Anyone who read my Gold Rush question….?

Question

Also, given that it doesn’t have to be California, or gold for that matter, any other location/mined material combination that serves the plot concept I laid out?

Answer 1

If you want to stick to the time period of the 1870s, where the Gold "rush" was at the time was in Washington and Idaho territories as well as in southern British Columbia. In particular you could look to the Couer d'Alene Valley, which to this day is the largest silver belt in North America (Comstock as a mine was bigger, but as field was totally inferior to Couer d/Alene) Some of the other "up and comers" at the time was the Dease Lake field in British Columbia (placer gold) the Cariboo, again in British Columbia (industrialized placer) and I believe there was placer gold brewing a storm in the Okanagan Valley in Washington state as well. All that said though, if you were looking to set a story in the truest part of a "rush", meaning at the height of the speculation and movement of people etc, you best bets, in order of the size and rapidity of movement would be:

1. The Klondike 1898-99
2. California 1849-1851
3. The Fraser/Cariboo 1858-1863
4. Nome 1903

Note these are all placer gold rushes which are quite different but no less dramatic than other mining booms. In particular the hard rock silver/lead boom of the 1890s throughout the Pacific North-West would be really good. That was largely fuelled by JJ Hill's massive development of the Great Northern Railroad network which was a very crucial step in hard rock mining (for hardrock to be profitable you need the bulk transport capacity)

There is just one more thing that I want to add. As to a security feature, one of the best tricks that mining companies employed in keeping their gold safe in transit and was widely used in British Columbia and the Yukon was the torpedo ingot. Basically the trick was, you take your purified gold and pour it into a bullet shaped formed that was usually four gallons or more in size. Now that doesn't sound that big BUT you're talking about four gallons of GOLD. What this immediately meant is there was only one way to transport such a piece of gold and that was by heavy duty stage on the road. No horse or mule could ever hope to move something like that and therefore no bandit could hope to abscond with it. Especially given the road only went from where the gold came from to where it was going, there was really nothing you could ever hope to do with your ill gotten gains. This simple trick was so effective that there is more than one recorded incident in British Columbia that I can think of where thieves stopped the BX express, rolled the gold out of the stage, and sent the driver on his way, who in turn went into town to get the constable and a posse, only to return to the scene of the crime and find the ingot left abandonned in the middle of the road with no one around.

Feel free to use my contact info to ask further questions if you'd like. My degree in history was earned writing about this stuff and I'm a hobby placer miner myself.

Answer 2

You might think of the Klondike gold rush. It let's you use weather and terrain more creatively. Read Jack London.