The gold rush essays

The gold rush essays What if the shinny material was never found? In a world of hypothetical questions one has to wonder where our country would be if we had not secured what is currently known to be California, from the ruling hand of Mexico. California state history would be severely different had the Gold Rush never happened. To better understand the affects of this question, I will talk about where the gold rush took place, the results of the gold rush, and the effects of what would happen if the gold rush had not taken place. California derives fro the Latin words Cali and Fornix. Cali fornix means hot oven, another dead end for most linguistic inquiries, but which actually means alchemical crucible, the sort of alchemical crucible that has a single purpose: to turn ordinary materials into gold. (Henry 283). California was later recognized as the golden state; the gold rush came and soon swept California by surprise. The most prevalent area of mining that took place was around the foothills of San Francisco. In the start of the early 1840s there were only a few hundred people living in San Francisco but by the end of the gold rush thousands inhabited there. The citys real estate soon began to rise significantly as did the number of murders and such related crimes. The city of San Francisco burned to the ground six times in the first two years of existence, but the citys vast gold digging entrepreneurs rebuilt the city each and every time. One could say that Californias reason for being was the gold miners who came into the area in search of wealth and fame (Bonanza). Every nook and cranny of the California Mountains was completely engulfed with such miners and as the digging space near the city began to crowd miners began spreading northward and southward. As the miners began to come by the thousands, California began to see the results of its natural fruits (gold)....