Stories of Gold Discoveries

There was a man named Benny Hollinger who was at first a young barber that was completely broke. He became a prospector in 1909 and one day pulled some moss off of some rocks and ran into a vein of quartz that had the appearance of having been mixed with icy snow. Benny’s discovery was the original Hollinger Gold Mine close to Timmins, in Ontario. This Hollinger Gold Mine was the richest producer of gold in the entire western hemisphere and had a production of $400 million. Before this time in the Sacramento Valley in California in 1848 there was a carpenter that was setting up a saw mill on the South Fork of the American River for Johan Augustus Sutter. The carpenters name was James Marshall who discovered a nugget that was the size of a dime in the tailrace of Sutter’s Mill. This is when the great California Gold Rush officially began and the production of gold at the time was of 11,866 ounces. The production of gold began to increase and went up to almost 2,782,020 ounces in 1856. Around the ending of that year Marshall found that nugget, around $6 million of the precious yellow metal had been found by these early stampeders. In the first four years after Marshall’s grand discovery, the diggings in California produced over $220 million. In the middle of the second year, the gold production in California did not go under that of $11,200,000 per year. Around ten years later though the production of gold went down tremendously under a million ounces and this is when the gold rush ended. This event caused the old time miners to move on to other places to look for the gold in places such as Alaska, Colorado and Australia. The area that used to be located around Downieville in California, used to be so richly concentrated in gold that a prospector who was known as Al Calis, located gold one Sunday morning by simple kicking his foot at the ground. Al Calis who was a spiritual man, was not able to work on Sunday so he decided to cover the strike and waited until the next day to be able to work on it. The discovery of placer gold in Klondike is also a very well known one where four men by the name of George Carmack, Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie were on the Klondike river in the north western side of Canada searching for logs in order to float down the river so they could sell at a Fortymile mill. It is said that Skookum Jim, who had just killed a moose for meat to eat, was at the Rabit Creek River washing a dish pan and is said to have spotted flakes of gold in the stream bed. The men staked claims and this area was then renamed Bonanza Creek. This even started up the gold stampede that occurred.