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gold rush


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.

 
 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: 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

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,
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
For other meanings, see Gold rush (disambiguation)
A California Gold Rush handbill
Enlarge
A California Gold Rush handbill

A gold rush is a period of feverish migration of workers into the area of a dramatic discovery of commercial quantities of gold. Several gold rushes took place throughout the 19th century in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States. 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.

The first significant gold rush in the United States was the Georgia Gold Rush in the southern Appalachians, which started in 1829. It was followed by the California Gold Rush of 1848–49 in the Sierra Nevada, which captured the popular imagination. The California gold rush led directly to the settlement of California by Americans and the rather rapid entry of that state in the union in 1850. Successive gold rushes occurred in western North America, gradually moving north: the Fraser Canyon, the Cariboo district and other parts of British Columbia, and the Rocky Mountains. 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 films such as Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush.

The Victorian gold rush, which occurred in Australia in 1851 soon after the California gold rush, was the most major 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. Many of those involved in mining in Victoria later traveled across the Tasman Sea to take part in the Central Otago Gold Rush, New Zealand's biggest gold rush. This kick-started New Zealand's economy and made the city of Dunedin a major financial center in the young colony. In South Africa, the Witwatersrand Gold Rush in the Transvaal was equally important to that country's history, leading to the founding of Johannesburg and tensions between the Boers and British settlers.

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 capitalism to denote any economic activity in 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.

Life cycle of a gold rush

Many gold rush towns boom overnight and expand rapidly, only to eventually become uninhabited
Enlarge
Many gold rush towns boom overnight and expand rapidly, only to eventually become uninhabited

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 often started by a discovery of placer gold made by an individual or small group. 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. So far, winning the gold requires almost no capital investment, only a simple pan or equipment that may be built on the spot, and only simple organization. The low capital investment, the high price per unit weight of gold, and the ability as gold dust or 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 becomes 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. The gold rush may also quickly change from placer mining to lode (hardrock) mining, as the placer miners follow the gold upstream to its source, and discover vein gold deposits. 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.

Notable gold rushes

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 1970s

The Klondike

One of the best-known gold rushes was the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897–99; the main goldfield was along the south flank of the Klondike River near its confluence with the Yukon 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 there.

The Klondike Gold Rush sparked the largest mobilization of goldseekers in history. Millions started on the journey although ultimately only a few hundred thousand reached the "Yukon Ports" or other disembarkation points such as Nome, Alaska, Yakutat Bay and Stewart, British Columbia for the long overland journey to the goldfields. Some hopeful disembarkation points such as Edmonton, Alberta turned out to be impractical and less than a handful made it by such routes. Only 35,000 finally reached what was to become Dawson City, at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers, to be faced by famine, fire and some of the world's bitterest and darkest winters.

The Klondike Gold Rush brought prospectors to other locations in the Far North, with several other smaller rushes occurring as spin-offs. Three of the better-known of such rushes were:

South Africa

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 benefitted from the newly discovered techniques by Scottish chemists, the MacArthur-Forrest Process, of using potassium cyanide to extract gold from low-grade ore.[1]

Australia

See also

References

  1. ^ Micheloud, François (2004). The Crime of 1873: Gold Inflation this time. FX Micheloud Monetary History. François Micheloud: www.micheloud.com.

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Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 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 GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Gold rush".  Read more

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