The Georgia Gold Rush: Twenty-Niners, Cherokees, and Gold Fever

by David Williams

Book Overview

The definitive story of Georgia's role in the first U.S. gold rush

In the 1820s a series of gold strikes from Virginia to Alabama caused such excitement that thousands of miners poured into the region. This southern gold rush, the first in U.S. history, reached Georgia with the discovery of the Dahlonega Gold Belt in 1829. The Georgia gold fields, however, lay in and around Cherokee territory. In 1830 the State of Georgia extended...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1570030529
• ISBN13: 9781570030529
• Release Date: November 1994
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Bravo!

As a Georgia native and an amateur historian, I was shocked by my own level of ignorance about the history of Georgia Gold Rush. While there has been a great deal of literary and historical attention given to the forced removal of the Cherokee nation from Georgia and the tragic journey of the Trail of Tears, there has been relatively little recent scholarship devoted to the historical events that precipitated that exile and the utter disregard shown to the Cherokee people as well as their private property by speculators, the state of Georgia and the Federal government in concert. I highly recommend this volume for the general reader of US and southern regional history as well as for Georgians who are willing to develop a more complex appreciation of their state's history.

Accurate portrayal of America's first gold rush.

Mr. Williams documents the Georgia gold rush in an interesting and uncompromising style. So many myths surround this time frame in north Georgia's history. For example, Benjamin Parks is frequently credited with the first modern discovery of gold in Georgia, mostly because he claimed it to an Atlanta reporter fifty years later. Williams quickly disproves virtually all of Park's claims. In the chapters titled "Gold Fever and the Great Intrusion" and "The Cherokee Nation Abandoned," Williams gives one of if not the most accurate concise histories of Cherokee Removal I have ever read. Additional chapters review a miner's life, the people who made money (most weren't miners), and the end of the Georgia gold era in 1849.