Gold rush

Historians have written extensively about the mass migration, trade, colonization, and environmental history associated with gold rushes.

[2] Gold rushes were typically marked by a general buoyant feeling of a "free-for-all" in income mobility, in which any single individual might become abundantly wealthy almost instantly, as expressed in the California Dream.

Activities propelled by gold rushes define significant aspects of the culture of the Australian and North American frontiers.

Within each mining rush there is typically a transition through progressively higher capital expenditures, larger organizations, and more specialized knowledge.

After the sluice-box stage, placer mining may become increasingly large scale, requiring larger organisations and higher capital expenditures.

Lower-grade ore may require on-site treatment to either recover the gold or to produce a concentrate sufficiently rich for transport to the smelter.

In this way, Leadville, Colorado started as a placer gold discovery, achieved fame as a silver-mining district, then relied on lead and zinc in its later days.

Butte, Montana began mining placer gold, then became a silver-mining district, then became for a time the world's largest copper producer.

They were highly significant to their respective colonies' political and economic development as they brought many immigrants, and promoted massive government spending on infrastructure to support the new arrivals who came looking for gold.

[5] One of these political institutions was statehood; the need for new laws in a sparsely-governed land led to the state's rapid entry into the Union in 1850.

Successive gold rushes occurred in western North America: Fraser Canyon, the Cariboo district and other parts of British Columbia, in Nevada, in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, eastern Oregon, and western New Mexico Territory and along the lower Colorado River.

[11] In South Africa, the Witwatersrand Gold Rush in the Transvaal was important to that country's history, leading to the founding of Johannesburg and tensions between the Boers and British settlers as well as the Chinese miners.

Between 1883 and 1906 Tierra del Fuego experienced a gold rush attracting many Chileans, Argentines and Europeans to the archipelago.

According to Africa's industrial mining firms, they have not exported any amount of gold to the UAE – confirming that the imports come from other, illegal sources.

As per customs data, the UAE imported gold worth $15.1 billion from Africa in 2016, with a total weight of 446 tons, in variable degrees of purity.

The fastest clipper ships cut the travel time from New York to San Francisco from seven months to four months in the 1849 California Gold Rush . [ 1 ]
A man leans over a wooden sluice. Rocks line the outside of the wood boards that create the sluice.
Swedish gold panners by the Blackfoot River , Montana in the 1860s
Gold prospecting at the Ivalo River in 1898
Jets of water at a placer mine in Dutch Flat, California sometime between 1857 and 1870
Ballarat 's tent city in the summer of 1853–54, oil painting from an original sketch by Eugene von Guerard
A chart showing the great nuggets of Victoria at Museums Victoria
Miners and prospectors ascend the Chilkoot Trail during the Klondike Gold Rush.
5-gram gold coin from Tierra del Fuego issued by Julius Popper