Australia and New Zealand 's tent city in the summer of 1853–54, oil painting from an original sketch by
Eugene von Guerard Various gold rushes occurred in Australia over the second half of the 19th century. The most significant of these, although not the only ones, were the
New South Wales gold rush and
Victorian gold rush in 1851, and the
Western Australian gold rushes of the 1890s. They were highly significant to their respective colonies' political and economic development as they brought many immigrants, and promoted massive government spending on infrastructure to support the new arrivals who came looking for gold. While some found their fortune, those who did not often remained in the colonies and took advantage of extremely liberal land laws to take up farming. Gold rushes happened at or around: In New Zealand the
Otago gold rush from 1861 attracted prospectors from the
California gold rush and the
Victorian gold rush and many moved on to the
West Coast gold rush from 1864.
Finland in 1898 The first references of gold in the
Finnish Lapland date back to the early 16th century, when gold was discovered from
Utsjoki, but its presence not widely known until the 19th century. The
actual gold rush started in the valley of the
Ivalo River in 1870 and lasted for a few years. Although the scale of the gold rush is not comparable to the major 19th century gold rushes, the Lapland gold rush has great local significance in Lapland and across Finland; during the spring and the summer in 1870, about 500 gold prospectors, who traveled hundreds of kilometers by ski, foot, or boat to the gold prospecting area, made their way through Lapland to the Ivalo River. To regulate the rush, the government of
Grand Duchy of Finland, then part of
Imperial Russia, established a headquarters for the authorities and service point for the prospectors, called the "Kultala Crown Station." In Kultala (), the officials issued licenses for prospectors and purchased their gold, and there were also law enforcement officers and cartographers, as well as a restaurant and post office. Thirty years later, in 1829, the
Georgia Gold Rush in the southern
Appalachians occurred. It was followed by the
California Gold Rush of 1848–55 in the
Sierra Nevada, which captured the popular imagination. The California Gold Rush led to an influx of gold miners and newfound gold wealth, which led to California's rapid industrialization, as businesses sprung up to serve the increased population and financial and political institutions to handle the increased wealth. One of these political institutions was statehood; the need for new laws in a sparsely-governed land led to the state's rapid entry into the Union in 1850. The gold rush in 1849 also stimulated worldwide interest in prospecting for gold, leading to further rushes in Australia, South Africa, Wales and Scotland. Successive gold rushes occurred in western North America:
Fraser Canyon, the
Cariboo district and other parts of British Columbia, in
Nevada, in the
Rocky Mountains in
Colorado,
Idaho,
Montana, eastern
Oregon, and western
New Mexico Territory and along the lower
Colorado River. There was a gold rush in Nova Scotia (1861–1876) which produced nearly 210,000 ounces of gold.
Resurrection Creek, near
Hope, Alaska was the site of Alaska's first gold rush in the mid–1890s. Other notable Alaska Gold Rushes were
Nome,
Fairbanks, and the
Fortymile River. during the Klondike Gold Rush. One of the last "great gold rushes" was the
Klondike Gold Rush in the
Yukon Territory (1896–99). This gold rush is featured in the novels of
Jack London, and
Charlie Chaplin's film
The Gold Rush.
Robert William Service depicted in his poetries the Gold Rush, especially in the book ''
The Trail of '98''. The main goldfield was along the south flank of the
Klondike River near its confluence with the
Yukon River near what was to become
Dawson City in Yukon Territory, but it also helped open up the relatively new US possession of
Alaska to exploration and settlement, and promoted the discovery of other gold finds. The most successful of the North American gold rushes was the
Porcupine Gold Rush in
Timmins, Ontario area. This gold rush was unique compared to others by the method of extraction of the gold. Placer mining techniques were not able to be used to access the gold in the area due to it being embedded into the
Canadian Shield, so larger mining operations involving significantly more expensive equipment was required. While this gold rush peaked in the 1940s and 1950s, it is still active today with over 200 million ounces of gold having been produced from the region. The gold deposits in this area are identified as one of the largest in the world.
Africa In South Africa, the
Witwatersrand Gold Rush in the
Transvaal was important to that country's history, leading to the founding of
Johannesburg and tensions between the
Boers and British settlers as well as the Chinese miners. South African gold production went from zero in 1886 to 23% of the total world output in 1896. At the time of the South African rush, gold production benefited from the newly discovered techniques by Scottish chemists,
the MacArthur-Forrest process, of using
potassium cyanide to extract gold from low-grade ore.
South America and the Caribbean issued by
Julius Popper With the arrival of
Nicolás de Ovando's settlement expedition in 1502, the construction of the first colonial society in the Hispaniola island began, focused on the search for and exploitation of gold of
Cibao valley. The influx of immigrants was massive until 1510, when the island's gold production reached its peak. The mining industry rested on the forced work of the Taíno indigenous, who quickly became extinct. With the decline of the Taíno labor force and the depletion of deposits, gold production also declined, surpassing that of Puerto Rico and Cuba by the second decade of the century. The gold mine at El Callao (Venezuela), started in 1871, was for a time one of the richest in the world, and the goldfields as a whole saw over a million ounces exported between 1860 and 1883. The gold mining was dominated by immigrants from the British Isles and the British West Indies, giving an appearance of almost creating an English colony on Venezuelan territory. Between 1883 and 1906
Tierra del Fuego experienced a gold rush attracting many Chileans, Argentines and Europeans to the archipelago. The gold rush began in 1884 following discovery of gold during the rescue of the French steamship
Arctique near
Cape Virgenes. ==Mining industry today==