Gold rush

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 the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. 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 was in the Appalachians in the United States, 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. The "last great gold rush" 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. 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

The discovery of gold in a new region typically began with a spontaneous discovery of "free gold" by a single individual. This free gold was usually placer gold in the beds of streams that descend from a nearby mountain range. Propagation of the news of the discovery typically resulted in a large influx of prospectors to join existing groups and to form new ones. The free gold supply in stream beds would become depleted somewhat quickly, and the initial phase would be followed by a longer period of prospecting in upper canyon walls for lode gold. Typically the heyday of a gold rush, when the lodes had not yet all been prospected, would last only a few years. In some cases, the depletion of gold was followed by a transition to a silver boom, and then a period of mining of other lesser value minerals. For significant gold-producing areas, the initial rush phase would be followed by a transition to modern industrial mining of ore.

What distinguished gold rushes from gold exploitation campaigns of previous eras was the relative democratization in the participation of mining enterprises. The early New World expeditions of the European colonial powers, notably the Spanish Empire, were driven largely by the search for gold. The expeditions of earlier eras were typical state enterprises, however, and were usually accompanied by state military support. Gold rushes, by comparison, reflected a spontaneous grassroots capitalism akin to homesteading, but centered on mining rather than agriculture. In some places, notably California, the gold rush era is celebrated as embodying an archetypal founding of the state itself.

Factors that led thousands at a time to abandon daily Industrial Revolution drudgery and travel to gold fields (diggings) included

relative improvements in transport networks;
improvements in the means of communication that supported rumour-distribution chains,
some social discontent, and
an international gold-based monetary system.

Only a few miners made fortunes, several suppliers (such as Levi Strauss and John Mohler Studebaker) and traders made good money, and numerous unfortunates endured hardship and privation in exotic frontiers of civilization for little ultimate reward. Demographically, several gold rushes shook up the patterns of settlement, resulting in the opening up of previously sparsely-settled areas and a Cantonese diaspora around the Pacific Rim.

Gold-rush culture, often reflected in popular song, tended to promote self-images of robust masculinity.

Notable gold rushes

Rushes of the 1830s

the southern Appalachian Mountains of the United States, north of Atlanta and west of Charlotte; in Georgia in the late 1830s

Rushes of the 1840s

California (1848), the California Gold Rush;

Rushes of the 1850s

Queen Charlottes Gold Rush, 1850 British Columbia
Australia (1851), the Victorian gold rush
Fraser Canyon Gold Rush 1858–1861
Colorado (1859), the Colorado Gold Rush
Northern Nevada from the 1850s

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 and other areas in Montana after 1863
Eastern Oregon in the 1860s and 1870s
Kildonnan, Sutherland, in the Scottish Highlands, 1869

Rushes of the 1880s

Transvaal, South Africa (1886), the Witwatersrand Gold Rush; 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

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 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 total world output in 1896. Gold production in South Africa 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

Australia had a second major gold rush in the 1890s:

Western Australia (1890s), the Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie gold rushes

References

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External links

The Australian Gold Rush
Off to the Klondike! The Search for Gold — Illustrated Historical Essay

Gold rushes

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