![]() Telegraph wires, steamships, and railroads followed in their wake minor ports became major international metropolises for goods and migrants (such as Melbourne and San Francisco) and interior towns and camps became instant cities (think Johannesburg, Denver and Boise). The rush for gold redirected the technologies of communication and transportation and accelerated and expanded the reach of the American and British Empires. The discovery of the precious metal at Sutter’s Mill in January 1848 was a turning point in global history. Others again, little attracted to the idea of settling, caught the backwash out across the ocean – and simply kept rushing.įrom 1851, for instance, as the golden tide swept towards NSW and Victoria, some 10,000 fortune seekers left North America and bobbed around in the wash to be deposited in Britain’s Antipodean colonies alongside fellow diggers from all over the world. Others still, having managed to ride the momentum of the gold wave further inland, toiled on new mineral fields, new farm and pastoral lands, and built settlements, towns and cities. ![]() Others found themselves marooned, and so put down roots in the golden states. Smithsonian National Museum of American HistoryĪs the force of the initial wave began to recede, many drifted back to more settled lives in the lands from which they hailed. ![]() New goldfields were inundated by fresh arrivals from around the globe: miners and merchants, bankers and builders, engineers and entrepreneurs, farmers and fossickers, priests and prostitutes, saints and sinners.Ī nugget believed to be the first piece of gold discovered in 1848 at Sutter’s Mill in California. Across Australasia, Russia, North America, and Southern Africa, 19th century gold discoveries triggered great tidal waves of human, material, and financial movement. “The smaller discoveries made in the colony of New South Wales three months before,” he observed, “had already started emigrants towards Australia they had been coming as a stream.” But with the discovery of Victoria’s fabulous gold reserves, which were literally Californian in scale, “they came as a flood”.īetween Sutter’s Mill in January 1848, and the Klondyke (in remote Northwestern Canada) in the late 1890s, the 19th century was regularly subject to such flooding. “The only population of the kind that the world has ever seen gathered together”, Twain reflected, it was “not likely that the world will ever see its like again”.Īrriving at Ballarat in 1895, Twain saw first-hand the incredible economic, political, and social legacies of the Australian gold rushes, which had begun in 1851 and triggered a second global scramble in pursuit of the precious yellow mineral.Įureka! X-ray vision can find hidden gold Looking back later, Mark Twain famously described those who rushed for gold asĪ driving, vigorous restless population … an assemblage of two hundred thousand young men – not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves… From Mexico and the Hawaiian Islands from South and Central America from Australia and New Zealand from Southeastern China from Western and Eastern Europe, arrivals made their way to the golden state. Some of these people now stare back at us enigmatically through daguerreotypes and tintypes. ![]() In 1848 California’s non-Indian population was around 14,000 it soared to almost 100,000 by the end of 1849, and to 300,000 by the end of 1853. Marshall had pulled the starting trigger on a global rush that set the world in motion. “Boys,” he announced, brandishing a nugget to his fellow workers, “I believe I have found a gold mine!” On January 24, 1848, while inspecting a mill race for his employer John Sutter, James Marshall glimpsed something glimmering in the cold winter water. This year is the 170th anniversary of one of the most significant events in world history: the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California.
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