Nineteenth Century Gold Rushes
Russian Gold
During the early to mid 1800s, Russia was for a time considered the world’s leading producer of gold. The first major record of gold production in Russia occurred after 1750 in the Ural mountain region (Sutherland 150). Here one could find beds of alluvial gold of a high purity and the area produced a gold output of 175,000 pounds in the year 1814 to 1839. Between 1830 and 1840, the center of Russian gold production moved to the valleys of the Altai Mountains where 40,000 pounds of gold were discovered during that decade.
Early on in American history, gold deposits were found in the Appalachian region, mainly in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. Small gold deposits were also found in California in 1842. However, the great beginning of American gold production came with the US Acquisition of California in July 1848 and the Gold Rush of that year.
The California Gold Rush began on the property of a man by the name of John Augustus Sutter (Sutherland 154). Sutter was an emigrant from Switzerland who had come by boat to California in 1839. In February of 1848, workers commenced repairing a water-mill for Sutter. A worker by the name of Charles Marshall then “saw glittering particles in the bed of the stream” (Sutherland 155) and the gold rush was born. Thousands of people trekked across the continent to make it rich on the West Coast. The annual rate of gold coming out of California between 1851 and 1855 averaged 175,000 and peaked at 200,000 pounds in 1853 (Sutherland 157).By 1851, an official assay office was erected in the territory and would be soon followed by an official US mint. Ultimately, the gold rush of California did not only change the US economy with an influx of gold but helped to expand the geographical boundaries of the country with the migration it caused.
One of the last gold rushes of the 1800s was initiated in 1896 in Alaska near the Klondike and Yukon rivers. This frozen artic region did not have a single human resident prior to the find but by 1897 had the bustling community of Dawson City (Sutherland 162). The gold deposits in this region had to be removed from a 15 foot thick gravel layer under another layer of frozen mud. Prospectors either burned off the mud or waited for the Alaskan summer to thaw it. Even so, in 1900 the region produced 45,000 pounds of gold, yet this supply would last only briefly compared to previous deposits.
Gold was discovered in 1851 by Edward Hargraves after he discovered a grain of it in a waterhole near Bathurst. After having recently returned from the Californian gold fields he was convinced that search for Gold in Australia should be started.
The discovery marked the beginning of the Australian gold rushes and a radical change in the economic and social fabric of the nation.
Soon after Ophir became the home of more than 1000 prospectors and the Australian government was forced to appoint ‘Commissioners of land’ and collect license lies in order to allow people to dig.
One year later New South Wales yielded 26.4 tones (850,000 ounces of gold) and 370,000 immigrants arrived into Australia. The economy was booming.
In the next three years the population tripled from 430,000 to 1.7 million in 1871.
Because so many people were traveling to and from the goldfields, the 1850s also saw the construction of the first railway and the operation of the first telegraphs.