The world's fifth-largest gold producer, America mined an estimated 170 metric tons of the precious metal in 2023. Gold mining may still be going strong, but the glory days of the American gold rush – when prospectors would travel thousands of miles in the hope of striking it rich –are long gone.
However, tales of the lucky few who made their fortunes have a special place in America's history. Read on as we turn back the clock to look at the most significant gold rushes in US history.
All dollar amounts in US dollars.
The history of gold discoveries in the US dates back to 1799 when 12-year-old Conrad Reed reportedly skipped school to go fishing in Meadow Creek, Cabarrus County in North Carolina. He got much more than he bargained for. The boy stumbled upon a 248-troy ounce (7.7kg) gold nugget which he brought home to show his father, a farmer named John Reed.
Believing it was just a pretty stone, the family used the weighty nugget as a doorstop – and there it stayed, hiding in plain sight for the next three years.
In 1802, everything changed when John Reed showed the rock to a jeweler. Although he immediately identified it as gold, the jeweler kept quiet about the nugget's true value and paid the Reeds just $3.50 for it. This was the equivalent of around one week's wages at the time, and works out at around $100 today.
After realizing he'd been swindled, Reed teamed up with three savvy prospectors. In 1808, the men found a nugget weighing 408 troy ounces (12.7kg). News of their discovery spread far and wide, sparking America's first gold rush: the Carolina Gold Rush.
The photo shows a group of miners panning at a gold mine in Cabarrus County.
Prospectors descended on Reed's farm and the surrounding area and initially used the placer mining method, which involves recovering the precious metal from stream beds. When the placer deposits were exhausted, miners – many of whom were enslaved Africans – went underground to extract the gold from the mother lode.
North Carolina remained America's leading producer of gold until 1848 (the map pictured dates from 1850). From 1799 to 1849, an impressive 267,422 troy ounces (8,318kg) worth $349 million at today's prices were extracted in the Tar Heel State.
While North Carolina was the chief gold producer in the US before 1848, the precious metal was also "discovered" in Georgia in 1828. However, gold is thought to have been mined in the region on a small scale from the 16th century onward by Native Americans, as well as French and Spanish prospectors.
Historians have been unable to pinpoint exactly who made the discovery in 1828, but the first mention of the find appeared the following year in the Georgia Journal newspaper, initiating America's second great gold rush: the Georgia Gold Rush.
Prospectors headed to the Chattahoochee and Etowah Rivers to pan for the precious metal, but by the early 1830s, much of the area's gold was being mined on land belonging to the Cherokee Nation. Dubbed "the Great Intrusion," thousands of miners headed to the region, mainly to boom towns such as Dahlonega and Auraria.
During the early 1830s, around 273 troy ounces (8.5kg) were being extracted every day. This massive influx of miners led to tensions with the local Cherokee population, which culminated in the forced removal of the Native Americans from their ancestral lands, the infamous Trail of Tears. Thousands of Cherokee and other Native American peoples perished as a result.
By the 1840s, the lion's share of gold in the area had been depleted. As discoveries of the yellow stuff declined, prospectors keen to make their fortune began to hope for another great gold rush – though as this map from 1909 attests, interest in the state's gold deposits still remained.
From 1828 until the mid-20th century, when commercial gold production ceased, it's thought that 870,000 troy ounces (27,000 kg) of gold was discovered in the Peach State.
Just as the Georgia gold rush was coming to an end, gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California by mill operator James W. Marshall. News of the find was announced in March 1848 by a San Francisco newspaper, reaching the East Coast in August of that year.
The news brought an influx of 250,000 fortune seekers to California from other parts of America and the world, many of whom arrived in 1849. Dubbed the "forty-niners," these prospectors flocked to the Sierra Nevada foothills and San Francisco, where the population skyrocketed.
Prospectors started out by panning for the rich alluvial deposits. But hydraulic mining had emerged by 1853, and thereafter the gold was extracted on an industrial scale. Outrageous fortunes were made by a lucky few, but many of the forty-niners earned very little.
And other people were left to an even worse fate. As was the case in Georgia, the immigrant miners displaced much of the Native American population. Large numbers of indigenous Californians succumbed to starvation, disease, and genocide, and their numbers dwindled significantly.
By 1855, 10.9 million troy ounces (over 339kg) of gold had been mined – worth around $15 billion at current prices – and the US was producing half the world's supply of the precious metal.
America's most famous gold rush was a key factor in establishing the nation as a significant global economic power, and California attained full-fledged statehood in 1850. This daguerreotype (early photo) shows the fast-growing city of San Francisco in 1850/51.
Originally called the Pike's Peak Gold Rush, the Colorado Gold Rush began in July 1858 in Pike's Peak County, which was then located in western Kansas Territory and southwestern Nebraska Territory. (It became part of Colorado Territory in 1861.) Prospectors Green Russell and Sam Bates had found gold the previous year following a tip-off from local Cherokee tribe members.
Like the California Gold Rush, the discovery attracted legions of fortune seekers.
As many as 100,000 prospectors headed to Pike's Peak County, mainly to an area along the South Platte River. The gold-seekers became known as the "fifty-niners" (the peak of the gold rush was in 1859) and adopted the motto “Pike's Peak or Bust.”
In 1859, more substantial gold deposits were found at Clear Creek, not far from Denver, and copious placer deposits were discovered in the Breckenridge and South Park areas. Other key finds were made in the Leadville area, which later became renowned for its silver deposits.
The boom times lasted until the mid-1860s, when prospectors realized they had effectively exhausted the shallower gold deposits and lacked the technology to extract the precious metal from the deeper ores.
The Colorado Gold Rush wasn't quite as bountiful as its predecessor in California. Still, by 1865 a whopping 1.1 million troy ounces (over 34,000 kg) had been extracted. At today's prices, that would be worth over $1 billion.
America's next great gold rush took place from 1874-75 and peaked in 1876-77. In 1874, General Armstrong Custer led an expedition to the Black Hills in Dakota Territory to investigate rumors of large deposits of gold in the area. At the time, the area was owned by the Lakota Sioux, who had been ceded the territory in 1868.
Custer and his men discovered small amounts of the precious metal near modern-day Custer, and larger placer deposits were found in 1875. This prompted a major gold rush, with thousands of prospectors pouring into the newly created town of Deadwood to try their luck.
Needless to say, the sudden arrival of thousands of gold seekers claiming their land didn't go down well with the Lakota Sioux and their allies, and the influx triggered the Great Sioux War of 1876. The Native American forces famously defeated General Custer's army in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, aka Custer's Last Stand, but were eventually forced to surrender.
By the following year, a vast swathe of land belonging to the Lakota Sioux had been seized.
Placer gold was reasonably plentiful in the area, but three experienced prospectors located the abundant hard rock source of the alluvial gold near the modern-day city of Lead. They claimed the land and named their mine Homestake.
The Homestake mine went on to produce a jaw-dropping 10% of the world's gold supply until its closure in 2002. All in all, more than 40 million troy ounces (just over a million kg) were extracted from the tremendously productive mine, with a value of around $50 billion at today's prices.
Local miners discovered large quantities of gold along the Klondike River in August 1896. When news of their find reached the cities of Seattle and San Francisco, a stampede of prospectors, dubbed the "Klondikers," swarmed the area.
Though it was largely centered on Canada's Yukon territory, which borders the state of Alaska, the Klondike Gold Rush is considered an American gold rush because the vast majority of fortune seekers arrived from the contiguous US.
As with the California Gold Rush, only a lucky few got rich. The journey to the region was fraught with difficulty, and life in the Yukon territory, which endures some of the most brutal winters on the planet, was unforgiving. Getting at the gold in the permafrosted ground proved an impossible challenge for many. In fact, 98% of the Klondikers failed to find any gold, and thousands of prospectors never returned.
The First Nations Han people also suffered greatly. The indigenous tribe was forcibly removed to a reservation, and many of them died in the process. The Klondike Gold Rush caused severe environmental damage to the region as well.
The tiny minority of people who made money from the Klondike Gold Rush included one Friedrich Trump, the German-born grandfather of Donald Trump, who started building the family fortune by running restaurants and hotels in the area.
By 1899, prospectors realized that much of the money had already been made and that opportunities were now few and far between. In total, the Klondike Gold Rush is thought to have yielded 2.2 million troy ounces (over 68,000 kg) of the precious metal, worth roughly $3 billion at current prices.
As the Klondike Gold Rush was coming to an end, the so-called "Three Lucky Swedes," a trio of Scandinavian-born Americans, struck gold at Alaska's Anvil Creek in the fall of 1898 and established the Nome mining district.
Reports of the Nordic trio's find resulted in an exodus of Klondikers from Yukon. When gold was discovered literally littering the beach at Nome, prospectors began arriving from Seattle, San Francisco, and even as far afield as Adelaide, Australia.
The gold rush is notable for its numerous incidences of "claim jumping," with many prospectors filing claims for the same pieces of land. The population of Nome swelled to 20,000 in next to no time, and the town attracted all sorts of fortune seekers, including lawman Wyatt Earp, who operated a saloon.
In 1905, bustling Nome had everything from churches and schools to stores and saloons. It also boasted America's first wireless telegraph. However, once the easily extracted gold was exhausted, the gold rush ended, and Nome's population dropped to 2,600 by 1909.
Yet again, the biggest losers were the area's indigenous peoples, who had their lives turned upside down by the gold rush. The explosion of the immigrant population and a surge in mining activity led to a marked decrease in game animals and destroyed the salmon streams they relied on for food.
Meanwhile, the Three Lucky Swedes amassed a fortune of $20 million. Industrial and recreational gold extraction continues in the Nome mining district to this day. To date, more than 3.3 million troy ounces (over 102,000kg) have been recovered, worth $4.3 billion at current prices.
The last great American gold rush took place from 1902. Italian-born immigrant Felice Pedroni, aka Felix Pedro, had spent years searching for the precious metal and finally discovered gold in the summer of 1902 in the remote Tanana River valley in Alaska's harsh interior.
Word soon got out about Pedroni's find, and prospectors began descending on the valley in search of the valuable metal. The population of the small trading post of Fairbanks mushroomed, with many of the new arrivals hailing from Nome.
Local trader E. T. Barnette (pictured), credited with founding Fairbanks, led the bulk of the mining operations and hired many fortune-seeking newcomers, finding work for them panning and sluicing gold in and around the Fairbanks area.
Big business then got in on the act. The Fairbanks Exploration Company bought up most of the claims in the area, importing gold sledges via the Alaska Railroad, which was constructed during the 1900s and 1910s. The era of individuals cashing in on extracting gold had come to an end.
From the 1910s onward, gold extraction in the US has been carried out primarily by mining companies, and the precious metal is still mined around Fairbanks. Since 1902, 10.9 million troy ounces (339,000 kg) – worth over $14 billion at current prices – have been produced around the Alaskan city.
For much of the 20th century, Alaska, South Dakota, and Colorado were America's major gold-producing states. But this all changed in the 1960s...
Nevada was known more for its silver than gold mining before the 1960s. In the summer of 1961, the Newmont Mining Corporation discovered an enormous low-grade deposit of the yellow stuff at Carlin, which has since transformed the gold mining industry in America.
Measuring five miles wide and 40 miles long, the Carlin Trend geological feature was found to be packed with gold, which, thanks to technological advances, was more easily extracted. Newmont dug an open-pit mine and began production in 1965.
However, it wasn't until the late 1970s that the extraction of gold from the mine really took off. The price of the valuable metal went through the roof during this time, and production at the mine increased accordingly.
A corporate gold rush occurred during the 1980s. By this point, the Carlin Trend mine was extracting more of the precious metal than any other, and Nevada became the nation's leading gold-producing state.
Other profitable mines were opened along the Carlin Trend, and by 2002 the geological feature had supplied America with 50 million troy ounces (over 1.5 million kg) of gold, worth around $65 billion at today's prices.
To date, an eye-watering 76.6 million troy ounces (over 2.3 million kg) have been recovered from the mines, and supplies of the precious metal won't be running out anytime soon. Experts believe the Carlin Trend still holds 97.5 million troy ounces (over 3 million kg) of gold, which would have a value of around $130 billion on today's market.
Updated by Alice Cattley
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