January 24, 2011

Gold Discovered in California – 1848

James Marshall was a pretty average guy—a carpenter and a sawmill operator. But on this date in 1848, he made a discovery that changed his life. Heck, it changed a whole lot of people's lives!

He was examining the channel below the sawmill he was constructing in partnership with John Sutter in California, which then belonged to Mexico. He noticed some shiny flecks in the channel bed, and he picked up one or two pieces for closer study. He knew a little bit about minerals, and when he saw that the shiny stuff was very bright, brittle, yet malleable (which means it could be beaten into different shapes, without breaking)—and, of course, that it was gold-colored!—Marshall knew that he had discovered precious, valuable gold!

According to his later recounting, he went to one of the carpenters working on the mill and said, “I have found it.” And when he explained that “it” meant gold, the other carpenter protested that it couldn't be gold. But Marshall was sure of himself. And of course, he was right!

However, Marshall's discovery did not make him rich. Instead, his sawmill failed when everybody dropped everything to search for gold, and his later business ventures, a vineyard and a gold mine, eventually failed as well. Neither Marshall, the guy who actually discovered the gold, nor Sutter, the guy who owned the land on which the discovery was made, benefitted from the discovery!

You may already know that people came to California from all over the world to search for gold (or to sell things to miners searching for gold). It is estimated that some 300,000 people came during the Gold Rush!

Find out more!

For more on the discovery of gold, go to the History Net. 

Take a virtual tour of the Oakland Museum's Gold Rush exhibit. 

Check out these web resources on the women of the Gold Rush. 

August 16, 2010

Klondike gold rush!

Gold was discovered in Klondike Creek in Canada on this day in 1896. The news took ten months to reach the U.S., but then a gold rush of Americans started, and people from as far away as Australia and South Africa came, as well. At one point there might have been more than 40,000 people in Klondike, and the possibility of famine seemed possible.

Possibly because of other gold rushes, such as “THE Gold Rush” to the California gold fields in 1849, many men who came to try their luck in the Klondike area knew that they weren't likely to strike it rich. They came partly for the adventure, and many happily turned to other ways of earning money, and stopped short or went further than the gold fields as well. For this reason, the Klondike gold rush helped develop the economy of Alaska, Western Canada, and the Pacific Northwest.

Celebrate!

• Eat a Klondike bar!

• Play a gold rush game.

• Check out this website that shows what Fool's Gold (pyrite) looks like in a 3-D molecular model. First, click the molecule diagram. Use your mouse to rotate the molecule (or to click the box “spin the molecule”), and use the mouse with the shift key to zoom in and out, as specified at the bottom of the window. Cool!

Now compare the pyrite molecular model to the molecular model of gold.