The Gold Rush
By: Olivia
Introduction November 9 , 2017
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The gold rush of 1849 one of the biggest thing to take place in California during Westward Expansion . It brought people from all over the world like China and Europe crowding california creating thousands of boomtowns. Buying and selling of mining and panning tools and the end of the rush all to find the precious rare metal called gold. This is what you're gonna learn while you read. Lets dive in.
The Start of the Rush
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First of all ,It was a cold January morning in 1848 when James Marshall a carpenter was asked by John Sutter a merchant from switzerland to build his sawmill for him. When James and his crew were working on building the sawmill when James saw something shiny the was reflecting of some light he yanked it out. it was something rare GOLD! When James asked his crew they all said it was pyrite or known as fool's gold . Without taking their word the it was pyrite he went home and conducted experiments that tested what gold would do or not do when reacting to something just to make sure. He tested and tested and finally he actually found gold after all that time doing all those experiments . The next morning, when he went to work he showed John the gold John was still a little shaky that it was actually gold.
There was one more test citric acid it would melt all metal but gold. They put a few drops just to see what would happen surprisingly it did nothing it just stayed there not melting or anything. After this they both agreed to keep this to themselves. But John Sutter was writing a letter to a friend and couldn't keep it in . In a letter he wrote to a friend he mentioned the gold that they found. In 1849 news spread everywhere about the gold at Sutter's Mill and people from all across the world wanted to get their hands on this gold to make them rich. They were so willing that they left their families, jobs just to try and get rich.
How to Find Gold
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Gold was usually found by taking a pan with ridges to catch the gold and go to the stream then they would squat down and dig deep down into the stream to get a big hunk of sand.. After they have a lot of sand a water and shake it into the stream to see in the pan if they had anything. They would this for hours and hours a day or until the day ended . Also, most of the time they would spend all those long hard hours just to get nothing or find Fool's gold when they thought they found gold, It was a lot of work just panning for gold but it was also hard mining for it you would would just mine around until you hit something but there was a small chance it was ore
Miners would take there pickaxe and mine around in caves looking for ore that carried gold but again rarely found it but would also suffer fatigue from all the hard work in the mines. What a miner/panner would bring with them is a pick,water,canteen,shovel,and a bucket and pan. Miners would use charms that apparently found gold.
Pros
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Cons
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You could strike go
and get rich really easily.
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You would have to work very hard for it and you would probably not find it.
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You could get a lot of gold and be famous in history
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You would have to work all days and night and day to get that much gold and work super hard
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The point of this chart is if you wanted to be rich by finding a lot of gold or being famous for finding the biggest piece,or most of it you had to work hard for finding all of that gold.
Boomtowns
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Boomtowns were started by the gold rush because people rushed over and needed a place to stay so they created Boomtowns. They stayed in them and they grew bigger and bigger some even had theaters. Another point of boomtowns is that they had to be close to sutter's mill or a river/stream or cave where gold was found. One of the boomtowns which is now California's capital today is Sacramento.
When the gold rush started only 150 people lived in Sacramento 6 months later 6,000 people live there and from 1848 to 1853 the population was 50,000 people .One thing boomtowns also brought was abandoned ships because people wanted to stay in California and those whips were either used striped apart and used to make buildings or part of it was cut and turned into a building itself the whole thing. The boomtowns also turned into ghost towns because people did not want to live there anymore.
Who Struck it Rich & The End of the Rush
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It is really clear that people that participated in the gold rush did not get rich they barely did they would find gold but not enough to be considered rich. One lady who sold boston pies made 11,000 dollars worth of money today,and John Bidwell John Sutter's boot keeper stuck it lucky and got 2.5 million dollars worth of gold today. The way they made all this money is that they would buy stuff for cheap and sell for much much more then they bought it for so much more than they bought it for that made them as rich if they struck gold
What lead to the end of the rush is there being no more easy gold to find so people went back to where they came from or just stayed in the boomtowns which helped the U.S grow in size of population. When people left most of the boom towns became ghost towns but then became tourist sites. The gold rush impacted California in how it grew the population with boom towns and people from everywhere wanting to find gold.
Conclusion
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In conclusion, the gold rush was an important time for westward expansion and I hoped you had a fun time reading and learning about How it got started,How they found Gold, Boomtowns ,and Who Struck it rich & the end of the rush. What would you do if you were in a gold rush? Would you rush to the place where there was gold? Or would you stay where you are?
Bibliography
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Pictures -
https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Sutte
Book -
Holub, Joan, and Tim Tomkinson. What Was the Gold Rush? Scholastic Inc, 2013
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