Who owned the Comstock Lode? One of the earliest discovers of the Comstock Lode's silver riches was George Hearst, who later found more mineral wealth in the mountains of Utah and South Dakota and finally the Anaconda copper deposits in Montana.
His son, William Randolph Hearst would become the nation's most powerful publishing baron. Who found the most gold? Located in South Africa, the Witwatersrand Basin represents the richest gold field ever discovered. Who discovered gold first in the world? George Harrison. When was gold discovered? In January , John Marshall discovered traces of gold while building a lumber mill near Sacramento for a pioneer named John Sutter.
Who was the richest person in the Gold Rush? Where was the most gold found in California? Klamath River The Klamath River was one of the richest sources of gold during the early days of the Californian gold rush. Gold was discovered on the river and on pretty much all its tributaries and creeks throughout Siskiyou County. What was John Sutter's job? Businessperson Army officer. Is Burger King a retailer? It celebrates the actually , not , discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill on the aptly named American River by James W.
He was just there to build a sawmill, in partnership with John Sutter, but when he saw some tiny gold flecks in the river, it changed everything. By the next year the town of Coloma had ten thousand residents; it now has two hundred, and the river was filled with prospectors looking for their fortune.
Within two years, the river ran dry of gold, but by that time, almost , people had come to California looking for gold, or their fortune, in one way or another. Sutter's Ranch- John Sutter came to the area in with a land grant of 48, acres, where he built a ranch, a fort, and then commissioned a young New Jersey man who'd come west on the Oregon Trail, James W.
Marshall, to build a sawmill, and John Bidwell, who led the first wagon train west, to become his business manager. In the fall of , construction on the sawmill began. When they dug a ditch to the river on January 24, , gold came into the picture with the discovery by Marshall of flecks in the American River. Not only did it swell the city of Coloma to ten thousand people, it impacted the large gateway city of San Francisco one hundred and forty miles away.
The city grew to twenty-five thousand residents, twenty-five times its former size, in less than two years. An estimated eighty thousand would pass through the city going for gold in alone. The California Gold Ranch Expands - Although Sutter's Mill is the best known, and first, of the sites and area where prospectors looked for California gold, other locations swelled in size with prospectors, including the Northern California towns of Yreka and Shasta.
Shasta is now also a state historic park. Nesbitt and Company, Printer, circa Courtesy Wikipedia Commons. Below: Photo above: Gold miners in El Dorado mining camp, circa Courtesy Library of Congress. Inside the Park - Take your time to visit the park and discover the gold rush era. Begin your visit at the Gold Rush Museum and Visitor Center, take a guided walk, then walk around the site and town residents still live there.
There are twenty historic buildings, plus the mill below current and monument to James Marshall. Outside the Park- The region of the Coloma Valley has many recreational activities for you to choose, including kayaking and white water rafting on the American River. If you'd like more sedate pursuits, there are many hiking trails and places to fish.
And wine country is not too far away either. Official gear from America's Best History. Shop Now. I then collected four or five pieces and went up to Mr. At the time, Marshall was working to build a water-powered sawmill owned by John Sutter, a German-born Swiss citizen and founder of a colony of Nueva Helvetia New Switzerland, which would later become the city of Sacramento.
At the time, the population of the territory consisted of 6, Californios people of Spanish or Mexican descent ; foreigners primarily Americans ; and , Native Americans barely half the number that had been there when Spanish settlers arrived in In fact, Sutter had enslaved hundreds of Native Americans and used them as a free source of labor and makeshift militia to defend his territory and expand his empire.
By mid-June, some three-quarters of the male population of San Francisco had left town for the gold mines, and the number of miners in the area reached 4, by August. As news spread of the fortunes being made in California, some of the first migrants to arrive were those from lands accessible by boat, such as Oregon , the Sandwich Islands now Hawaii , Mexico , Chile, Peru and even China.
When the news reached the East Coast, press reports were initially skeptical. Gold fever kicked off there in earnest, however, after December , when President James K. Throughout , people around the United States mostly men borrowed money, mortgaged their property or spent their life savings to make the arduous journey to California. In pursuit of the kind of wealth they had never dreamed of, they left their families and hometowns; in turn, women left behind took on new responsibilities such as running farms or businesses and caring for their children alone.
By the end of the year, the non-native population of California was estimated at ,, as compared with 20, at the end of and around in March The overcrowded chaos of the mining camps and towns grew ever more lawless, including rampant banditry, gambling, prostitution and violence. San Francisco, for its part, developed a bustling economy and became the central metropolis of the new frontier.
In late , California applied to enter the Union with a constitution that barred the Southern system of racial slavery, provoking a crisis in Congress between proponents of slavery and anti-slavery politicians.
After , the surface gold in California largely disappeared, even as miners continued to arrive. Mining had always been difficult and dangerous labor, and striking it rich required good luck as much as skill and hard work. Moreover, the average daily take for an independent miner working with his pick and shovel had by then sharply decreased from what it had been in
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