Gold Rush Quotes

During the Gold Rush, most would-be miners lost money, but people who sold them picks, shovels, tents and blue-jeans (Levi Strauss) made a nice profit.

The great Pacific Railway is commenced... Immigration will soon pour into these valleys. Ten millions of emigrants will settle in this golden land in twenty years... This is the grandest enterprise under God!

A gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar at the bottom.

Move to California - my first impression of the Wild West.

Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.

I left Montana in Spring of 1866, for Utah, arriving at Salt Lake city during the summer.

My favorite Bob Dylan record is the very first one where he sings one Bob Dylan song and the rest of them are his interpretations of the Dust Bowl-era folk songs, or even going back as far as the mass influx of people coming into the U.S. during the gold rush. His interpretations of those songs are incredible.

Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble.

… the admission, as a state, of California, from which we have been excluded by congressional agitation?

My grandmother ... came here, not only like so many others because of the streets 'being paved with gold' and all, but because she wanted to leave the place where the streets were paved with people who had not gone to America.

The public conviction that a railroad linking the West and the East was an absolute necessity became so pronounced after the gold discoveries of '49 that Congress passed an act in 1853 providing for a survey of several lines from the Mississippi to the Pacific.

It never bothered me that people made fun of my passion for gold... I would never feel bad when people ridiculed me for my fascination with gold.

The first treasure California began to surrender after the Gold Rush as the oldest: her land.

Everybody was talking of “Gold! gold!!” until it assumed the character of a fever. Some of our soldiers began to desert; citizens were fitting out trains of wagons and pack-mules to go to the mines. We heard of men earning fifty, five hundred, and thousands of dollars per day, and for a time it seemed as though somebody would reach solid gold. Some of this gold began to come to Yerba Buena [San Francisco] in trade, to disturb the value of merchandise, particularly of mules, horses, tin pans, and articles used in mining.

I think the American West really attracts me because it's romantic. The desert, the empty space, the drama.

I live for playing live. All my records are live, since After the Gold Rush, with the exception of Trans and the vocals on Landing on Water.

For California Direct Extraordinary Inducements 35 Days to Gold Regions Steamship Nicaragua The Quickest, Safest, Cheapest Price of Passage Through: 90 Dollars

At a meeting which occurred in Washington on the 3d of November […] the President decided that while the orders heretofore issued forbidding the occupation of the Black Hills country by miners should not be rescinded, still no fixed resistance by the military should be made to the miners going in.... Will you therefore cause the troops in your Department to assume such attitude as will meet the views of the President in this respect.

I was surprised at how cosmopolitan the Gold Rush was: prospectors were of all races, genders, and countries. I was equally surprised at how fast gold prospecting became big business.

Anything for gold and experience.

The conquistadors and their followers were very rough people, and they were fixated on gold and silver. They were oblivious to the astonishing achievements of the Inca civilisation.

Every seaport as far south as San Diego, and every interior town, and nearly every rancho from the base of the mountains in which the gold has been found, to the Mission of San Luis, south, has become suddenly drained of human beings. Americans, Californians, Indians and Sandwich Islanders, men, women and children, indiscriminately.

Break windows, smoke cigars, and stay up late. Tell 'em to do that, they'll find a little pot of gold.

In 1900, as the immigrants come down the gangplank into Jersey City, they expect the streets to be paved with gold, and they were only paved with gold in Frank Baum's 'The Wizard of Oz,' of course.

For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.