A prospector is someone who searches for minerals [or sometimes oil].  Early prospectors were looking for gold and most had never done it before.  The one thing that most prospectors had in common was wanting to become rich.  They wanted it so much that many prospectors left their families, homes, and jobs to search for gold.
     One of the most famous gold rushes was in California in 1849.  Prospectors [miners] traveled from all over the world when they heard that gold had been found there.  They spent a lot of money to travel to the gold areas and to buy equipment, food, and build a shack to live in. 

A Prospector’s life when he WASN'T working:

     An early prospector’s life was really determined by his family.  If he left his family somewhere far away, he spent his free time much differently than the miner did who brought his family with him.  Either way, miners usually lived in shacks, were always in danger, had pretty bad food, and were often sick.

© Photographer: Dan Bannister | Agency: Dreamstime.com

     The miner who left his family in the East, spent his free time feeling lonely and homesick.  He would write home or do chores when he wasn’t mining.  He would do his laundry or go to town for supplies. Many times, lonely miners would go to saloons in town and gamble most, or all, of their gold away. Miners would also go to town to drink alcohol.  This usually got them in trouble with fights and gambling.

     Sometimes miners brought their families with them.  It was hard to travel in those days.  It took a lot of time and money to get a miner and his family to the gold areas.  This is why most wives and families stayed in the East.  It was interesting to find out that wives could get a ‘claim’ of their own beside their husband’s.  This gave the family double the land to search for gold.

     Wives would grow vegetables, do the laundry, take care of the kids, and sometimes help with the mining, too.  Some wives would get jobs in town so that the family would have more money.  The children would help with the mining, do jobs around the home, and sometimes work in town doing jobs like delivering newspapers or working at hotels and stores.  Most of the time, a miner's children didn’t go to school.

     Life at a prospector’s claim site was dangerous.  The West didn’t usually have any nearby law officers because the claim sites were in the mountains or outside of towns.  Lots of people, who did illegal things in the East, went out West so that they wouldn’t get caught.  This brought lots of bad people to the prospecting sites.  These people sometimes tried to steal the gold and even the claims or land that was being mined. Claim jumping is where someone comes along and steals the land that a miner owns and begins to take the minerals himself.  Laws to protect miners and their claims didn’t come until after the Civil War.
     Since there weren’t any law officers at the claims, miners dealt with the crime themselves.  This meant that they would sentence the lawbreakers and deal out punishment.  This was called vigilante justice and a lot of times it was strict and cruel.   An accused person was arrested and punished without a trial.  Some punishments might be:

     Another danger was Native Americans.  Prospectors were not their best friends.  When they mined the land, prospectors dammed rivers that were used to supply water to the Native Americans, polluted the water, and killed buffalo for fun and for their skins.    The Native Americans ended up with no food or water.  Prospectors also brought diseases with them.  All of these things caused the Native Americans to fight with the miners over the land.   In the end, the Native Americans lost the rights to their land and were put on reservations, land picked and passed out by the government.  Over 120,000 Native Americans died during the Gold Rush time.

Interesting information:

• Many black Americans were used as slaves in gold rushes.  Many actually bought their freedom with the gold that they found.

• Native American children were kidnapped and made to work for the prospectors.