Strike Gold With This Quiz on the California Gold Rush

The lyrics of this traditional folk song reveal that Clementine was the daughter of a miner during the California Gold Rush. As the second verse goes, “In a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine, lived a miner forty-niner, and his daughter Clementine.” Forty-niners were, of course, the gold miners of 1849.

Some $81 million worth of gold had been found in California by 1852, the equivalent of over $3 billion in today’s money. For context, according to the 1850 U.S. Census, the entire railroad industry earned $38.5 million. Unfortunately for latecomers, the haul decreased every year until 1857, when it flattened around $45 million. By then, the remaining gold required expensive equipment to extract, meaning most prospectors had to work for a mining company.

In January 1850, Sacramento was a rapidly growing trade town, thanks to its prime location at the confluence of two major rivers. New settlers lived at the water’s edge, while longtime residents (such as John Sutter, who first discovered gold in the area) were advised by natives to settle farther away. After a huge flood decimated the city, locals rebuilt and began working on a flood barrier, earning Sacramento the nickname “levee city.”

This epic staple of the Western revival genre tells the tale of different members of the Prescott family. When Lilith, one of the daughters, finds out she inherited a gold mine, she travels from St. Louis to California to collect her riches. Unfortunately — as was the case for so many ambitious miners during the real Gold Rush — Lilith’s dreams of wealth are shattered when she arrives at the mine and realizes it’s empty.

Levi Strauss and his business partner Jacob Davis famously popularized the pants we now call blue jeans, patenting the design in 1873. Though they weren’t immediately the universal wardrobe staple they are today, early jeans sold well enough with miners in the Gold Rush. Their key innovation was the presence of metal rivets reinforcing the pockets and fly, making each pair much more durable.

Hydraulic mining uses an extremely high-pressure stream of water to extract valuable minerals from soil and rock formations. The water mixes with dirt and rock, creating a sludge-like substance known as “slurry.” The slurry is then filtered to extract the desirable minerals. In California, years of hydraulic mining in the Gold Rush led to problems with flooding and contaminated drinking water, and the process was finally banned in 1884.

Samuel Clemens — better known by his pen name, Mark Twain — left home in Missouri as a teen in search of adventure that would fuel his writing. He spent years as an itinerant laborer, working various jobs in cities across the U.S. Though Twain wasn’t on the West Coast for the major 1849 Gold Rush, he mined the Comstock Lode for silver in Nevada and lived in central California boomtowns after the Gold Rush.

Despite the regional uproar over the discovery of gold, many people on the East Coast were skeptical about the rumors. Newspapers published editorials questioning the validity of the claims of gold deposits out West. But in December 1848, President James Polk confirmed the presence of gold in California during an address to Congress. The Gold Rush began the next month, in January 1849, which is why prospectors were nicknamed “forty-niners.”

The Hangtown Fry originates in Placerville, California, originally called Hangtown. As local legend has it, the dish was created when a miner struck gold and asked the bartender at the El Dorado Hotel to get him the most expensive meal they had, which happened to be eggs, oysters, and bacon. The recipe has varied over the years, but the three main ingredients remain.

In 1799, a young boy discovered a 17-pound gold nugget in Cabarrus County, North Carolina. His father used it as a doorstop until a jeweler recognized it as gold and bought it. By 1802, word spread and the Carolina Gold Rush began. The Carolina rush never met the value of California, but enough gold was discovered that President Jackson established a mint in Charlotte to process the lode.

The territory of California was part of Mexico until February 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred control of the region to the United States after the Mexican-American War. The Gold Rush that followed caused the territory’s population to triple in 10 years, and California was admitted to the union as a U.S. state in 1850.

On January 24, 1848, John W. Marshall discovered gold flakes while building a sawmill on the South Fork on the American River. The sawmill belonged to Captain John Sutter, giving the site of the historic discovery its name: Sutter’s Mill.

In 1852, businessmen Henry Wells and Willian Fargo launched Wells, Fargo and Co. to meet the demand of shipping freight from the East Coast to mining camps in California. They also provided banking services by buying gold dust, selling paper bank drafts, and giving loans. Wells Fargo is now one of the largest banks in the world, and its stagecoach logo pays homage to its Gold Rush origins.

Pyrite closely resembles gold in appearance, and during the Gold Rush, inexperienced miners would claim they had struck gold when in fact they had found pyrite. The mineral is composed of iron sulfide, which is of no monetary value. However, in the 1980s researchers discovered that pyrite does contain trace amounts of real gold invisible to microscopes — a little too late for the forty-niners.

In 1853, Levi Strauss moved to California and set up a dry-goods store to cater to prospectors. In partnership with a tailor named Jacob Davis, Strauss created a pair of sturdy work pants made of a blue-and-white French fabric called “serge de Nimes,” with rivets hammered into the pockets for added durability. The fabric became known as denim, and the pants earned the nickname blue jeans.

Before gold was discovered in the California hills, San Francisco was a small outpost with a mere 200 residents. By 1857, the population had swelled to around 150,000. As a port city not far from the mountains, it was a hub for miners and an entry point for immigrants that came overseas to seek gold. Thanks to the California Gold Rush, San Francisco became the largest financial center in the American West.

Sawmill owner John Marshall’s history-changing discovery of gold in California was made in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The foothills of the mountain range comprises the Gold Rush belt, known as Mother Lode Country for the rich veins of gold in the area. It is estimated that between 1948 and 1967, more than 106 troy ounces of the precious metal were mined from the area.

In the 19th century, boomtowns popped up around many areas rich in natural resources, including gold. The towns had quick economic and population growth, and during the California Gold Rush, boomtowns cropped up overnight wherever gold was struck. But when the gold ran out, economic growth stalled, and the towns quickly collapsed, many ultimately becoming ghost towns.

In January 1848, John Sutter, a Swiss-born explorer and governor, was having a water-powered saw mill built in his territory, about 40 miles northwest of Sacramento. His carpenter, John Marshall, discovered flakes of gold in a nearby stream, and though the two men agreed to keep it a secret, word soon spread among Sutter’s workers, and then local communities, and eventually throughout the country.

Gold was first discovered in California in 1848, and the news quickly spread across the country and even overseas. Throughout 1849, some 100,000 people migrated to California in search of gold and fortune. Those who were part of the 1849 migration to California were called “forty-niners” — the namesake of San Francisco’s NFL team today.