What is usually ascribed to gold fever or rotgut whiskey or bad women was more likely due to poisoning by mercury, a much less benign metal than gold. One of the odd historical coincidences about the gold rush is that it was preceded a few years earlier by a less ballyhooed mercury rush. Though we now know that mercury fumes aggressively attack the brain, beginning in the 1850s mercury was often used to consolidate and isolate gold. When mixed with gold-bearing dust, and heated, the mercury burned away, leaving melted clusters of gold. Miners often burned the mix in their cabins, breathing in toxic fumes.
Gold is an element distributed pretty much everywhere on the globe.
The first serious American gold rush occurred in Georgia in 1829. There are gold rushes going on right now in Indonesia, Guyana and Brazil. Hikers can still pan gold out of the muddy Potomac River. One celebrated example is the merchant who, seeing how fast miners' pants wore out, began making them out of tough tent canvas, eventually securing them at key points with copper rivets. He was Levi Strauss, the inventor of Levi's.