'The United States is on the brink of an Age of gold,' reported the New York Herald Tribune in November 1848 when the full scale of the gold discoveries in California began to percolate to New York. The newspaper might more correctly have phrased it that the world was 'on the brink'. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the world of gold suddenly expanded beyond anything that seemed reasonable. The riches that Egypt had won nearly 5,000 years before from the mines of Africa, that the Roman Empire had wrested from Spain, and that Spain herself had shipped from South America in the sixteenth century, were dwarfed by an avalanche of gold. In the short span of a little over fifty years, more gold was mined than in the preceding 5,000. In the whole of the first century after Columbus discovered America the world's mined gold totally roughly 750 tonnes (24 million ounces); in the last half of the nineteenth century it was a mighty 10,000 tonnes (320 million ounces). Annual production rose from 77 tonnes (2.5 million ounces) in 1847 to almost 280 tonnes (9 million ounces) in 1852.

The changes were not, however, simply a matter of cold statistics. In human terms the age of the individual prospector had arrived. Previously, gold mining had always been the exclusive privilege of, or had least been heavily taxed by, the state. In the twentieth century, it was generally to fall within the franchise of great mining companies, at least until the gold boom in the 1980s gave the prospector his head again in Latin America, the Philippines, Indonesia and many parts of Africa. Now, for a short span of half a century, the prospector - the man in crumpled clothes and slouch hat, his ear constantly open at the diggings or in the saloon for the newest gossip of great finds - had his day. With his 'pan', he followed the latest rumours of gold: first to California, then to Australia, to New Zealand, back to Australia or Nevada, Colorado, Idaho or South Dakota, and finally - in a glorious finale - to the Klondike. 'The rush and struggle is awful,' wrote one Australian gold digger, 'and the only chance is to fly off at the first sound. The mischief is that you hear so many wonderful stories that prove false, that you will not listen to a first rumour, and by the time something authentic reaches you, it is too late.'

(This section on The Gold Rushes is adapted from The World of Gold by Timothy Green - see goldavenue/library/general)