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We were planning a gold panning vacation and got into a heated argument about some of the fact and figures relating to the various gold rushes that have occurred not only in these United States of America but also in places like Canada and Australia. We have often thought of taking a gold panning vacation while retracing the footsteps of some of those early pioneers of gold prospecting and those who followed in the consequent gold rushes. 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. A gold rush is a period of feverish migration of workers into the area of a dramatic discovery of commercial quantities of gold. Since we wanted to plan our gold panning vacation around the colorful history of gold rushes it was important to find out where the first great American gold rush occurred and interestingly enough the first significant gold rush in the United States was the Georgia Gold Rush in the southern Appalachians, which started in 1829. It was followed by the California Gold Rush of 1848-49 in the Sierra Nevada, which captured the popular imagination. Incredibly 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. One of the last "great gold rushes" 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. We then decided to expand our search and look into gold rushes that occurred in other countries since we might just as well take our gold panning vacation international and we found that Australia has had some significant gold rushes such as 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. With the Australian gold rushes came the construction of the first railways and telegraph lines, multiculturalism and racism, the Eureka Stockade and the end of penal transportation. |
