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.

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).

gold rush

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.

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).