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.