California Gold Rush Research Papers

“Prices for all products soared to previously unimagined heights, such as one dollar for a single egg” (37). According to Wallace, in the town of Deadwood, the capital of the Black Hills, a large mining town, the banks “handled up to $100,000 a day”, and a bunk in a hotel cost “$1 a night”. While a man named “Coal Man Johnny” monopolized kerosene sales, allowing him to make upwards of “$3.75 a gallon”. He made a large lump sum of money by the end of the Gold Rush (53).

When prospectors first came, they looked in “stream-bed placers” or better known as “poor man’s mines” because this technique proved easier to find gold without proper equipment or machinery (Wallace 26). By the mid 1850’s, machinery replaced the individual prospector. Machines tore up the landscape with “the force of a combined flood and earthquake”, as entire rivers were moved and diverted for the sole purpose of mining (Johnson 108). These new mining methods had significant applications in the mining towns, as well as in the way gold was mined after the introduction of machines.

Some plain folks actually struck it rich. A man named Warren

During the California Gold Rush multiple mechanical advancements were made. This was because the Gold Rush happened during the same time period as the Industrial Revolution, where many industries changed to the use of machines. Panning for gold went by the wayside in favor of water mines. According to Wallace, one of the largest water mine pumps had a “40ft flywheel and pumped over two million gallons of water 1,100 feet” to a separate drainage tunnel daily (13). As stated by Johnson, of all the contraptions designed to help miner’s separate gold from the earth, the most popular style was the lowly pan, which proved simple to use, but a miner could also “wash his shirt, feed his mule or fry bacon in the same pan”. They used them for multiple daily processes