Thread by @EveryTeam_Mark, Been reading a bunch of gold rush history over the past week [...]

Been reading a bunch of gold rush history over the past week (California, Melbourne, British Columbia) and it's both fascinating to read about and generally, unsurprisingly, very awful

TW in this thread for genocide

A note that while I've read about as many (academic) articles as I probably did for some uni essays, that's still only undergrad level, and this is a broad topic. Apologies if I make any mistakes in this thread, and I'll clarify and/or delete tweets depending on severity

So.

idk what the popular images of the gold rushes are elsewhere in the world - myself, I mostly think of Thunder Mountain at Disney - but I also have vague notions of this 'anyone rocks up with a pan and can find a fortune'

But of course in California the gold rushes is the start of killing and dispossessing the Native American population. In Melbourne (although not all Australia) the conflict had mostly ended by the rushes of 1851 onwards, but still takes place with a backdrop of that dispossession

British Columbia was literally declared as a colony in 1858 because of gold, although here the dynamics were very different.

Gold rushers, mostly coming up from California, were foreigners, and Americans at that. The East India Company-esque Hudson's Bay Company already had working relationships with local First Nation groups for the fur trade, and wanted to keep gold between these two groups

But both got outnumbered by gold rushers. Californian practices and prejudices got transplanted to Fraser River; the British presence didn't have much control; the indigenous population understandably wanted to keep their land intact

TW genocide

The miners formed militias at the Fraser River diggings, with some groups favouring a peace with indigenous groups while others wanted to kill everyone. They didn't; but a group of them wanted to.

But as well as the backdrop of colonialism, as well as the overwhelming male nature, the costs it took to travel to California and other rushes (unless you happened to be local) meant it was a much more middle class pursuit than we might think

Plus, in California there were Mexican and Chilean miners, who - unlike much of the European-heritage miners - actually had mining experience. This did not go down well with the colo-miners.

Miners, generally, also banded together to pore over sections, and, even travel costs excluded, diggings weren't an economic leveller. Wealth = equipment, machinery, labourers

The Melbourne-area rush, taking place after the colonising was secure, was interesting in that the arrival of Chinese miners forced some (*some*) introspection among colonial locals

There was an article in one of the local papers of the time from a writer wondering aloud about how the British colonisers had justified their presence by cultivating the land, but if another race [the Chinese] came along who could do that better, would they, the British, leave?

I read something (granted, written over a decade ago) about gold field tourism in Australia too, about how Aboriginal stories weren't being told. And this is a good place to finish this thread:

How do you tell these histories in a way that people can digest? Particularly when so many people will have so many different starting points and sensitivities. And is it even possible to digest them all at all?

Latest Threads Unrolled: