurrying to what would soon be known to the world as the Comstock Lode came from the declining placer camps of California. They soon found their capital and skills insufficient to meet the demands of mining at depths that reached several thousand feet. Through the years thousands of miners labored for wages and hoped to make their fortunes by speculating in mining stocks while a few "bonanza kings" reaped millions from the output of the Comstock's fabulous mines.

More rewarding for men without capital, discoveries in Idaho in 1860-1862, and Montana, 1862-1864, offered the best chances of fulfilling the dream of finding gold placers like those in the early days of California. Veteran miners discouraged in Colorado and Nevada joined thousands of new gold seekers and rushed to Orofino and then Florence and Boise. Gold discovered in the gulches and mountain valleys of Montana drew some of Idaho's pioneers and many newcomers from far and wide to populate Virginia City and Helena. Later discoveries, new technologies, and railroads combined to develop these regions despite their isolation and severe climate.

In the next frenzied rush, thousands of veterans and greenhorns in 1876 pushed into the Black Hills of Dakota Territory where rich gold placers and later quartz mines supported boisterous boomtowns like Deadwood. A year later in the southeast corner of Arizona a silver strike at Tombstone created a national sensation that continued through the 1880s, with copper mining soon producing major profits as well.

Then in 1892 an astonishing gold discovery created another El Dorado at Cripple Creek, Colorado, where rich but complex ores yielded years of profit owing to advances in geology, engineering, and metallurgy.

The final gold rush came at a time of national despair, after the calamitous depression of the mid-1890s. On July 16, 1897, word flashed across the nation that an unbelievably rich gold discovery had been made on the Klondike River in the remote Canadian Yukon Territory. Two days later a ship docked at San Francisco with two tons of gold from "the golden Mecca of the North." Despite the distance and dangers, an estimated 100,000 Americans set out for Dawson City on the Klondike in 1897-1898. Exploration quickly led to new gold discoveries in U.S. territory in Alaska, culminating in the summer of 1899 with coarse gold found on the beach at Nome. The dozen miles along that shore of the Bering Sea proved to be the richest tidewater diggings ever known.

And so it ended, except for a postscript in the deserts of southern Nevada where gold and silver mines at Tonopah and Goldfield produced a few boom years between 1900 and 1918 reminiscent of earlier flush times.

Gold rushes in the Far West generated the founding of cities where wilderness would otherwise have prevailed for many decades; the building of railroads to connect the industrial islands in the midst of deserts, mountains, and forests; the creation of governments and the establishment of territories and states where none would have evolved for who knows how long; and the advance of technical knowledge and capital investment far and wide. And not least, gold in California and other wild places offered every man a chance to make his fortune.

Bibliography:

J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (1981; paperback ed., 1983); Rodman Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848-1880 (1963); T. H. Watkins, Gold and Silver in the West (1971).

Author:

J. S. Holliday


 
Columbia Encyclopedia:

gold rush

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gold rush, influx of prospectors, merchants, adventurers, and others to newly discovered gold fields. One of the most famous of these stampedes in pursuit of riches was the California gold rush. The discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill early in 1848 brought more than 40,000 prospectors to California within two years. Although few of them struck it rich, their presence was an important stimulus to economic growth. Agriculture, commerce, transportation, and industry grew rapidly to meet the needs of the settlers; mining, too, soon became big business as corporations replaced the individual prospector. Vigilante justice and ad hoc political structures quickly gave way to the complex organization of state government. Other large gold rushes took place in Australia (1851-53); Witwatersrand, South Africa (1884); and the Klondike, Canada (1897-98). The excitement of the California gold-rush days has been captured in the works of Bret Harte and Jack London.

Bibliography

See O. Lewis, Sea Routes to the Gold Fields (1949); E. Wells and H. Peterson, The '49ers (1949); P. Barton, The Klondike Fever (1958); R. W. Paul, ed., The California Gold Discovery (1966); D. B. Chidsey, The California Gold Rush (1968); H. W. Brands, The Age of Gold (2002); D. L. Walker, Eldorado: The California Gold Rush (2003).

Wikipedia:

Gold rush

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For other uses, see Gold rush (disambiguation).

A gold rush is a period of feverish migration of workers into the area of a dramatic discovery of commercial quantities of gold. Major gold rushes took place in the 19th century in Australia, Brazil, Canada, South Africa, and the United States, while smaller gold rushes took place elsewhere.

Gold rushes were typically marked by a general buoyant feeling of a "free for all" in income mobility, in which any single individual might become abundantly wealthy almost instantly. The significance of gold rushes in history has given a longer life to the term, and it is now applied generally to denote any capitalist economic activity in which the participants aspire to race each other in common pursuit of a new and apparently highly lucrative market, often precipitated by an advance in technology.[citation needed]

Gold rushes helped spur permanent non-indigenous settlement of new regions and define a significant part of the culture of the North American and Australian frontiers. As well, at a time when money was based on gold, the newly-mined gold provided economic stimulus far beyond the gold fields. Gold rushes presumably extend back as far as gold mining, to the Roman Empire, whose gold mining was described by Diodorus Siculus and Pliny the Elder, and probably further back to Ancient Egypt.

There are about 13 million to 20 million small-scale miners around the world, according to Communities and Small-Scale Mining (CASM). Approximately 100 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on small-scale mining. There are 800,000 to 1.5 million artisanal miners in Democratic Republic of Congo, 350,000 to 650,000 in Sierra Leone, and 150,000 to 250,000 in Ghana, with millions more across Africa.[1]

Contents

Life cycle of a gold rush

Many gold rush towns boom overnight and expand rapidly, only to be abandoned eventually.

Within each mining rush there is typically a transition through progressively higher capital expenditures, larger organizations, and more specialized knowledge. They may also progress from high-unit value to lower unit value minerals (from gold to silver to base metals).

The rush is started by a discovery of placer gold made by an individual. At first the gold may be washed from the sand and gravel by individual miners with little training, using a gold pan or similar simple instrument. Once it is clear that the volume of gold-bearing sediment is larger than a few cubic meters, the placer miners will build rockers or sluice boxes, with which a small group can wash gold from the sediment many times faster than using gold pans. (See placer mining for details.) Winning the gold in this manner requires almost no capital investment, only a simple pan or equipment that may be built on the spot, and only simple organization. The low investment, the high value per unit weight of gold, and the ability of gold dust and gold nuggets to serve as a medium of exchange, allow placer gold rushes to occur even in remote locations.

After the sluice-box stage, placer mining may become increasingly large scale, requiring larger organizations, and higher capital expenditures. Small claims owned and mined by individuals may need to be merged into larger tracts. Difficult-to-reach placer deposits may be mined by tunnels. Water may be diverted by dams and canals to placer mine active river beds or to deliver water needed to wash dry placers. The more advanced techniques of ground sluicing, hydraulic mining, and dredging may be used.

Typically the heyday of a placer gold rush would last only a few years. The free gold supply in stream beds would become depleted somewhat quickly, and the initial phase would be followed by prospecting for veins of lode gold that were the original source of the placer gold. Hardrock mining, like placer mining, may evolve from low capital investment and simple technology to progressively higher capital and technology. The surface outcrop of a gold-bearing vein may be oxidized, so that the gold occurs as native gold, and the ore needs only to be crushed and washed (free milling ore). The first miners may at first build a simple arrastre to crush their ore; later, they may build stamp mills to crush ore more quickly. As the miners dig down, they may find that the deeper part of vein contains gold locked in sulfide or telluride minerals, which will require smelting. If the ore is still sufficiently rich, it may be worth shipping to a distant smelter (direct shipping ore). Lower-grade ore may require on-site treatment to either recover the gold or to produce a concentrate sufficiently rich for transport to the smelter. As the district turns to lower-grade ore, the mining may change from underground mining to large open-pit mining.

Many silver rushes followed upon gold rushes. As transportation and infrastructure improve, the focus may change progressively from gold to silver to base metals. In this way, Leadville, Colorado started as a placer gold discovery, achieved fame as a silver-mining district, then relied on lead and zinc in its later days. Butte, Montana began mining placer gold, then became a silver-mining district, then became for a time the world’s largest copper producer.

Gold rushes by region

Australian Gold rushes

The Victorian gold rush, which occurred in Australia in 1851 soon after the California gold rush, was the biggest of several Australian gold rushes. That gold rush was highly significant to Australia’s, and especially Victoria's and Melbourne's, political and economic development. With the Australian gold rushes came the construction of the first railways and telegraph lines, multiculturalism and racism, the Eureka Stockade and the end of penal transportation.

In 1852 alone, 370,000 immigrants arrived in Australia and the economy of the nation boomed. The 'rush' was well and truly on. Victoria contributed more than one third of the world's gold output in the 1850s and in just two years the State's population had grown from 77,000 to 540,000.

The number of new arrivals to Australia was greater than the number of convicts who had landed there in the previous seventy years. The total population trebled from 430,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million in 1871.

Gold rushes happened at or around:

North America

A California Gold Rush handbill
See also: Gold mining in the United States

The first significant gold rush in the United States was in Cabarrus County, North Carolina (east of Charlotte), in 1799 at today's Reed's Gold Mine.[2] Thirty years later, in 1829, the Georgia Gold Rush in the southern Appalachians occurred. It was followed by the California Gold Rush of 1848–52 in the Sierra Nevada, which captured the popular imagination. The California gold rush led directly to the settlement of California by Americans and the rapid entry of that state into the union in 1850. The gold rush in 1849 stimulated worldwide interest in prospecting for gold, and led to new rushes in Australia, South Africa, Wales and Scotland.- Successive gold rushes occurred in western North America, moving north and east from California: Fraser Canyon, the Cariboo district and other parts of British Columbia, and the Rocky Mountains. Resurrection Creek, near Hope, Alaska was the site of Alaska's first gold rush more than a century ago, and placer mining continues today.[3] Other notable Alaska Gold Rushes were Nome and the Fortymile River.

Klondike

Main article: Klondike Gold Rush

One of the last "great gold rushes" was the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada's Yukon Territory (1898–99), immortalized in the novels of Jack London, the poetry of Robert W. Service and Charlie Chaplin's film The Gold Rush. The main goldfield was along the south flank of the Klondike River near its confluence with the Yukon River near what was to become Dawson City in Canada's Yukon Territory but it also helped open up the relatively new US possession of Alaska to exploration and settlement and promoted the discovery of other gold finds.

South Africa

In South Africa, the Witwatersrand Gold Rush in the Transvaal was important to that country's history, leading to the founding of Johannesburg and tensions between the Boers and British settlers.

South African gold production went from zero in 1886 to 23% of the total world output in 1896. At the time of the South African rush, gold production benefited from the newly discovered techniques by Scottish chemists, the MacArthur-Forrest process, of using potassium cyanide to extract gold from low-grade ore.[4]

Notable gold rushes by date

Rushes of the 1690s

Rushes of the 1800s

Rushes of the 1820s

Rushes of the 1840s

Rushes of the 1850s

Rushes of the 1860s

Rushes of the 1870s

Rushes of the 1880s

Rushes of the 1890s

Rushes of the 1900s

Rushes of the 1930s

Rushes of the 1970s

Rushes of the 1980s

Rushes of the 2000s

  • Great Mongolian Gold Rush, Mongolia (2001)[11]
  • Apuí Gold Rush, Apuí, Amazonas, Brazil (2006);[12] approximately 500,000 miners are thought to work in the Amazon's "garimpos" (gold mines).[13]

References

  1. ^ Soaring prices drive a modern, illegal gold rush, International Herald Tribune, July 14, 2008
  2. ^ "The North Carolina Gold Rush". Tar Heel Junior Historian 45, no. 2 (Spring 2006) copyright North Carolina Museum of History.. http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newnation/4374. 
  3. ^ "Resurrection Creek Restoration Phase II Project Environmental Impact Statement". Environmental Protection Agency, US. 2008-01-17. http://www.epa.gov/fedrgstr/EPA-IMPACT/2008/January/Day-28/i347.htm. Retrieved 2008-08-31. 
  4. ^ Micheloud, François (2004). "The Crime of 1873: Gold Inflation this time". FX Micheloud Monetary History. François Micheloud: www.micheloud.com. http://www.micheloud.com/FXM/MH/Crime/Gold.htm. 
  5. ^ "Gold rush". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc.. 2008. http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-237388/gold-rush. Retrieved 2008-08-31. 
  6. ^ "The North Carolina Gold Rush". Tar Heel Junior Historian 45, no. 2 (Spring 2006) copyright North Carolina Museum of History.. http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newnation/4374. 
  7. ^ Dollimore, Edward Stewart. - "Kumara, Westland". - Encyclopedia of New Zealand (1966).
  8. ^ Marlise Simons (1988-04-25). "In Amazon Jungle, a Gold Rush Like None Before". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE0D91038F936A15757C0A96E948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all. Retrieved 2008-08-31. 
  9. ^ Mount Kare gold rush : Papua New Guinea 1988 - 1994 / Dave Henton and Andi Flower
  10. ^ Black bonanza : a landslide of gold / Peter Ryan
  11. ^ The Great Mongolian Gold Rush The land of Genghis Khan has the biggest mining find in a very long time. A visit to the core of a frenzy in the middle of nowhere., money.cnn.com, December 22, 2003
  12. ^ Gold Rush in the Rainforest: Brazilians Flock to Seek their Fortunes in the Amazon
  13. ^ Brazilian goldminers flock to 'new Eldorado'

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Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 1994-2009 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
US History Companion. The Reader's Companion to American History, Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors, published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Gold rush".  Read more

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