THE U.S. GOLD RUSHES

In 1849, gold was neither a royal prerogative nor a privilege of nobility. The early treasure hunters had all been members of the nobility. In Russia, Czar Alexander I expanded the gold mining in the Urals in the 1820s.

That search was later pressed into Siberia, but it was the wealthy-the nobility-who profited. The year 1849 saw all that change.Gold had been found in the United States in 1799, when a twelve-year-old boy found a large, yellow-colored rock in a creek near Concord, North Carolina. He took it home, and his father used it as a doorstop for three years until curiosity made him take it to a jeweler.

The farmer offered to sell it for $3.50, and the jeweler-who had recognized the gold-seized the opportunity of buying the 17pound rock whose value was closer to $3,600. Later, gold was found in Georgia in 1827. Both strikes were substantial enough for the government to establish branches of the mint in North Carolina and in Georgia.

Then, on January 24, 1848, James Marshall, the foreman at the sawmill in the Sacramento Valley owned by John Augustus Sutter, found gold. Sutter tried to keep the news quiet, but it leaked out. Within a year, the gold rush was on. San Francisco was filled with entrepreneurs of all kinds. The price of a shovel rose from $1.00 to $10.00. The population of California was swelled by almost 500,000 people, who came from Europe, Australia, and other countries as well as the United States. At one time, there were 40,000 miners on Sutter's property alone.

In the first year, an estimated 575,000 ounces of gold worth $10 million were taken from the rivers of central California. Nine years later, by the time of the Nevada strike, that amount had reached 2.5 million ounces, or 820 tons.