gold rush
Imagine yourself building a sawmill and all of a sudden you see something shiny in the ground. You pick up the shiny pieces and determine that you just found gold. You go tell your foreman what just occurred. Soon, the news spreads that gold was found. Millions from all around pour into a place they had never seen before. These young white men were in a pursuit for happiness not realizing the hardships they would encounter on the way to California. In January of 1848, James Marshall had a work crew camped on the American River at coloma. The crew was building a saw mill for John Sutter. On the morning of January 24, James Marshall found a few tiny nuggets of yellow metal. Thus began one of the largest human migrations in history as a half-million people from around the world descended to California in search of instant wealth(gold rush p1). Gold fever-an obessive, insane desire to find and squirrel away the precious yellow metal-soon swept California. The fever spread to the eastern United States, and then to Europe and Asia. Gold fever triggered the great California Gold Rush, the largest and wildest mass movements of people the world had ever seen(Stein p.42). Although Marshall's discovery occurred in 1848, the news did
Yet they came. By ship, horse, wagon, and on foot, ninety thousand gold seekers spilles into California during 1849. Though they suffered tremendous hardships along the way, these were young men who looked upon the journey as an adventure too exciting to miss(Stein p.44). Fortunes came to some men who never panned or dug for gold. John Studebaked, a carpenter, hammered together wheelbarrows and sold them to miners. Years later, the company he founded became a multimillion-dollar automobile maker. Philip Armour was barely out of his teens when he walked from stockbridge, New York to California. Believing beef to be more important than gold, he set up a butcher shop that grew into one og the nation's largest food supply enterprises. Levi Strauss stepped from a ship in San Francisco woth dreams of making a pair of pants tough enough to withstand the rigors of a gold miner's working routine. The company he later formed now makes the popular pants the entire world calls levis(Stein p46). Newcomers to the gold fields faced many surprises. First among these were the shocking prices for food and supplies. The mining area had few stores and thousands of customers. Storekeepers earned far more than did the gold miners. A loaf of bread cost $2.00, potatoes were $1.25 a pound, a pair of boots that went for $2.00 in New York sold for as much as $20.00 in San Francisco. The practice of chargimg sky-high prices for goods was c
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 962
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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