Gold Rushes

Gold Rushes. The nineteenth century was the great era of North American gold rushes.Beginning in North Carolina in 1799, gold rushes were initially a southern phenomenon, centered along the eastern piedmont of the Appalachians. A rush in the Cherokee Nation contributed to the forced removal of Cherokees in the 1830s.

The western rushes began in 1848 with a gold discovery in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, just as the United States acquired California from Mexico, and they shared characteristics with those in the South. They dispossessed native peoples, focused on placers (surface gold deposits), and attracted disproportionately male and stunningly diverse populations. California's was the most male of the rushes, though native women were present in the diggings, and Miwok women, for example, took up mining in order to supplement older subsistence strategies. The rush drew gold seekers from around the world, especially from Mexico, Chile, the United States, China, and several European nations. California also set a pattern for future rushes whereby Anglo Americans, sometimes aided by the state, fought to control the placers. As Anglo women began to arrive, they, too, inaugurated a pattern common in later rushes by campaigning against such public amusements as dance halls and brothels, which often employed Mexican, Chilean, French, and Chinese women.

These patterns were repeated during gold rushes in Nevada and Colorado in the late 1850s; Montana, Idaho, and Arizona in the 1860s; and Dakota Territory in the 1870s. By the 1880s, the emphasis in western mining was shifting to the underground, hard‐rock mining of gold, silver, and copper, which required heavy capital investment, industrial processes, and large numbers of wage workers. Not until the 1890s, however, did hard‐rock miners outnumber placer miners in the West. And the 1890s saw new placer rushes following a series of discoveries in Alaska Territory and Canada's Yukon Territory.

The western rushes coincided with industrialization and class formation in the United States and with an era of North Atlantic global economic dominance. For many in industrializing nations and in countries ruled by colonial powers, the rushes seemed to provide opportunities outside of the economic and geopolitical bounds that circumscribed their lives. That so many people from so many different places descended on the placers and contended with one another over access to gold, and that Anglo‐American men often succeeded in limiting access for so many others, demonstrates that gold rushes were no sideshow; they were part of the main event of nineteenth‐century history. Even Anglo men, however, try as they might to impose themselves as the rightful claimants of North American gold, could not extract from the hills the promise they sought—at most, a fortune; at least, an escape from a lifetime of wage labor. For most participants, gold rushes never lived up to the hopes they inspired.
See also Capitalism; Cherokee Cases; Gilded Age; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Mexican War.

Bibliography

Rodman Wilson Paul and and Elliott West , Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848-1880, 1974; rev. ed., 2001.
Rodman Wilson Paul and and Elliott West , Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848–1880, 1974; rev. ed., forthcoming.
David Williams , The Georgia Gold Rush: Twenty‐niners, Cherokees, and Gold Fever, 1993.
Peter J. Blodgett , Land of Golden Dreams, 1999.

Susan Lee Johnson