49ers (I)

choi

Walter R Borneman, Striking It Rich. New York Times, Aug 10, 2014
www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/books ... edward-dolnick.html
(book review on Edward Dolnick, The Rush; America’s fevered quest for fortune, 1848-1853. Little, Brown & Company, 2014)

Quote: “Relatively few of the tens of thousands who streamed to California managed to pick a fortune from the earth. By the end of the rush, many of those who came away rich did so not from labor in the mines but by providing services to the miners — as hoteliers, prostitutes, merchants, bankers and more. They mined the miners as readily as the miners themselves worked the ground.

Note:
(a) “Shouts of ‘Gold!’ would later be raised in such scattered locales as Bannack, Mont, Cripple Creek, Colo, and Nome, Alaska, but it all began in California near a place called Sutter’s Mill.”
(i) Bannack, Montana
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bannack,_Montana
([now] a ghost town; Founded in 1862 and named after the local Bannock Indians, it was the site of a major gold discovery in 1862)
(ii) Cripple Creek, Colorado
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cripple_Creek,_Colorado
(a city with 1,189 at the 2010 census; located 44 miles (71 km) southwest of Colorado Springs

Quote: “On Oct 20, 1890, however, Robert Miller ‘Bob’ Womack discovered a rich ore and the last great Colorado gold rush began. Thousands of prospectors flocked to the region, and before long WS Stratton located the famous Independence lode, one of the largest gold strikes in history. In three years, the population increased from five hundred to ten thousand by 1893. Although half a billion dollars' worth of gold ore was dug from Cripple Creek, Womack himself would die, penniless, on Aug 10, 1909.
(iii) Nome, Alaska
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nome,_Alaska
(section 4.2 Gold rush)
(iv) Sutter’s Mill
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutter's_Mill
(a sawmill owned by 19th-century pioneer John Sutter in partnership with James W Marshall; located in Coloma, California [qv]; On Jan 24, 1848, Marshall found several flakes of gold)

* The English and south German surname Sutter: “a shoemaker or cobbler (rarely a tailor), from Middle English suter, souter, Middle High German suter, sutære (from Latin sutor, an agent derivative of suere ‘to sew’).”

(b) “Had this first great gold rush occurred only a few years earlier, California might not have dropped so easily into the American orbit. Instead, a tidal wave of gold seekers propelled California to almost instant statehood, and anchored the United States on both coasts.”
(i) Mexican–American War (1946- Feb 2, 1848 ,the day Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed; teh war occurred in the wake of the 1845 US annexation of Texas)  Wikipedia
(ii) “On September 9, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850, California was admitted to the United States undivided as a free state, denying the expansion of slavery to the Pacific Coast.”  Wikipedia

(c) “Luzena Wilson survived a flood in Sacramento and a fire in Nevada City to make a fortune in real estate.”
(i) Luzena Wilson
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luzena_Wilson
(1819-1902;  a woman)
(ii) Luzena Stanley Wilson (c. 1820-1902), in American Experience; The Gold Rush, undated
www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goldrush/peopleevents/p_wilson.html