The hot economy isn’t the result of a single sector but rather one that is affecting many sectors and markets throughout the United States.
A century and a half ago, there was a similar boom; it was called the California Gold Rush. But even before California and gold came together, there was another such rush that occurred in North Carolina. What most people do not know is that North Carolina was the site for America’s first Gold Rush.
North Carolina was the first state to experience the gold rush effect. So many people came to the Tarheel State, that, ultimately, it reported 30,000 people came in search of their own ‘pot of gold.’ In addition, parenthetically, for more than 30 years, all gold coins issued by the U.S. Mint were produced using North Carolina gold.
As far as gold rushes go, the California Gold Rush was the largest mass migration in the history of our country. In March 1848, there were approximately 157,000 people in the California territory. By the time that the Gold Rush fizzled down to a gold trickle, there were over 300,000 new arrivals, to the point where one in every 90 people lived in California.
Gold rushes and other economic booms are known to attract immigrants from around the world. As we see in the United States today, California was a magnet for new immigrants. In 1850, more than 25% of California’s population was born outside the U.S. By 1852, another 25,000 immigrants came from China. After the passing the 1852 Miner Law, the law that California passed expressly identifying and taxing Chinese miners, it began to charge miners $2 a month to work.
Another feature of economic booms and gold rushes is that in California, the Gold Rush attracted basically men; 92% of all people prospecting for gold were men. The number of women never did grow significantly and by 1860 women in the gold mining towns represented just 19% of the total population. Mining was clearly a male-dominated industry.
Finally, it wasn’t the prospectors who made the most fortunes from the California Gold Rush. It appeared that those businesses that opened and catered to the new prospector population made out best. An example of one such entrepreneur was John Studebaker. Before Studebaker built his first car, he actually made a fortune manufacturing wheel barrows for gold miners. In addition, the famous bank Wells Fargo began in California, founded by two bankers Henry Wells and William Fargo. And one other famous entrepreneur who got started back in the Gold Rush days was Levi Strauss, who was a German-born tailor. He began his manufacturing business of Levi’s denim jeans in order to provide for the men the kind of pants that would withstand the long days of working in the mines.