Gold Rush

What made gold so appealing
When an annual cash income of $350 in 1847 made Eddin Lewis one of the most prosperous farmers in Sangamon County, Illinois, and when a young man such as C.C. Mobley could record in his diary that his company of miners had made $350 a piece in two weeks during 1850, who wouldn't be tempted by gold? (Starr, 1986)
The individual's who became the wealthy and prominent in the west were unique in the history of the world. Their wealth was sometimes the result of an idea that provided them with wealth not through generations of stewardship of land and education of offspring, but rapidly through wit or fortune. Their importance and power grew, as did their acquisiti...