5 US Gold Rushes Not in California

In 1799, the 12-year-old son of John Reed, a former Hessian soldier in the Revolutionary War, discovered a 17-pound yellow “rock” in Little Middle Creek on the family farm about 30 miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina. It served as a doorstop for about three years before a jeweler recognized what it was and paid $3.50 for the large gold nugget—a fraction of its value ($3,500 then, more than $100,000 today).

When word got out about the young nation’s first big gold strike, hundreds flocked to the area. Realizing his mistake, Reed joined forces with others and began a feverish hunt for more nuggets. One weighing 28 pounds—still the largest discovered east of the Mississippi River—was found by an enslaved boy named Peter. Established in 1803, Reed Gold Mine unearthed tons of the precious metal after placer deposits (loose gold in streams) played out. North Carolina led the United States in gold production until the California discovery nearly 50 years later.

While accounts vary, gold was discovered in 1828 about 80 miles north of what today is Atlanta. The rush commenced the following year and became even more feverish in 1830, when another strike was reported on land belonging to the Cherokee Nation. "The news got abroad, and such excitement you never saw,” Benjamin Parks, an early finder, later told the Atlanta Constitution. “Men came from every state I had ever heard of. They came afoot, on horseback and in wagons, acting more like crazy men than anything else.”

Tens of thousands of miners and others seeking their fortunes converged on Georgia, causing tensions to boil over between settlers and Native Americans. To facilitate access to the gold fields, President Andrew Jackson authorized the Indian Removal Act of 1830, pushing tribal nations off their ancestral land. Nearly 125,000 Cherokee and other Indigenous peoples were resettled in the dead of winter to what is now Oklahoma, in what became known as the Trail of Tears. Georgia gold mining continued until the 1840s, when the strikes dwindled and news of a huge find in California drew miners away.

“With the discovery of gold, settlers rushed into lands occupied by the Cherokee,” Tuffnell said. The [government] didn’t believe it could keep white settlers out and “was really interested in exploiting the land. It sets a template of who is on the land and how it should be used in the future.”

As with Georgia decades earlier, the gold rush in South Dakota rippled far beyond the dig sites. It began modestly, with miners trickling into the Black Hills after a small strike near present-day Custer. By 1876, that trickle turned into a torrent with the discovery of rich placer gold deposits in Deadwood Gulch. Prospectors soon traced the source of this deposit upstream, launching a mine that would become a powerhouse of global production—eventually yielding 10 percent of the world’s gold supply over the next 125 years.

There was one major problem: This land belonged to the Lakota people by the terms of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. But when thousands of settlers flooded into the area and built the Wild West boomtown of Deadwood, the U.S. government broke the treaty, seizing the land and forcibly displacing the Lakota. In response, Indigenous resistance intensified. Under the spiritual and strategic leadership of Sitting Bull, Native forces delivered a stunning defeat to the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn. But U.S. military campaigns continued, and by 1881, the Lakota were forced to surrender and relocate to reservation lands.

“This ignites the Great Sioux War, the last large Indian war,” says Wolff, author of the 2024 book The Gold Rush: Black Hills History Tours. “It ends the dominance of the Lakota in this part of the country. Of the various native groups that practiced war, the Lakota were the strongest. This war broke them.”

The discovery of gold in California—and in other territories west of the Mississippi River—played a powerful role in accelerating America’s westward expansion. Beginning in 1859, a series of strikes in Colorado drew throngs of fortune-seekers to the Rocky Mountains. With banners on their wagons proclaiming “Pikes Peak or Bust,” hopeful prospectors poured into the region with hopes of becoming rich. This rush coincided with the famed Comstock Lode silver discovery in Nevada, further stoking dreams of wealth and luring even more migrants to the rugged frontier.

“The hunt for precious metals filled in the map of the West,” said David A. Wolff, historian and professor emeritus at Black Hills State University in South Dakota. “That’s what gold rushes and silver rushes did.”

Despite its name, the Colorado Gold Rush didn’t begin at Pikes Peak. The first major discovery occurred about 85 miles north of the 14,000-foot summit. In the spring of 1859, the region—soon to be designated the Colorado Territory—saw its population swell by an estimated 100,000 “Fifty-Niners” in search of fortune.

While that initial strike played out by 1861, subsequent finds fueled the momentum. Among them: a bonanza at what became Central City mining district (known as “The Richest Square Mile on Earth” for two decades). Strikes in Golden City, Clear Creek, Cripple Creek and at other mines kept the Colorado rush active until the end of the 19th century.

This gold rush was, in many ways, an offshoot of the legendary Klondike strike of 1896. When tens of thousands of fortune-seekers surged into Canada’s Yukon Territory, most found that the richest claims had already been staked. Undeterred, many turned westward to Alaska, where new discoveries reignited their hopes. Gold was found in Nome in 1898, in Fairbanks by 1902 and at several other promising sites about the same time. According to the 1960 Johnny Horton song: “Where the river is windin’, big nuggets they’re findin’, North to Alaska, we go north, the rush is on.”

An economic depression in the 1890s drove waves of desperate fortune-seekers north in search of gold. Between 1890 and 1900, Alaska’s white settler population skyrocketed. The 1898 Nome discovery triggered a particularly dramatic boom: The town’s populace surged to more than 20,000 in a matter of months. Gold was initially found in plain sight—scattered along the windswept beaches of the Bering Sea. Once the visible nuggets were gone, miners used sluices and hydraulic systems to wash away soil and expose deeper veins.

In 1902, Italian immigrant Felice Pedroni—better known by his Americanized name, Felix Pedro—struck gold just north of Fairbanks, igniting another rush. Miners flocked to the town, though many found themselves working for larger companies that had already secured most of the valuable claims. The frenzy persisted for nearly a decade, but by 1911, the Alaskan gold fields had largely played out.