Ghost Town by Michael Collins

Author:Michael Collins [Collins, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-03-01T04:30:00+00:00

*****

By 1850, most of the easy to find gold had been collected and attention turned to extracting gold from more difficult locations. With the gold being more difficult to retrieve, Americans began to drive out the foreigners to get at the gold that was left. Laws and taxes were brought in for any claim finds. A miner’s tax of $20 a month was brought in the equivalent of $570 in today’s money. The native American prospectors began organized attacks on foreign miner’s. particularly Latin Americans and Chinese.

By the beginning of 1849 word of the gold rush had spread around the world and overwhelming number of gold seekers and merchants began to arrive from every continent. It is estimated the 90,000-people arrived in California in 1849 and by 1855 over 300,000 had flooded into California.

Through good fortune and hard work the lucky ones reaped the benefits. As the gold rush progressed local banks and dealers issued bank notes or locally accepted bank note currency. In the early days, as in my story it was too risky to keep the gold in a bank so they hid it and shared it out at a later date. Had I lived in them times I would have felt very insecure not knowing where my gold was or when they were going to share it out, or for that matter would they share it at all. Town banks would have the towns folk sign documents as proof that they were entitled to their share of the gold in that particular town, if the main breadwinner died or was killed the gold would pass on to the immediate family and like in my story the documents were kept in the banks safe, I read this while looking for information on the gold rush and I personally don’t think it was worth the paper it was printed on. MC

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.