Talk:Gold rush

message: The 'graph 
:Anecdotally, a few miners made thousends, several suppliers (such as Levi Strauss) and traders made good money,i and numerous unfortunates endured hardship and privation in exotic frontiers of civilisation for small ultimate rewards.
::Side thought: a list of companies and individuals whose roots (money or markets) lay in the Klondike rush, such as Levi-Strauss; here in BC it was (among others) Jones Tent & Awning.  The Scrooge McDuck list, as it were.  The same page could perhaps go into some of those who made it all, then lost it all, too.Skookum1 02:02, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Read it to me 38.124.141.179 (talk) 23:26, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

text: I disagree; a gold rush is not necessarily low-technology nor is it necessarily labour intensive, and they're also a unique phenomenon in New World history (the big one right now being in the Amazon and, yes, low-paid labour-intensive but a potential path to quick riches in a time/place of great poverty - the same formula that fueled the Klondike, actually, the associated spending spree for which is credited with jumpstarting the world economy after a long depression in the 1890s.  As for low-technology, in the case of the Klondike there's the development of the "steam dredges" (they look like steamboats, but they dig through the frozen muck by using huge screws infused with steam-injection, and were mass-production and low-labour; can find you a picture of you like).  Like war, gold mining drives the development of technology and isn't all just axes and picks and goldpans; in British Columbia it was a driving force in the development of the early roads in the Colony ("road" being a term used loosely, of course).Skookum1 22:12, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Being Part of a Gold Mine 

message: Comment re minor revision by elysdir was In the US, the most famous gold rush for most people is the California one; many Americans haven't heard of the Klondike one. Tweaked "most famous" line accordingly.  True I suppose, and it seems that there's a general fudging of the timeline, too; i.e. a lot of the imagery associated with the California rush is intermixed with the imagery of the Klondike, even though they were 60 years apart; same as the BC/California rushes getting mingled, but that's only a 9 year separation and there's a direct connection culturally/individually.  "The Gold Rush" is a movable feast, and while associated with California in the American popular mine the real gold rushes, the ones where a "rush" was involved, were the Fraser, the Cariboo, Fort Colville, Big Bend, the Stikine, the Klondike and Alaska; but avbain in the popular mind these have all become fused as if they were one eventSkookum1 22:12, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gold rushes: Cali vs Klondike 

message: I've added Scotland to the list of countries that experienced a gold rush in the 19th century.
In case nobody believes me, I live pretty close to this location.
Lianachan 22:02, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Baile an Or 

message: Ref comment in the edit summary: You don't need a web link, you can of course cite a book, thesis, .... Please use Wikipedia:Template messages/Sources of articles/Generic citations.  Please also find a non-northern Amerian ref (ie not Canada nor USA) that supports the assertion that Klondike most famous, preferably with reference to gold production and comparisons with other rushes in the world.  In ten years the European population of Victoria, Australia increased seven-fold from from 76,000 to 540,000 because of the Victorian Gold Rush.
:And the continued practice of "transportation" and regular settlement colonization; the settlement of Victoria wasn't due to the gold rush alone. (comment inserted by [[User:Skookum1|Sko all comments - including thse inserted in the middle of somebody else's discussionA Y Arktos\talk 01:40, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That was the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush that was about, not the Klondike.  Getting to the Klondike did NOT involve a short period of time, nor getting out of it.  Those foolish enough to try the journey from Edmonton and via the Red River of the North (in the latter case, two survivors arrived in Dawson after the rush was over, starved, crazy and apparently having eaten the others on board the vessel after burning it to stay warm, which had voyaged down the Athabasca and Mackenzie to the latter's delta, before attempting the ascent of the Red River of the North and the mad, totally mad, crossing of the Ogilvie Range.  Similarly, the attempted voyages up the Yukon River took over a year-and-a-half to make it; I could go on but you get the idea; even the voyage from Seattle or Vancouver to Skagway took over a week in those days, and it took ages to make the multiple trips up the passes to bring the required tonne of goods for entering Canadian territory.  The Fraser Canyon Gold Rush brought 30,000 men (the usual estimate) to Victoria, and then the Fraser River near Yale in less than a month, and more were to follow.  The first week saw Victoria's population skyrocket from the fur-trade era 500 to well over 5,000 (the ships coming from San Francisco were so full that it is a miracle non capsized en route).  The claim that this was the largest single movement of gold seekers may be limited to North America only, I can't remember; I think it was in Donald J. Hauka's Ned McGowan's War (title could be McGowan's War), or else in an unpublished doctoral thesis out of UBC by a Donald Marshall.Skookum1 01:50, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Neither the Californian nor Australian (nor British Columbian) rushes occurred in an era when mass production of consumer goods made possible the worldwide making of money on the dreams of Eldorado; even products "branded" with the Klondike name (or otherwise associated with the dream-cum-adventure); my source for this is in Berton, and I've seen it in articles on the Klondike (which may have. used Berton as the source).  Whole factories and shipping lines were launched because of the Klondike, and new inventions and technology come up with (not just the steam dredges, which I have a picture available of but I don't know enough about to write their article).  I'm not sure of world economic conditions in 1850 and 1849, i.e. whether there was a Depression or not; the point with the "Eldorado of the North" is its mere existence rejuveanted the New York and London stock exchanges after a prolonged depression; it also encouraged entrepeneurship as people began making and selling goods and services to those wanting to go there; I only know what I read, and that's what I read; the extended economic argument is a bit more complicated but thorough and involves all kinds of motivation of people, investors, manufacturers, shipping companies and more.  California did not do that, nor did Australia; both too remote, and the "world economy" not yet developed enough for there to have been an impact on the order of what the Klondike caused.Skookum1 01:59, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: "shallow" is not a term I would use for the Klondike's glacial deposits; any defintion of waht a "shallow alluvial" goldfield is, perchance; I'm not sure it was one.Skookum1 01:52, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

text: I think the challenge is to document all gold rushes better, population numbers involved, duration, gold produced - certainly this discussion has made me realise the information lacking on the wikipedia about Australian gold rushes.--A Y Arktos\talk 01:40, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

text: *Oh in repsonse also to whether transportation affected Australia's demography in the period 1851 to 1861 see Convictism in Australia - the colony of Victoria only ever had about 1750 convicts from England in the period 11844 to 49 - no one was silly enough to send convicts to the gold fields!  Convict transportation had negligable impact on Australia's population growth after 1850.  Regular settlement colonisation did, but not enough to make the difference - helped South Australia no doubt - but I think the Caldwell source is authorative on the population growth being attributed to gold rushes.--A Y Arktos\talk 01:48, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Klondike in the lead/ introduction section 

message: How about the following as the two lead paragraphs? I believe they reflect the discussion above. Edits welcome. Luigizanasi 17:17, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  New lead 

message: Seem to recall this; I might have the 1890s confused with Granite City, in the Tulameen district of BC (just NW of a town called Princeton by about 20 miles, 150+ miles due east of Vancouver on the inland side of the Canadian Cascades, which has the same kind of placer deposit: mixed gold and platinum: as the Amur, which I know there was a rush on over at some point; although how Tsarist Russia managed the movement of people there I don't know; it couldn't have been the same, I think, because of the regulatory nature of movement in the Russian Empire; but there was a flurry of activity on the Amur I do know that, and I heard/saw the term "rush" associated with it.  Anyone here know about this one?  I think there were Russian gold rushes somewhere else; can't remember where though.  Thought crossed my mind partly because of the comment about democratization in the California goldfields; it was the launching of that collective mining-management process that touched off alarm bells with Vancouver Island's Governor Douglas concerning the geopolitical fate of the BC mainland when the Fraser rush was in full swing; he had to assert colonial authority to prevent further inroads of the "California system" (as it was called in contemporary BC documents) and established a British-based licensing system (with most amendments wanted to please the miners) in order to prevent the evolution of a popularly-based legal/political system in what at the same time was declared to be a new colony.  All this I'll get into in the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush article at some point; just noted here as an aside in terms of the comments overleaf.Skookum1 06:42, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Amur River rush, 1890s I think

message: I was just scanning the article and on lines like this one:
As well, at a time when money was based on gold, the newly-mined gold provided economic stimulus far beyond the gold fields.
...it crossed my mind that what was missing in the article is an important part of the gold rush mentality, and what a gold rush was; something more than just economic.  The addition to the above line I'm mulling over would go something like. and inspired people in hard times with dreams of wealth.  Not quite; I'll work on it.  There's the whole fabled lure of gold, the underlying myth of Eldorado and sudden riches (so memorialized in the Klondike, but archetyped in California and BC and Australia), the magical quality to it above all other metals (at least until uranium came along, and that if anything is an even darker magic).  Point is that gold rushes carried with them a mythology rooted in Cortez and Pizarro and the search for El Dorado and Cibola and the Seven Cities; this is especially the case with the western North American gold rushes because they were in the region where Cibola and its even more fabled northern neighbour Anian were said to lay, and had been sought avidliy by the Spanish across miles of ridiculously stark wasteland.  The Spanish just missed, it seems, or didn't look hard enough, or because they presumed that they would find cities of gold like those of the Aztecs and Incas never bothered to prospect on their explorations (or perhaps even knew much about how to, come to think of it).  Supposedly one of these expeditions made it as far north as Osoyoos, perhaps Keremeos; as both legend has it and a conquistador-style helmet or something of that kind in a mound near Keremeos, and the famous Okanagan Mission story has never quite been clarified; it seems to have been Mexican (or Spanish Empire anyway) pirates and sundry based at Bellingham Bay, according to one account; by another they came overland across the Columbia Plateau and up the Okanagan, but this is undocumented (SFAIK).  
But the story of those missions, and the lost cities of gold, fired the imagination of those coming West and underlay its imagery and mythology and the knowledge that somewhere in the northwestern quadrant of the continent lay a HUGE body of gold; it was the Spanish Empire's early successes and ongoing dreams of this that fired up the Americans to acquire the West, much less go there, I'd say; i.e. I'd wager that it wasn't rank patriotism that drew many men West, but the lure of gold only; for that they crossed deserts and Indian Wars to seek Eldorado.  And the name Eldorado indeed hangs over each of the gold regions of North America (I don't know about Aussie or Yarpie mine/claim names), with mine or claim names and also mountain names on the landscape, and if you read papers from any of the rushes that had them, you'll see Eldorado in use; what I'm getting at is its symbolic nature; the wealth of kings, in one small patch of land; find it, and the world is yours.  THAT'S what gold rushes are about.  This article needs more of that flavour; if I try to write it directly I think I'd get too intense; so might as well workshop the idea and see what y'all might come up with, if you got my point that is.  The mythology of the red gold, the devil's metal, the metal that makes white men crazy, the craziness of the mining camps and the extroversion of mining culture; and the particular flavour of rowdy frontier party towns, with what women there were not attached to the church working on the other side of town, as itwere; the population of such places in North America's case anyway was ovewhelmingly male, although the Klondike is noted for the many successful women who did well with claims or with busineses founded en route; a sign of female participation in the gold economy that was not present in the Fraser Canyon or Cailfornia rushes and an earlier, less liberated tie; maybe in California, but at least not anywhere to the same degree; I don't know about Australia again, but from the references I've seen in BC histories about Australian precedents, and what I know about Aussies from the Outback (and the harsher suburbs or Sydney) I've known, it sounds pretty much the same.
So that's what I'd like to see; more colour, more romance.  It's not all about economics, and gold rush culture has a special tone to it that deserves description.  
Also weren't there gold rushes in Mexico, and elsewhere in Latin America? - i.e. not just the recent rapine strip-mining in the upper Amazonas of Brazil)Skookum1 06:44, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Where's the lure of Eldorado?

message: To follow up the note from above: "I believe Micheloud is wrong on the cyanide process used in the Klondike. The gold mined there is strictly alluvial, and the same placer deposits are still being mined to this day for the third or fourth time, still yielding paying dirt using mechanical means. ... Luigizanasi 02:36, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Er, my old roommate's brother has one of the only working claims on Bonanza Creek (Klondike); or at least it was 15 years ago when we went up for a brief pre-freezeup working visit (got out before the snow flew).  I never did have a look at where Marty's concentrate went, but at the visible level of operations were a bulldozer, a loader (something like a backhoe) and a huge crusher/sluice.  The dozer and loader would scrape away at bedrock beneath the old till - what's left above bedrock after being turned over 3-5 times ("soil" it no longer is...) - trying to grind remaining gold out of crevices and cracks in the rock; then it would get scooped to the sluice.  But my impression was that a lot of it wasn't visible gold - that may have only been because the rocks holding it had to be broken, but AFAIK chemicals were still involved, though which ones I can't say, to separate gold-bearing rocks from the gold; in addition to what loose placer there remains up there; but in heavily-worked over areas there's extractive chemical process going on I think; I just don't know if it's cyanide or another process.Skookum1 17:28, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cyanide in the Klondike 

message: This crossed my mind while writing that bit about the Klondike just above.  The Chinese role in any gold rush and their mining techniques should maybe be in this article, or a separate linked one.  In BC's gold rush they were noticed for washing individual rocks for loose placer stuck to them, resulting in piles of washed rocks in areas they'd worked; they also helped develop hydraulic mining techniques and systems.  Another technique that other miners marvelled at the ingenuity of was the use of blankets as filters in placer extraction, after large grains of gold and nuggets had already been sluiced or rockered; the wash-out from whatever placer machinery would flow through a wool blanket.  After an appropriate time, the blanket would be burned, with the gold smelting in the fire and molten chunks emerging in the ashes afterwards.  I recall, also, a National Geographic article from the '70s sometime on some strip mine in Nevada or elsewhere in the Great Basin which was working with very low-concentrate ores; huge amounts of ore would be smelted down and poured into conical moulds; the point of which would be solid gold due to its weight....Skookum1 17:36, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chinese placer techniques 

message: Another editor was not familar with this article and deleted the referenced paragraph because he thought it was poorly written and biased. I will restore the paragraph after a minor re-write. Ronbo76 22:25, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The Bodie section is still poorly written.  Note that this is an article on gold rushes, not gold mining towns.  Nothing is said about the rush to Bodie.  This material belongs instead in the separate article on Bodie, California.  All we need in the gold rush article is a wiki link to Bodie.Plazak 21:22, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

text: The Bodie section does not fit in this article. A link to the main article on Bodie, California should be under a section about the history or significance of Gold Rushes. I would say that the same goes for the Cripple Creek section. --Helm.ers 15:26, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

text: No one gave me any reason the Bodie section should even be in this article, so I eliminated it.  All the same info is in the article on Bodie, California.  If there are not any objections, I will also delete the section on Cripple Creek.  Plazak 04:01, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Deletions of the paragraph regarding [[Bodie, California]] 

message: Again, this article is on gold rushes, not gold mining towns.  This material belongs
in the separate articles on Cripple Creek, Colorado, and Victor, Colorado.  Besides being misplaced, the section is full of errors.  The district is by no objective measure the "World's Greatest."  Float is not "lightweight rock." Stratton did not discover the Independence in 1901, nor did he sell it for $11 million.Plazak 21:42, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No one sees any reason to have this blurb on the Cripple Creek district in the Gold rush article?  OK, then out it goes.  I'm a big fan of Cripple Creek history, but this section said nothing about the rush to the district. Plazak 02:20, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Cripple Creek

message: If no one objects, I'd like to remove the tag at the beginning of the article warning that it may not reflect a world-wide point of view.  I see that the US, Canada, Australia, New Zeeland, and South Africa are all represented here.  I'd like to see more coverage of gold rushes in non-English speaking countries, but the article certainly covers a number of nations.Plazak 11:21, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm going to remove itr. Smith Jones 05:26, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Worldwide point of view

message: According to Stefan Zweig the gold rush of Minais Gerais in 18th century Brazil was the biggest ever, even defeating the ones in South Africa and Klondyke. I didn't read his book ("Brasilien. Ein Land der Zukunft.") and have no further information, but I would appreciate it, if someone could evaluate this information and put it into this article.Hirsch.im.wald 19:21, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Minas Gerais

message: I have semi-protected the article due to a number of vandalisms from anonymous ip addresses the last couple of days. Feel free to unprotect. ArchStanton 10:25, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Protected

message: please see discussion at Talk:Shoal (disambiguation).Skookum1Skookum1 (talk) 19:21, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Bar (landform)]] vs [[Bar (mining)]]

message: I don't see anything in the section Roman gold rushes that describes actual gold rushes as defined in the lead.  It is useful information, but inappropriate in an article on gold rushes.  Is there any reason that this section should not be moved to a history section of the article Gold mining?  Plazak (talk) 00:38, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Roman gold rushes

message: Hi. I've removed New Zealand, Argentina and Chile from being mentioned as places with the "main" gold rushes in the lead paragraph. I did this because, while the other countries listed have numerous events listed on this page, some even having their own sub section or even article, these three countries only have one event each throughout the entire article, and only New Zealand's has a source confirming it. They hardly qualify as being notable enough to be mentioned in the lead. 124.179.170.87 (talk) 10:15, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Countries listed in lead section

message: "South African gold production went from zero in 1886 to 223% of the total world output in 1896."  How could it have more than 100% of the total world output?173.21.65.42 (talk) 20:25, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I checked the ref.: it says 23%, not 223%.  I assume the 223 was just a typo -- I didn't spend the time to see when that number showed up, or who was responsible. NameIsRon (talk) 16:56, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  South Africa percentage 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: — Assignment last updated by TPWR2 (talk) 20:13, 9 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: CALIFORNIA DREAMING, THE GOLDEN STATE'S RHETORICAL APPEALS