About 150 years ago the demand for gold attracted people to the furthest corners of the earth. “A gold rush is a period of feverish migration of workers into the area of a dramatic discovery of commercial quantities of gold. Gold rushes took place in the 19th century in Australia, Brazil, Canada, South Africa, and the United States … Gold rushes helped spur permanent non-indigenous settlement of new regions and define a significant part of the culture of the North American and Australian frontiers.” according to Wikipedia. Gold arguably played a more important part in the creation of Australia than the British convict system. “The number of new arrivals to Australia was greater than the number of convicts who had landed there in the previous seventy years. The total population trebled from 430,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million in 1871.”
One of the more interesting artifacts of the Australian gold rush is a ghost town up in the high Snowys. What’s left of it now?
- Kiandra, New South Wales – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Kiandra Coordinates:
35°53′S 148°30′E / 35.883°S 148.5°E is an abandoned gold mining town and the birthplace of Australian skiing. The town is situated in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales, Australia, in the Snowy River Shire inside the Kosciuszko National Park. Its name is a corruption of Aboriginal ‘Gianderra’ for ‘sharp stones for knives’. It was earlier called Gibson’s Plains, named after Dr. Gibson, a settler in the district in 1839.[1]. For a Century (until the establishment of Cabramurra), Kiandra was Australia’s highest town. -
In November, 1859, Gold was discovered by mountain cattlemen, the Pollock brothers, and by March 1860, some 10,000 miners and storekeepers had raced to the scene. Initial returns were very good. A 9 kg nugget was discovered in river deposits under what became known as New Chum Hill. Kiandra post office opened on 1 June 1860 and 15 hotels and 30 stores set up shop. But by 1861, the Sydney Morning Herald was reporting a “mass exodus” and the easy pickings were exhausted.
Significant numbers of Chinese people worked the Kiandra goldfields. Chinese miners built Three Mile Dam in 1882 to assist with sluicing operations at “New Chum Hill”. The scenic lake still exists and now supplies Selwyn Snowfields with its snow-making water requirements
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- Kiandra – New South Wales – Australia – Travel – smh.com.au
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Historic goldmining town now little more than a ghost town.
Today Kiandra is literally one old house, a Court House which is used to store equipment, some ruins and enough memories to bring the whole cold and lonely valley alive. In its heyday it was a true gold rush town which rose and fell in less than a year. -
Kiandra’s moment of glory occurred in a few months from 1859-1860. The rush broke out after payable gold was discovered by David and James Pollock (two men who had been bringing their cattle to graze on the summer pastures in the area for some years)
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The Snowys
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An old lady remembers
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Do you ever look at a place and wonder what possessed people to ever build a town there? Some places are obvious, like Denver, Salt Lake City, even Santa Barbara. But others…. North of Santa Barbara, where the 101 turns sharply inland, there is a small ghost town, Las Cruces. It is a pretty spot, just through a very narrow pass in from the ocean, but you can see no way to make a living there, at least if it did not involve shooting rockets. If there was any gold mining around there it was not very successful.
I remember lots of small towns I have passed through. Many looked pretty empty, and I wondered why they were ever built in the first place. I guess that transportation was limited and farms were small. People had to live close to where they grew food and fiber.
Not far from where I live there used to be a place called Stinkmore. The local industry was shark fishing. I have no idea what you do with sharks once you catch them, but I guess someone had a use for dead sharks. The government bought Stinkmore and everything else around it and it is now part of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
I guess what impresses me most of all was the obvious courage of such people. They built farms and houses and stores in what often even today is essentially the middle of freakin’ nowhere. What courage they had, what confidence in their own abilities, what trust in the future. No wonder we took to shooting rockets into space.
RWE @ 3: Yes, I’ve wondered. Anywhere in Nevada. (Except maybe Lake Tahoe.) Ridgecrest and Trona, CA. And my own hometown, Lancaster, CA. Why would anyone live in these places???
Neil Young after the goldrush
Louis Lamour comments in one of his western books about a town started when a wagon broke down and the owner started selling liquor off the back end.
I remember reading that towns were generally 7-8 miles apart to keep from having to ride a horse too far in one day.
When transportation improved, many of these towns lost their reason for existence and disappeared.
Willdomath #4: Yes, the desert especially makes you wonder. My last trip to Calif I drove out to see an old friend in Ridgecrest. “Testing atomic bombs. That’s all this place is good far” was all I kept thinking. That, and that the next time I came to see him I better have a supersonic aircraft instead of a bouncy little rental miniature SUV.
When we both first moved to Calif in 1978 I went out to see him in Lancaster and we drove out past Palmdale to a new development. They were building houses out in the middle of the desert. Could not believe it – was so odd to see those places, some already inhabited, rising out of a flat scrubby treeless nothing. No fences or storage sheds or nothing else there yet. Could have been on Mars. Why would people go there? Mars I could understand, but 15 miles outside of Palmdale?
Some of the small towns in places such as Kansas have been so desperate to get some people that they were giving away lots if you would just build a house there and come live for a while. People talk about the abandonment of the Great Plains. I guess telecommuting might change some of that; I hope so. And Kansas is 3 or 4 orders of magnitude nicer than the High Desert in my book.
If this is true then all we’ve been hearing about fiat money is a total lie. And further, the threat of hyper inflation is total hokum. But is this true?
<a href="http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2331711/posts"Money Supply: The Myth of Hyperinflation (The Fed is printing money only marginally)
The mighty Croesus rubbed his hands
He had the gold he had the lands
He had it made despite the Persian threat
The oracle divinely said
An empire would soon be dead
Poor Croesus ended up with deep regret
For gold alone will not delay
Thy destiny for e’en a day
And those who think it will are soon dismayed
To find their gold is just a weight
Upon the soul as worthless freight
When God in all his glory is displayed
So search you rivers, creeks and fields
For autumn reds and aurum yields
If lucky you may find a grain or two
But gold lies not beneath the ground
The truest gold is surely found
Inside of God and deep inside inside of you
It is I am sure infuriating to others when Americans like them for who we assume them to be. It can seem condescending, like we believed in a Disney version of the world and fail to deal directly with people as individuals in the here and now.
People from the UK are annoyed by Americans, not only conservative Americans either, who affect a Tory nostalgia for a past that many in Europe are eager to repudiate. Even when aligning with egalitarian political ideals of the Left Americans tend to give credence to every cretin from the Old World, treating everyone from England as if the were a precious aristocrat to be fawned over. Real Conservative Americans harbor a deep respect for England as our elder brother and are aware that our Revolution was really for the protection of the colonists rights as Englishmen. On some level what we are, to go back to a subtopic of a thread that passed me by, is England in exile. America is a refuge established to keep a dream of liberty alive.
If we feel for England as for a parent or older sibling in a way that clouds our vision then we feel for Australia in a different way. When my ships visited Australia we stopped in Perth/Freemantle and the loveliest little town in Western Australia, a place called Albany. When people asked me what it was like visiting Australia I said it was like time travel, like what we believed America was like in ’50s or in the ’40s. It was like visiting Utah. While Australians may be aware of all the warts in their own historical record and the grievances of the aborigines, only 2+% of the population, may be real, to an American it does seem like an Oz where we can glimpse what we should be if only we had been spared slavery and the Civil War.
Love the interview. Thanks.
6/Art. Towns are a bit closer when the terrain is more rugged and a bit farther apart if there is a good trail and decent water. You can cover 20 miles on foot in a day (horses can’t always go as far as a human), but not day in, day out, so towns needed to be a little closer.
Towns based on railways can be very close, within just a few miles, if what is being shipped is large (timber) or especially heavy (stone). You’ll also find towns in places where wagons or trains typically broke down, at the side of a river that requires a ferry for crossing, and in those odd spots where the land forms a protected little haven in the winter.
3/RWE. Salt Lake City has an interesting history. They were supposed to go a bit farther north and build a town where Logan, Utah, is now. Brigham Young had a fever and insisted they turn south — to a harsh land. It is definitely a testament to the pioneer spirit that the Mormon settlers survived. Logan would have been infinitely easier!
I’m a native of San Francisco but live in the Victorian Goldfields about 1.5 hours NW of Melbourne.
It’s a fascinating area. The Gold Rush there started only a few years after the California Gold Rush and the first find was at Forest Creek, 20 minutes away.
I used to run the Bendigo Tramways (in the 1970s) and that town was built on gold. It’s an amazing place and there are still poppet legs and old mineshafts all over the place.
There was evidently a fair bit of movement between the gold rushes in spite of the distance and a lot of Americans came here then, and a lot of Chinese.
The town I live near (Guildford) now has only about 200 people but there were 4,000 Chinese here in the gold rush.
Hydraulic mining really messed this countryside up and there wasn’t a tree left because they used all the wood to shore up the mineshafts and fire the boilers. Interesting place.
The USFS burned down or dismantled many of the old mining camps in the Sierra Nevada. The reasoning at the time was to stop depression era squatters from living in the old cabins but it was part of a broader policy to stop/deter applications for patented mining claims on federal land.
Some mining structures still remain in the remote regions of the Sierra and I know of a 5 stamp gold/ore crusher that still stands (not in a park or protected area) and may stand for another 100 years unless vandals burn it down.
Nevada still has lots of old abandoned farm homes. Recreational users keep the old buildings patched up and its not uncommon to find a bottle of whiskey, cans of spam, bottled water and those tiny bottles of Tabasco from MRE kits in the cupboards. The really old mining camps are long gone – collectors and bottle hunters stripped them bare 70 years ago and later people simply tore the old buildings apart for campfire wood.
The mining town of Bodie was moved and preserved before treasure hunters destroyed it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodie,_California
Sylvia #11
The first time I saw Salt Lake City, having just flown over from Denver, I thought that Denver was built because people came over the broad flat plains, looked at the Rockies and said “Oh! Crap! Look at those things! Let’s just stop here.” While in Salt Lake City they crossed the mountains, looked at the desert and said “Oh! Crap! Look at that! Let’s just stop here.”
Lifeofmind #10:
A friend of mine described a conversation with a lady visiting the USA who lived in a village in England. Based on her description he said “How nice it must be, to go shopping and first go to the bakery then the green grocer, then the butcher shop…” And the English lady responded “Are you kidding? Do you know how much trouble that is? We wish we had a Wal Mart!” Supermarkets and then Superstores got going here for a reason; they were not shoved down our throats.
I recall in an airliner early one evening, flying over some tiny town in eastern Colorado or western Kansas, maybe the panhandle of Oklahoma, and seeing a grain elevator, a small store that was not a 7/11, what was probably a bar, and less than a dozen houses and maybe three times that many trees. What do the people there do? How do they like it?
But, condescending though we may be, we need to realize that living in a tiny town out on the plains of the Midwest, working at what the Left describes as a “dead end job” for what they like to call “chump change” – for 90% plus of the people in the world that constitutes a functional definition of Heaven.
RWE,
The Left denigrates labor. Their insecure exaltation of a TV world populated by either Knowledge Workers or whiskey‘s granite counter top consuming urban sluts makes them fail to comprehend why 98% of humanity when given the chance chose to move to isolated wildernesses or into urban slums. People sought out jobs doing backbreaking manual labor in isolation or toiling in dark satanic mills.
The entire field of Economics can be summed up in two sentences.
1) Life is about choice.
2) The only real costs are opportunity costs.
All else is commentary.
Why did people choose to move into these places that that the Left would only want to visit on a TV screen or as part of an exotic adventure tour with a 5 star hotel at the end of the trail? Unless you were living out the script of the old sitcom Green Acres it wasn’t an aesthetic choice. People moved to these places because it beat the alternatives. People moved willingly into the slums of Manchester to work in the mills because it was better than starving on a farm. People moved willingly to the wilderness of Kansas because it beat starving in Manchester.
Transportation is a major factor in the location of cities.
Akron, Ohio was created because the Cleveland to Portsmouth canal reached its highest point there. Getting canal boats over the hump slowed them down so much that passengers could get out, stretch their legs, have lunch or do some shopping. Once the canal closed down, there was no reason for a city there, but it was propped up by the tire industry for a while.
Chicago became hog butcher to the world because a steam train could make it from the New York docks to the Chicago stockyards and back before the boiler needed to be cleaned.
One of the impressions I have of Australia is that its quite dry. But the first video is full of mist. Its a big place and has to have a lot of variety.
The video does reinforce another impression: the lack of large trees, like the oaks and poplars here. Ive seen the Australian pines that have taken over South Florida, and non of them are very big, despite perfect growing conditions.
I live in Atlanta and love the trees a vegetation. I remember driving from Norfolk to Nashville after a 14 month cruise and being astounded at the trees and greenery. (Part of that cruise was spent in and around Subic Bay, so green was not totally absent)
In the day towns were 7 to 8 miles apart along the railroad. This allowed a farm family time to hitch up the wagon, drive to town on Saturday, do business and get home before dark…and still get to the very local church on Sunday.
Works for horses or mules. Oxen are much slower
I learn more every day at this site. I remember a writer telling me that the California Missions were one day’s ride apart and that the trail was marked by the planting of mustard seed. According to Wikipedia, it was more complex, but there is a note regarding that tradition beliefs still hold re the mustard seed.
I had thought this would be another post re the value of investing in physical gold – spoken of in other posts comments. I did buy some the other day – Luddy Barsen #214 – (Buddy Larsen?) thank you!
I live in a Yukon town called “Whitehorse”. As a result of the Klondike Gold Rush, a combination of English money and American engineering pushed through a railway from the deep water port of Skagway, over the White Pass to a place that is BELOW a white rapids (Whitehorse). From there, paddlewheelers took people and supplies down the river to Dawson City where the Klondike was.
Things died down, of course. In 1939, there were some 300 people in Whitehorse. Then, with WWII and the building of the Alaska Highway (done in 9 months, before environmental reporting!!!), the White Pass Railway provided transport of soldiers, material, etc etc. Now, Whitehorse is a bureaucratic center. And the Railway goes only part way to Whitehorse. It is a tourist thing now. Dawson City still has gold miners. And lots of environmentalists.
Cities are all about people doing stuff. I noticed that the port of San Francisco is chock a block with lawyers and tourists. Over the way in the port of Oakland, ugly old economy flourishes.
Heathermc; I lived in the Yukon for a number of years; panned for gold above Old Crow, claim staker for mining companies, had a small homestead just outside Whitehorse. Best time of my life.
I know what you mean about the bureaucrats. Even in the early 70′s the place was rife with them. I remember a conversation with one decrying the “poverty” of the locals because they lived without electricity, running water, fished and hunted for a major portion of their food needs…they just didn’t get it then and I don’t think they get it now.
There is a little settlement north of Nome, Alaska, and south of Kotzebue called Candle. After the Nome gold rush, in the early 1900s, there was a gold rush at Candle, and the first year there were 5000 people with a bunch of buildings. The whole works. After a year, the place was almost a ghost town. 15 years ago there were about 5 people living there, with more living there seasonally in the summer doing mechanized placer gold mining. There are only a few buildings left, as the town was largely destroyed by fire.
Hello, heathermc! Been in and out of your fair city a number of times with my plane. Also, Dawson City is a neat place. It is still an active gold mining district. If anyone wants to see some real gold mining history, go up Bonanza Creek out of Dawson City, YT. And you can gamble the old fashioned way at Diamond Tooth Gerties. And do not ask about the Sourtoe Cocktail at the Downtown Hotel.
I like this thread. Just for the pure pleasure of reading people’s stories.
The 1920 census showed my home county (796 square miles) to have a population of 37.
Then oil was found. Reached a peak of 6000
permanent with 2000 transient in the l950s.
Went down to about 3500 thereafter. Now runs between 4000 and 5000 steady. Takes more to develop an oilfield than to maintain it. But the oilpatch is a bit more durable than a goldpatch.
County south of us has a town that was non-existent in 1920. Then went to 12,000 to 15000 before decling to 2500 to 3500 steady.
Reason for that high population was transportation. Early days the oil had to be trucked to a railroad and then manually transferred to primitive tank cars. Very labor intensive and NOT real good jobs. Pipelines, tank farms and loading racks ended that era ASAP.
Pretty nice corner of the world out there, if I do say so myself. And yes, what Tom Sowell calls “The Annointed” consider us deprived, depraved and so environmentally degraded as to have become extinct two decades ago and thus only useful as the stuff of their worst nightmares. (Which we strive to make come true, just as a means of recreation.)
Don’t you love it when a plan comes together?