A gold rush or gold fever is a discovery of gold —sometimes accompanied by other precious metals and rare-earth minerals —that brings an onrush of miners seeking their fortune. Major gold rushes took place in the 19th century in Australia , Greece , New Zealand , Brazil , Chile , South Africa , the United States , and Canada while smaller gold rushes took place elsewhere.
30-578: Irishtown or Irish Town may refer to the following places: Australia Irishtown, Victoria - a ghost town in the Gippsland region Irishtown, Western Australia Irishtown, Tasmania Canada Irishtown, New Brunswick Irishtown-Summerside , Newfoundland and Labrador Irishtown, Nova Scotia Irishtown, Prince Edward Island Ireland Irishtown, County Mayo , village Irishtown, Dublin , inner suburb Irishtown Stadium in
60-456: A gold-bearing vein may be oxidized, so that the gold occurs as native gold, and the ore needs only to be crushed and washed (free milling ore). The first miners may at first build a simple arrastra to crush their ore; later, they may build stamp mills to crush ore at greater speed. As the miners venture downwards, they may find that the deeper part of vein contains gold locked in sulfide or telluride minerals , which will require smelting . If
90-407: A transition through progressively higher capital expenditures, larger organizations, and more specialized knowledge. A rush typically begins with the discovery of placer gold made by an individual. At first the gold may be washed from the sand and gravel by individual miners with little training, using a gold pan or similar simple instrument. Once it is clear that the volume of gold-bearing sediment
120-599: Is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Irishtown, Victoria Irishtown is a locality near Castlemaine , Victoria , Australia . It is noted for heritage sites associated with the Victorian Gold Rush , near or within the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park . These include the Red Hill hydraulic gold sluicing site and
150-414: Is larger than a few cubic metres, the placer miners will build rockers or sluice boxes, with which a small group can wash gold from the sediment many times faster than using gold pans. Winning the gold in this manner requires almost no capital investment, only a simple pan or equipment that may be built on the spot, and only simple organisation. The low investment, the high value per unit weight of gold, and
180-568: The California Dream . Gold rushes helped spur waves of immigration that often led to the permanent settlement of new regions. Activities propelled by gold rushes define significant aspects of the culture of the Australian and North American frontiers . At a time when the world's money supply was based on gold , the newly-mined gold provided economic stimulus far beyond the goldfields, feeding into local and wider economic booms . The Gold Rush
210-663: The Cariboo district and other parts of British Columbia, in Nevada , in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado , Idaho , Montana , eastern Oregon , and western New Mexico Territory and along the lower Colorado River . There was a gold rush in Nova Scotia (1861–1876) which produced nearly 210,000 ounces of gold. Resurrection Creek , near Hope, Alaska was the site of Alaska's first gold rush in
240-608: The Burying Flat Cemetery, also known as Deadmans Gully Burial Ground. A rush began to New Year's Flat on Fryers Creek on New Year's Day, 1853. The rush was described by a digger as "the most animated sight of those stirring times that I ever witnessed". The settlement arose nearby, and the Shamrock Hotel, an establishment reportedly frequented by "wild men," was subsequently built on the Vaughan Road. A Catholic church
270-505: The UAE with the exports affirmed by the African states. According to Africa's industrial mining firms, they have not exported any amount of gold to the UAE – confirming that the imports come from other, illegal sources. As per customs data, the UAE imported gold worth $ 15.1 billion from Africa in 2016, with a total weight of 446 tons, in variable degrees of purity. Much of the exports were not recorded in
300-790: The United States was in Cabarrus County, North Carolina (east of Charlotte), in 1799 at today's Reed's Gold Mine . Thirty years later, in 1829, the Georgia Gold Rush in the southern Appalachians occurred. It was followed by the California Gold Rush of 1848–55 in the Sierra Nevada , which captured the popular imagination. The California Gold Rush led to an influx of gold miners and newfound gold wealth, which led to California's rapid industrialization, as businesses sprung up to serve
330-658: The ability of gold dust and gold nuggets to serve as a medium of exchange, allow placer gold rushes to occur even in remote locations. After the sluice-box stage, placer mining may become increasingly large scale, requiring larger organisations and higher capital expenditures. Small claims owned and mined by individuals may need to be merged into larger tracts. Difficult-to-reach placer deposits may be mined by tunnels. Water may be diverted by dams and canals to placer mine active river beds or to deliver water needed to wash dry placers. The more advanced techniques of ground sluicing , hydraulic mining and dredging may be used. Typically
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#1732845340413360-474: The focus may change progressively from gold to silver to base metals. In this way, Leadville, Colorado started as a placer gold discovery, achieved fame as a silver-mining district, then relied on lead and zinc in its later days. Butte, Montana began mining placer gold, then became a silver-mining district, then became for a time the world's largest copper producer. Various gold rushes occurred in Australia over
390-437: The heyday of a placer gold rush would last only a few years. The free gold supply in stream beds would become depleted somewhat quickly, and the initial phase would be followed by prospecting for veins of lode gold that were the original source of the placer gold. Hard rock mining, like placer mining, may evolve from low capital investment and simple technology to progressively higher capital and technology. The surface outcrop of
420-536: The increased population and financial and political institutions to handle the increased wealth. One of these political institutions was statehood; the need for new laws in a sparsely-governed land led to the state's rapid entry into the Union in 1850. The gold rush in 1849 also stimulated worldwide interest in prospecting for gold, leading to further rushes in Australia, South Africa, Wales and Scotland. Successive gold rushes occurred in western North America: Fraser Canyon ,
450-667: The mid–1890s. Other notable Alaska Gold Rushes were Nome , Fairbanks , and the Fortymile River . One of the last "great gold rushes" was the Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon Territory (1896–99). This gold rush is featured in the novels of Jack London , and Charlie Chaplin 's film The Gold Rush . Robert William Service depicted in his poetries the Gold Rush, especially in the book The Trail of '98 . The main goldfield
480-662: The new arrivals who came looking for gold. While some found their fortune, those who did not often remained in the colonies and took advantage of extremely liberal land laws to take up farming. Gold rushes happened at or around: In New Zealand the Otago gold rush from 1861 attracted prospectors from the California gold rush and the Victorian gold rush and many moved on to the West Coast gold rush from 1864. The first significant gold rush in
510-465: The ore is still sufficiently rich, it may be worth shipping to a distant smelter (direct shipping ore). Lower-grade ore may require on-site treatment to either recover the gold or to produce a concentrate sufficiently rich for transport to the smelter. As the district turns to lower-grade ore, the mining may change from underground mining to large open-pit mining . Many silver rushes followed upon gold rushes. As transportation and infrastructure improve,
540-644: The region. The gold deposits in this area are identified as one of the largest in the world. In South Africa, the Witwatersrand Gold Rush in the Transvaal was important to that country's history, leading to the founding of Johannesburg and tensions between the Boers and British settlers as well as the Chinese miners. South African gold production went from zero in 1886 to 23% of the total world output in 1896. At
570-427: The same term This disambiguation page lists articles about distinct geographical locations with the same name. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Irishtown&oldid=1178012230 " Category : Place name disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description
600-537: The second half of the 19th century. The most significant of these, although not the only ones, were the New South Wales gold rush and Victorian gold rush in 1851, and the Western Australian gold rushes of the 1890s. They were highly significant to their respective colonies' political and economic development as they brought many immigrants, and promoted massive government spending on infrastructure to support
630-575: The smuggling of billions of dollars' worth of gold out of Africa through the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East , which further acts as a gateway to the markets in the United States , Europe and more. The news agency evaluated the worth and magnitude of illegal gold trade occurring in African nations like Ghana , Tanzania , and Zambia , by comparing the total gold imports recorded into
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#1732845340413660-1044: The suburb Irishtown, Kilkenny , former borough Irishtown (Parliament of Ireland constituency) for the borough Irishtown, Limerick , inner city area Irishtown, Mullingar , a townland in Mullingar civil parish, barony of Moyashel and Maheradermon, County Westmeath Irishtown, Rathconrath , a townland in Rathconrath civil parish, barony of Rathconrath, County Westmeath United Kingdom, Northern Ireland Irishtown, County Antrim , see List of townlands in County Antrim United States Irishtown, California Irishtown Township, Clinton County, Illinois Other Irish Town, Gibraltar See also [ edit ] Lists of towns in Ireland Irishtown Bend , Cleveland, Ohio [REDACTED] Topics referred to by
690-546: The time of the South African rush, gold production benefited from the newly discovered techniques by Scottish chemists, the MacArthur-Forrest process , of using potassium cyanide to extract gold from low-grade ore. The gold mine at El Callao (Venezuela), started in 1871, was for a time one of the richest in the world, and the goldfields as a whole saw over a million ounces exported between 1860 and 1883. The gold mining
720-406: The world's gold supply stimulated global trade and investment. Historians have written extensively about the mass migration, trade, colonization, and environmental history associated with gold rushes. Gold rushes were typically marked by a general buoyant feeling of a "free-for-all" in income mobility , in which any single individual might become abundantly wealthy almost instantly, as expressed in
750-575: The world, according to Communities and Small-Scale Mining (CASM). Approximately 100 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on small-scale mining. For example, there are 800,000 to 1.5 million artisanal miners in Democratic Republic of Congo , 350,000 to 650,000 in Sierra Leone , and 150,000 to 250,000 in Ghana , with millions more across Africa. In an exclusive report, Reuters accounted
780-506: Was a topic that inspired many TV shows and books considering it was a very important topic at the time. During the time, many books were published including The Call of the Wild , which had much success during the period. Gold rushes occurred as early as the times of ancient Greece , whose gold mining was described by Diodarus Sicules and Pliny the Elder . Within each mining rush there is typically
810-764: Was along the south flank of the Klondike River near its confluence with the Yukon River near what was to become Dawson City in Yukon Territory, but it also helped open up the relatively new US possession of Alaska to exploration and settlement, and promoted the discovery of other gold finds. The most successful of the North American gold rushes was the Porcupine Gold Rush in Timmins, Ontario area. This gold rush
840-713: Was consecrated in 1865, the building existing until 1956 when it was demolished. This article about a location in Victoria, Australia is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This Australian ghost town -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Gold rush In the 19th century, the wealth that resulted was distributed widely because of reduced migration costs and low barriers to entry. While gold mining itself proved unprofitable for most diggers and mine owners, some people made large fortunes, and merchants and transportation facilities made large profits. The resulting increase in
870-661: Was dominated by immigrants from the British Isles and the British West Indies, giving an appearance of almost creating an English colony on Venezuelan territory. Between 1883 and 1906 Tierra del Fuego experienced a gold rush attracting many Chileans, Argentines and Europeans to the archipelago. The gold rush began in 1884 following discovery of gold during the rescue of the French steamship Arctique near Cape Virgenes . There are about 10 to 30 million small-scale miners around
900-493: Was unique compared to others by the method of extraction of the gold. Placer mining techniques were not able to be used to access the gold in the area due to it being embedded into the Canadian Shield , so larger mining operations involving significantly more expensive equipment was required. While this gold rush peaked in the 1940s and 1950s, it is still active today with over 200 million ounces of gold having been produced from
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