Gold Rush Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
This gold rush trivia quiz has 47 free questions with answers and starts at Sutter's Mill on January 24, 1848, and follows the forty-niners by sea and by trail to a San Francisco that grew from 200 people to 36,000 in six years. It covers Sam Brannan's vial of gold, hydraulic mining, the Foreign Miners Tax, Levi Strauss's denim and why the NFL's 49ers are named for prospectors. Then it heads north to the Klondike, with George Carmack and Skookum Jim on Bonanza Creek, the ton of goods every stampeder had to haul over the Chilkoot Pass, Dawson City's boom and Jack London's short mining career. There are stops in Ballarat for the Eureka Stockade and the Welcome Stranger nugget, in Johannesburg, Deadwood, Nome and Otago, and a final section on Discovery's Gold Rush with Parker Schnabel and Tony Beets. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reliable source.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Where was gold discovered in January 1848, setting off the California gold rush?
Sutter's Mill at Coloma
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.
Q 02Roughly how many people came to California during the gold rush?
300,000
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.
Q 03Which bank and express company was founded in 1852 to serve gold rush California?
Wells Fargo
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.
Q 04Which San Francisco merchant paraded a bottle of gold through the streets, shouting of riches from the American River?
Samuel Brannan
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.
Q 05Which U.S. president confirmed the California gold discovery in an address to Congress in December 1848?
James K. Polk
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.
Q 06In gold rush San Francisco, what were turned into hotels, stores and even a jail?
Sailing ships
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.
Q 07Which future household name came to gold rush San Francisco to open a wholesale dry-goods business?
Levi Strauss
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.
Q 08Which chocolate maker came to California to dig for gold in 1849 and ended up selling sweets to the miners instead?
Domingo Ghirardelli
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.
Q 09Which technique for extracting gold did an 1884 court ruling rein in after its debris buried California farmland?
Hydraulic mining
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.
Q 10Which NFL team is named after the gold rush miners?
San Francisco 49ers
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.
Q 11To avoid months at sea around Cape Horn, many gold seekers crossed which isthmus, where a railroad opened in 1855?
Panama
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.
Q 12By what classical nickname were the California gold seekers also known?
Argonauts
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.
Q 13Where did a boy's 1799 find lead to the first gold rush in the United States?
Cabarrus County, North Carolina
Q 21Which future U.S. president's grandfather made his fortune running a restaurant and hotel for Klondike stampeders?
Donald Trump
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.
Q 22The discovery of gold where in 1899 drew prospectors away and effectively ended the Klondike rush?
Nome, Alaska
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.
Q 23Which silent-film star was inspired by photographs of the Chilkoot stampede to make The Gold Rush (1925)?
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.
Q 14When news of the Klondike strike got out in 1897, which port city won the largest share of the stampeders' trade?
Seattle
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.
Q 15George Carmack made the Klondike discovery with which two relatives of his wife, Kate?
Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie
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.
Q 16What did Canadian authorities require every Klondike stampeder to bring across the border?
A year's supply of food
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.
Q 17Which town at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers grew from 500 to about 17,000 people by 1898?
Dawson City
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.
Q 18Which two Alaskan ports were the main gateways to the Klondike trails?
Dyea and Skagway
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.
Q 19What was the name of the steep final incline on the Chilkoot Trail that turned many stampeders back?
The Golden Stairs
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.
Q 20Which future author joined the Klondike rush in 1897 and came home with scurvy instead of a fortune?
Jack London
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.
Charlie Chaplin
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.
Q 24The 1854 Eureka Rebellion, a miners' revolt, took place at which Australian goldfield?
Ballarat
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.
Q 25The 1886 Witwatersrand gold rush led to the founding of which major city?
Johannesburg
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.
Q 26Which 1874 military survey reported gold in the Black Hills and set off a rush onto Lakota land?
The Custer Expedition
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.
Q 27Which 1859 Colorado stampede, whose slogan ended "or Bust", gave rise to Denver City and Boulder City?
The Pike's Peak Gold Rush
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.
Q 28The Comstock Lode, found in Nevada in 1859, was the first major US strike of which metal?
Silver
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.
Q 29Gabriel Read, a veteran of the California and Victoria diggings, set off which country's first major gold rush in 1861?
New Zealand
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.
Q 30Under what title did Discovery's gold-mining reality series first air in 2010, before the place name was dropped?
Gold Rush: Alaska
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.