47 Fun Facts About Gold Rush

Where was gold discovered in January 1848, setting off the California gold rush?

Sutter's Mill at Coloma was a sawmill going up on the American River. Its owner, John Sutter, wanted the find kept quiet; instead his workers left for the diggings and squatters took his land, crops and cattle.

Roughly how many people came to California during the gold rush?

300,000 is the usual estimate, about half arriving by sea and half overland. The surge was enough to carry California from military rule to statehood in under three years.

Which bank and express company was founded in 1852 to serve gold rush California?

Wells Fargo was started by two founders of American Express after that company declined to expand to California. It carried miners' gold, mail and money.

Which San Francisco merchant paraded a bottle of gold through the streets, shouting of riches from the American River?

Samuel Brannan, a newspaper publisher and storekeeper, had good reason to shout. He set up stores selling supplies to prospectors, then spread the news himself, and the miners' trade made his fortune.

Which U.S. president confirmed the California gold discovery in an address to Congress in December 1848?

James K. Polk told Congress the reports of gold would "scarcely command belief" had army officers on the spot not confirmed them. Within months, tens of thousands were on their way west.

In gold rush San Francisco, what were turned into hotels, stores and even a jail?

Sailing ships clogged the harbour by the hundred, stranded when their crews deserted for the diggings. Later the growing city filled in the cove around them, burying dozens of hulls under what is now the financial district.

Which future household name came to gold rush San Francisco to open a wholesale dry-goods business?

Levi Strauss was a dry-goods wholesaler for some twenty years before blue jeans existed. The riveted work pants came in 1873, when he and tailor Jacob Davis took out their patent.

Which chocolate maker came to California to dig for gold in 1849 and ended up selling sweets to the miners instead?

Domingo Ghirardelli came on the word of James Lick, his old neighbour in Peru, who had carried 600 pounds of his chocolate to San Francisco a year earlier. In 1852 he founded the company that bears his name.

Which technique for extracting gold did an 1884 court ruling rein in after its debris buried California farmland?

Hydraulic mining blasted hillsides with water cannon and sent the gravel downriver, where it brought floods to the valley's farms and towns. The 1884 ruling barred the mines from dumping their debris into the rivers.

Which NFL team is named after the gold rush miners?

San Francisco 49ers first wore a logo of a mustached miner firing a pistol from each hand. Since 2014 the team named for the city's gold seekers has played about 40 miles away, in Santa Clara.

To avoid months at sea around Cape Horn, many gold seekers crossed which isthmus, where a railroad opened in 1855?

Panama meant a week by canoe and mule through the jungle and a wait for a ship north, against four to five months around the Horn. The flood of travellers is why the railroad was built.

By what classical nickname were the California gold seekers also known?

Argonauts was the name given them by people who stayed at home: like Jason's crew in the Greek myth, they had sailed off in search of a golden fleece.

Where did a boy's 1799 find lead to the first gold rush in the United States?

Cabarrus County, North Carolina, is where 12-year-old Conrad Reed pulled a yellow rock said to weigh 17 pounds from a creek. His family used it as a doorstop for three years, then sold it for $3.50.

When news of the Klondike strike got out in 1897, which port city won the largest share of the stampeders' trade?

Seattle outfitted most of the stampeders, and its own mayor resigned to join them. The gold had been found eleven months earlier, in August 1896, but the news took almost a year to get out.

George Carmack made the Klondike discovery with which two relatives of his wife, Kate?

Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie were Kate Carmack's brother and nephew. Who first saw the gold is unclear; the party put Carmack's name forward, fearing officials would not accept an Indigenous claimant.

What did Canadian authorities require every Klondike stampeder to bring across the border?

A year's supply of food was the rule, meant to prevent starvation in the Yukon. With tools and gear it came to about a ton, which most men ferried over the passes in stages, trip after trip.

Which town at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers grew from 500 to about 17,000 people by 1898?

Dawson City was built of wood on an isolated river flat, and fires, epidemics and sky-high prices followed. Within a couple of years most of the crowd had left as quickly as it came.

Which two Alaskan ports were the main gateways to the Klondike trails?

Dyea and Skagway sat a few miles apart at the foot of the Chilkoot and White Pass trails. Skagway was run by con man Soapy Smith until he was shot dead in 1898; Dyea is now a ghost town.

What was the name of the steep final incline on the Chilkoot Trail that turned many stampeders back?

The Golden Stairs were some 1,500 steps cut into the ice, which climbers paid a daily fee to use. At the Scales below, packers re-weighed every load and raised their rates, and many people turned back.

Which future author joined the Klondike rush in 1897 and came home with scurvy instead of a fortune?

Jack London lost four front teeth to the disease and found almost no gold, but the Yukon winter gave him The Call of the Wild and White Fang.

Which future U.S. president's grandfather made his fortune running a restaurant and hotel for Klondike stampeders?

Donald Trump's grandfather Friedrich opened the Arctic Restaurant and Hotel on the trail at Bennett, later moving it to Whitehorse. He sold up and left in 1901 as the rush faded.

The discovery of gold where in 1899 drew prospectors away and effectively ended the Klondike rush?

Nome, Alaska, had gold lying in its beach sand, where nobody could stake a claim, so anyone with a shovel could dig. Among those who followed the crowd was Wyatt Earp, who ran a saloon there.

Which silent-film star was inspired by photographs of the Chilkoot stampede to make The Gold Rush (1925)?

Charlie Chaplin also drew on the Donner Party, snowbound pioneers reduced to eating shoe leather, which is why his Tramp boils and eats a boot. For the opening he sent 600 extras up a snowy pass.

The 1854 Eureka Rebellion, a miners' revolt, took place at which Australian goldfield?

Ballarat's rebels, led by Peter Lalor, lost the battle at their stockade. Yet juries acquitted all thirteen men tried for treason, and Lalor ended up Speaker of Victoria's parliament.

The 1886 Witwatersrand gold rush led to the founding of which major city?

Johannesburg sprang up on the gold reef almost overnight. So many foreign miners poured into the Boer republic that the quarrel over their rights helped bring on the Second Boer War.

Which 1874 military survey reported gold in the Black Hills and set off a rush onto Lakota land?

The Custer Expedition sent miners pouring into hills that an 1868 treaty had reserved for the Sioux. The Great Sioux War followed, and Custer died in it two years after his survey.

Which 1859 Colorado stampede, whose slogan ended "or Bust", gave rise to Denver City and Boulder City?

The Pike's Peak Gold Rush was named for the first landmark travellers saw across the plains. The diggings lay about 85 miles to the north, and no rich gold was found near the peak until the 1890s.

The Comstock Lode, found in Nevada in 1859, was the first major US strike of which metal?

Silver made up more than half the ore. The miners had been cursing a heavy blue-black mud that clogged their gold rockers until an assay showed what it was, and the rush that followed made Nevada a state by 1864.

Gabriel Read, a veteran of the California and Victoria diggings, set off which country's first major gold rush in 1861?

New Zealand's rush began in Otago, at a creek still called Gabriel's Gully. Within a few years the nearby port of Dunedin had grown into the colony's largest city.

Under what title did Discovery's gold-mining reality series first air in 2010, before the place name was dropped?

Gold Rush: Alaska followed six men from Sandy, Oregon, who had lost their jobs and staked everything on a claim at Porcupine Creek. Their whole first season produced 14.64 ounces of gold.

Which young miner on Gold Rush started out working his grandfather's Big Nugget Mine?

Parker Schnabel was still a teenager when he took on his grandfather's Alaskan mine. Two seasons later, in the Klondike, his 1,029 ounces beat the show's record of 803, set by men twice his age.

Which veteran Gold Rush miner rebuilt a decades-old dredge and pulled 2,100-plus ounces in one season?

Tony Beets hauled the 75-year-old dredge in pieces from a creek 150 miles away and rebuilt it, reviving a way of mining the Klondike had all but given up half a century earlier.

Todd Hoffman's Gold Rush crew quit the Klondike for a season to mine in which South American country?

Guyana's jungle gave the crew barely two ounces of gold in a whole season, plus $1,350 of diamonds, and they abandoned the site. The year before they had mined 803 ounces in the Yukon.

Which future railroad baron and university founder began as a storekeeper supplying California's gold miners?

Leland Stanford kept a general store for miners at Michigan Bluff before moving into wholesale. The fortune that followed went into the Central Pacific Railroad and, later, the university named for his son.

California was still technically part of which country when gold was found in January 1848?

Mexico signed California away just nine days after the gold was found, in the treaty that ended the Mexican-American War. Neither government yet knew what lay in the riverbed.

The temple Chinese gold miners built at Weaverville, California's oldest Chinese temple still in use, belongs to which faith?

Taoism is still practised at the Weaverville Joss House, whose name means the Temple of the Forest Beneath the Clouds. The miners rebuilt it in 1874 after fire destroyed the first one.

In which Black Hills gold camp was Wild Bill Hickok shot at a poker table in 1876?

Deadwood was an illegal camp on Lakota treaty land when Jack McCall killed Hickok as he played. The cards he is said to have held, aces and eights, became poker's "dead man's hand".

Which carpenter first spotted the gold flakes that set off the California gold rush in January 1848?

James W. Marshall gained nothing from it. His workmen all left to dig, gold seekers forced him off his own land, and he died penniless in a small cabin in 1885.

Which numbered California state highway strings together the Sierra foothill gold towns?

Route 49 grew out of a 1919 campaign by locals and historians for a road honouring the gold rush of 1849. It runs 295 miles through the old mining camps and is nicknamed the Golden Chain Highway.

California's state highway route shield is shaped like what, in honour of the gold rush?

A miner's spade is how the state described its route markers in 1964: "the spade used in the gold fields". In the 1930s its own highway magazine had called the same outline an acorn.

Which Mark Twain tale, heard in a mining-camp hotel bar, first made him famous?

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County grew from a yarn Twain heard at the Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, where he was trying his hand at mining. Printed in 1865, it made his name across the country.

Which food gave its name to veteran Klondike prospectors, as opposed to the newcomers, who were called cheechakos?

Sourdough starter went north because ordinary yeast was unreliable in the cold. Old hands carried a pouch of it round the neck or on a belt and guarded it from freezing, and the name stuck to them.

Six years before the gold rush, Francisco Lopez found gold on wild onion roots in a canyon north of which city?

Los Angeles had its own small gold rush in 1842. Legend says Lopez dreamed of gold under an oak before pulling up the onions, but he had studied mineralogy and was looking for it.

Of the 40,000 people who sailed into San Francisco Bay in 1849, about how many were women?

700 is the usual figure, fewer than two in every hundred arrivals by sea. The imbalance lasted: even in 1870, San Francisco still had only two women for every three men.

Which paper was the first major East Coast newspaper to report the 1848 gold find?

The New York Herald ran its report on August 19, 1848, seven months after the find. Editors in the East stayed sceptical until the president vouched for the story that December.

The SS Central America, carrying California gold to New York, sank in an 1857 hurricane off which coast?

The Carolinas lay to the west when the hurricane sank her with 425 people and tons of gold that New York's banks were waiting for. The loss fed the Panic of 1857, and the wreck was not found until 1988.

Which newspaper tycoon's father, a prospector who reached California in 1850, made the family fortune from mines such as Homestake?

William Randolph Hearst got his first newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, from his father George, who had accepted it in payment of a gambling debt. George's Homestake Mine produced gold until 2001.