Other Rushes · A Wider History
Other Historic Gold Rushes
Brazil, the Black Hills and British Columbia: gold fever beyond the famous four
California, Australia, the Klondike and the Rand are the famous rushes. But gold fever struck many other times and places, with consequences just as far-reaching.
The great gold rushes people remember, California, Australia, the Klondike and the Witwatersrand, are only the headline acts. Gold has triggered stampedes across centuries and continents, and several lesser-known rushes changed history just as decisively.
Brazil: the first modern rush (1690s–1700s)
Long before California, the largest gold rush of its era unfolded in Brazil. Major discoveries in Minas Gerais ("General Mines") from around 1700 drew a flood of Portuguese settlers and enslaved Africans into the interior. Over the 1700s, Brazil produced an estimated 1,200 tonnes of gold, making it the world's leading producer and transforming colonial society, while dramatically expanding the Atlantic slave trade that supplied its labor.
Serra Pelada: Brazil again, in living memory (1980s)
Brazil produced one of the last great hand-dug rushes, too. After a 1979 nugget find, Serra Pelada in the Amazon swelled by 1983 into a vast open pit worked by roughly 100,000 miners by hand, hauling sacks of ore up wooden ladders in scenes photographed by Sebastião Salgado that looked like something from an earlier century.
The Black Hills: a rush that broke a treaty (1874–1876)
In 1874, an expedition led by George Custer confirmed gold in the Black Hills of Dakota, land guaranteed to the Sioux by treaty. The rush of miners that followed was illegal but unstoppable, and the US government's failure (or refusal) to keep them out helped ignite the Great Sioux War of 1876, including Custer's defeat at Little Bighorn. Here gold fever directly drove the dispossession of a nation.
British Columbia: gold that founded a colony (1858)
In 1858, gold on the Fraser River drew some 30,000 prospectors, many of them California veterans, north into what is now British Columbia. Britain responded by establishing the mainland Colony of British Columbia to assert control, so that a gold rush effectively created a Canadian province.
Wherever gold was found, the same drama played out: discovery, stampede, boomtown, and bust, and a map redrawn in the process.
The common pattern
Across all of them, a recognizable arc repeats. A chance discovery draws a stampede; a boomtown erupts; easy gold is quickly exhausted; industrial mining or collapse follows; and the people who were already on the land, from California Indians to the Sioux, pay a heavy price. Suppliers and governments usually gain more, and more lastingly, than the miners.
Every one of these booms was, at bottom, the same story told in a new place: the extraordinary power of a soft yellow metal to move people, and to remake the world they moved into.
