Small finds occurred in 1869, and in 1870 the governor of Magallanes Óscar Viel sent a 35-gram gold nugget to Chilean president José Joaquín Pérez as a gift.

[1] In the 1870s a few settlers of the Falkland Islands moved to Punta Arenas to search for gold, as did John G. Hamilton and Federico Shanklin, two well-known English veteran miners of California and Australia.

[1] In 1879 an expedition led by Chilean Navy officer Ramón Serrano Montaner discovered gold in some watercourses of western Tierra del Fuego.

On the night of 23 to 24 September that year the French steamship Arctique ran aground on the northern coast of Cape Virgenes, in Argentina near the border with Chile.

[2] There were various reports of extraordinary gold findings in Zanja a Pique, where individual Frenchmen, Germans and Chileans extracted more than ten kilograms in less than one month.

[3] The Dalmatians involved in the gold rush gradually left mining activities either to return to Dalmatia or Buenos Aires or establish themselves in Punta Arenas.

[2] The gold rush caused an improvement in the geographical knowledge of the poorly known islands south of Beagle Channel and linked them to Punta Arenas.