The Discovery of Gold
Gold was discovered in January, 1848, on a ranch owned by John Sutter on the American River in northern California. News of the find spread like a prairie fire, and California, which had been a sparsely populated land of cattle ranchers, became the Mecca of goldseekers. Everyone who was lucky enough to be on the Pacific Coast rushed to the foothills of the Sierras to hunt for gold, and as soon as the news reached the East Coast, thousands of emigrants by land and by sea joined the gold rush.
In the years that followed the California gold rush, other rich deposits of precious metals were found elsewhere in the West. The Comstock Lode in Nevada produced a fabulous amount of silver, and later strikes in Colorado made boom towns out of Denver, Cripple Creek, and Central City. Still another gold rush after the Civil War took place in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
In the following selections we offer three glimpses of the rush for precious metals. The first two recount gold-rush days in California; the third deals with the silver bonanza in Nevada.