Gold Fever!
People have always wanted
gold, from the earliest of times when ancient Egyptians
used it, to today. A Gold Rush is when gold is
newly discovered somewhere and people start to tell
everyone about the discovery. Pretty soon there
are LOTS of people trying their best to be the ‘second’
people to get there. In the old times, people
would leave their homes and families and use all of the
money they had to travel to places where gold had been
discovered. They all had high hopes and dreams
that they would become rich. Most didn’t.
Gold Rushes do not bring out the best in people.
Each Rush has ugly stories of cheating, lying, theft, and murder.
As we studied the gold at the mineral museum, it seemed impossible to
believe what people did [and do] to get it.
We thought that Gold Rush meant Sutter’s Mill in California.
We were interested to find that there were other Gold
and Mineral Rushes that we didn’t know anything about.
Here are a few of them:
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1858: Near Pike’s Peak, Colorado. This Rush looked like it was going to be ‘easy’ gold: gold that could be picked up on the ground without a lot of work. The prospectors found out they were wrong.
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1843: Copper Harbor, Michigan [Copper]
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1851: Australia [Gold]
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1861: New Zealand [Gold]
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1885: Bunker Hill Mine, Idaho [Silver]
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1897-1898: Klondike Gold Rush. Because of the cold and snow in the Yukon, miners weren’t allowed to prospect unless they had a year’s worth of supplies with them.