Gold rush

A gold rush is a period of feverish migration of workers into the area of a dramatic discovery of commercial quantities of gold. Several gold rushes took place throughout the 19th century in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States. Gold rushes helped spur permanent non-indigenous settlement of new regions and define a significant part of the culture of the North American and Australian frontiers. As well, at a time when money was based on gold, the newly-mined gold provided economic stimulus far beyond the gold fields.

The first significant gold rush in the United States was the Georgia Gold Rush in the southern Appalachians, which started in 1829. It was followed by the California Gold Rush of 1848–49 in the Sierra Nevada, which captured the popular imagination. The California gold rush led directly to the settlement of California by Americans and the rather rapid entry of that state in the union in 1850. Successive gold rushes occurred in western North America, gradually moving north: the Fraser Canyon, the Cariboo district and other parts of British Columbia, and the Rocky Mountains. One of the last "great gold rushes" was the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada's Yukon Territory (1898–99), immortalized in the novels of Jack London, the poetry of Robert W. Service and films such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush.

The Victorian gold rush, which occurred in Australia in 1851 soon after the California gold rush, was the most major of several Australian gold rushes. That gold rush was highly significant to Australia’s, and especially Victoria's and Melbourne's, political and economic development. With the Australian gold rushes came the construction of the first railways and telegraph lines, multiculturalism and racism, the Eureka Stockade and the end of penal transportation. In South Africa, the Witwatersrand Gold Rush in the Transvaal was equally important to that country’s history, leading to the founding of Johannesburg and tensions between the Boers and British settlers.

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. The significance of gold rushes in history has given a longer life to the term, and it is now applied generally to capitalism to denote any economic activity in the participants aspire to race each other in common pursuit of a new and apparently highly lucrative market, often precipitated by an advance in technology.