Gold Rushes

The impetuous rush to a rumour of gold is a relatively modern phenomenon. It was first seen in Brazil in the early eighteenth century but really characterized by the great rushes of the nineteenth century in the search for alluvial or placer gold, first to California in the United States, then to Australia and finally to the Klondike in Canada. They involved thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of ordinary men throwing up their jobs, homes and families and dashing off halfway round the world in search of an elusive metal. ‘The rush and struggle is awful and the only chance is to fly off at the first sound’, wrote one prospector. ‘The mischief is that you hear many wonderful stories that prove false’.

Yet these invasions had a dramatic effect upon the opening up not only of the American West but also of British Columbia and the Yukon in Canada, and the rush for gold helped to transform Australia from a remote penal settlement into a viable nation. The fact was not lost on Joseph Stalin in the 1920s in his ambitions to open up Siberia; learning from the American experience, he encouraged Russian prospectors to go east.

Gold diggers who joined the rush to California after 1848
(Credit: The Hulton Picture Company)

The catalytic effect of gold rushes in opening up an economy is by no means over. In Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Venezuela the discovery of rich new alluvial deposits in the 1980s brought another era of gold rushes (often with catastrophic effect upon local rivers and forests) sometimes engaging, as in Brazil, as many as 200,000 diggers. Most gold rushes, however, are relatively short-lived. After three to five years the main alluvial deposits, easily workable by an army of prospectors with little more than shovels, are worked out and more serious miners have to move in with heavier equipment. But such rushes can produce remarkable amounts of gold in a short time; 93 tonnes (3 million ounces) was dug out of California in 1853 and Brazil’s rushes in the 1980s initially yielded up to 80 tonnes (2.6 million ounces) annually.