Talk:Gold rush
Being Part of a Gold Rush
The 'graph
- Anecdotally, a few miners made fortunes, several suppliers (such as Levi Strauss) and traders made good money, and numerous unfortunates endured hardship and privation in exotic frontiers of civilisation for little ultimate reward.
raises these concerns:
- What is the role of the word "Anecdotally" in this sentence? It doesn't modify any or all of the verbs! Is it just saying "I don't have any stats"? (Steven Pinker does argue for adverbs like "hopefully" that make sense by modifying the whole sentence, but IMO that's a fringe view.) If so, it can arguably be omitted as implicit in not offering stats, or said better; any other purpose can be served w/ less vagueness.
- "Good money" is unencyclopedically vague; in any case, vast numbers of traders (not several) probably would have considered they were making good money.
- "[N]umerous unfortunates" implies, by omission, being the last of the categories worthy of mention. But, as to the US (the nearly exclusive focus of the article, BTW), city life for immigrants and those drawn in from rural communities was pretty hellish. In constrast
- Deadwood, purportedly drawing on contemporary journals, portrays a miner (who shows no sign of being atypical) who mines every day only the amount that he needs to pay for the evening's liquor, gambling losses, and prostitution (no indication of whether he cooked for himself!), and couldn't be happier. And
- imputing misfortune (and by tone suggesting misery) so reflexively suggests complete ignorance of the strong modern subculture of outdoor recreation: even for those living in a nice suburb, a 13.5-hour, 18-mile hike, finishing in the dark, with, in the middle, clmbing and then descending a half mile of loose-scree-strewn slope at a grade above 40% (tearing the seat out of pants and bruising dignities), can be refreshing and "hurt real good". (Even when the summit has no view!) Love of the wilderness may not be assumed to be a modern invention, especially in light of its survival even in the face of the improvement of creature comforts of non-rural life.
--Jerzy(t) 21:20, 2004 Aug 13 (UTC)
Of course the article as a whole also needs to treat the non-English-speaking world. It should perhaps become part of a suite that discusses the histories of Gold mining and Diamond mining (with their respective technical particulars), and uses Gold rush as a redirect to Low-technology mining camp or Labor-intensive mining. --Jerzy(t) 21:20, 2004 Aug 13 (UTC)
- I disagree; a gold rush is not necessarily low-technology nor is it necessarily labour intensive, and they're also a unique phenomenon in New World history (the big one right now being in the Amazon and, yes, low-paid labour-intensive but a potential path to quick riches in a time/place of great poverty - the same formula that fueled the Klondike, actually, the associated spending spree for which is credited with jumpstarting the world economy after a long depression in the 1890s. As for low-technology, in the case of the Klondike there's the development of the "steam dredges" (they look like steamboats, but they dig through the frozen muck by using huge screws infused with steam-injection, and were mass-production and low-labour; can find you a picture of you like). Like war, gold mining drives the development of technology and isn't all just axes and picks and goldpans; in British Columbia it was a driving force in the development of the early roads in the Colony ("road" being a term used loosely, of course).Skookum1 22:12, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
Some of the people back in the east actually got more money than the "49-ers" just by selling what the miners needed to stay in California for a while.
Gold rushes: Cali vs Klondike
Comment re minor revision by elysdir was In the US, the most famous gold rush for most people is the California one; many Americans haven't heard of the Klondike one. Tweaked "most famous" line accordingly. True I suppose, and it seems that there's a general fudging of the timeline, too; i.e. a lot of the imagery associated with the California rush is intermixed with the imagery of the Klondike, even though they were 60 years apart; same as the BC/California rushes getting mingled, but that's only a 9 year separation and there's a direct connection culturally/individually. "The Gold Rush" is a movable feast, and while associated with California in the American popular mine the real gold rushes, the ones where a "rush" was involved, were the Fraser, the Cariboo, Fort Colville, Big Bend, the Stikine, the Klondike and Alaska; but avbain in the popular mind these have all become fused as if they were one eventSkookum1 22:12, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
Baile an Or
I've added Scotland to the list of countries that experienced a gold rush in the 19th century.
In case nobody believes me, I live pretty close to this location.