Gold rush

For other meanings, see Gold rush (disambiguation)

A California Gold Rush handbill

The gold rush was 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

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 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 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 1690s

• Brazil Gold Rush (1695), Minas Gerais

Rushes of the 1820s

• Georgia Gold Rush (1828), Georgia, U.S.

Rushes of the 1840s

• California Gold Rush (1849), California, U.S.

Rushes of the 1850's

• Queen Charlottes Gold Rush, 1850 British Columbia
• Victorian Gold Rush (1851), Australia
• Collingwood - Aorere Valley Gold Rush (1856), New Zealand
• Fraser Canyon Gold Rush 1858–1861, British Columbia
• Rock Creek Gold Rush 1859–'60s, British Columbia
• Pikes Peak Gold Rush (1859), Colorado
• Northern Nevada from the 1850

Rushes of the 1860s

• Idaho (1860), aka the Fort Colville gold rush
• Cariboo Gold Rush in 1862–65, a British Columbia Gold Rush
• Omineca Gold Rush, 1860s, also a British Columbia Gold Rush
• Wild Horse Creek Gold Rush, 1860s, also a British Columbia Gold Rush
• Central Otago Gold Rush, 1861–63, in Otago, New Zealand
• the Black Hills Gold Rush and other areas in Montana after 1863.
• Eastern Oregon in the 1860s and 1870s
• Kildonnan, Sutherland, in the Scottish Highlands, 1869

Rushes of the 1870s

• Palmer River, Queensland, Australia in 1872
• Bodie, California, 1876
• Hungen, Hesse, Germany in 1877

Rushes of the 1880s

• Witwatersrand Gold Rush, (1886) Transvaal, South Africa; the resulting influx of miners was one of the triggers for the Second Boer War
• Cayoosh Gold Rush in Lillooet, British Columbia
• Tulameen Gold Rush near Princeton, British Columbia

Rushes of the 1890s

• Tierra del Fuego, southern Chile and Argentina
• Cripple Creek, Colorado
• "Westralia," Kalgoorlie, Western Australia
• Klondike Gold Rush, (1897) Dawson City, Yukon
• Nome, Alaska, 1899

Rushes of the 1900s

• Goldfield, Nevada
• Porcupine Gold Rush, little known, but by far the largest in terms of gold mined

Rushes of the 1970s

• Upper Amazon region, Brazil and Peru

Rushes of the 1980s

• Amazon region, Brazil

Rushes of the 2000s

• Apuí, Amazonas, Brazil in 2006; approximately 500,000 miners are thought to work in the Amazon's "garimpos", or gold mines.

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:

• Atlin Gold Rush (1898)
• Nome, Alaska (1898)
• Fairbanks, Alaska (1902)

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.

Australia

• Coolgardie
• Kalgoorlie
• Bathurst
• Bendigo

See also

• Gold mining in the United States

External links

• Object of History: the Gold Nugget
• PBS' American Experience: The Gold Rush
• The Australian Gold Rush
• Off to the Klondike! The Search for Gold — Illustrated Historical Essay
• California Gold Rush; diggers in Mazatlan on their way to California