California Gold Rush
It lasted just a decade, but the California gold rush was a gigantic adventure for a generation of fragile young men, most of them citizens of a fragile young nation. They took their name ~ the forty-niners ~ from the year that the gold rush began. In 1849 the East was dazzled by the news that across the continent, on land that was just given to the U.S. by Mexico, golden nuggets were lying around loose on the ground. Abandoning farms and apprenticeships, deserting their families, the forty-niners swarmed West by the thousands. In California, they heard that a man could make a fortune by simply digging in hills with just a little more equipment than a shovel, a tin pan and a wooden, box like thing called a cradle. “If the man did not get rich from digging, who cared? For most of the forty-niners the adventure alone was enough treasure to last a lifetime.1” The gold rush all started in 1848 when James W. Marshall found gold nuggets at Sutter’s Mill. He rushed down to the nearest town and yelled that he had found gold. People from the near shanty towns rushed to El Derado to claim their fortune from Sutter’s Mill. By 1949, President Polk released this information to the rest of the country. People from all over the conti
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 872
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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