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This gold rush trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and starts at Sutter's Mill on January 24, 1848, and follows the forty-niners by sea and by trail to a San Francisco that grew from 200 people to 36,000 in six years. It covers Sam Brannan's vial of gold, hydraulic mining, the Foreign Miners Tax, Levi Strauss's denim and why the NFL's 49ers are named for prospectors. Then it heads north to the Klondike, with George Carmack and Skookum Jim on Bonanza Creek, the ton of goods every stampeder had to haul over the Chilkoot Pass, Dawson City's boom and Jack London's short mining career. There are stops in Ballarat for the Eureka Stockade and the Welcome Stranger nugget, in Johannesburg, Deadwood, Nome and Otago, and a final section on Discovery's Gold Rush with Parker Schnabel and Tony Beets. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reliable source.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Where was gold discovered in January 1848, setting off the California gold rush?
Sutter's Mill at Coloma
James W. Marshall spotted the shiny metal in the tailrace of a sawmill he was building for John Sutter on the American River. Sutter wanted the news kept quiet.
Q 02Roughly how many people came to California during the gold rush?
300,000
About half came by sea and half overland. Enough of them arrived in the peak year to give the migrants their nickname, the forty-niners.
Q 03Why were the gold seekers called 'forty-niners'?
1849 was the peak year of immigration
Ships and wagon trains poured in through 1849 after President Polk confirmed the discovery to Congress in December 1848.
Q 04Which San Francisco merchant ran through the streets shouting 'Gold! Gold from the American River!'?
Samuel Brannan
Brannan, a newspaper publisher, had first confirmed the rumors, then made sure everyone heard them so he could sell them shovels.
Q 05Which U.S. president confirmed the California gold discovery in an address to Congress in December 1848?
James K. Polk
The New York Herald had broken the story on the East Coast in August. Polk's endorsement turned a rumor into a stampede.
Q 06San Francisco grew from about 200 residents in 1846 to roughly how many by 1852?
36,000
Early on the town briefly emptied out as everyone left for the diggings, and abandoned ships in the harbor were turned into housing and shops.
Q 07In what year did California achieve statehood, fast-tracked by the gold rush?
1850
A state constitution was written in 1849 and adopted by referendum, and California entered the Union in September 1850 as part of the Compromise of 1850.
Q 08Which businessman began selling denim overalls in San Francisco in 1853 while most miners went broke?
Levi Strauss
He became a U.S. citizen that same year. The riveted jeans patent with tailor Jacob Davis came later, in 1873.
Q 09What monthly foreign miners tax did California impose on non-American prospectors?
Twenty dollars
That is roughly $770 a month in today's money. It targeted Latin American and Chinese miners, who also faced organized attacks.
Q 10Which technique, developed in California by 1853, blasted gold-bearing hillsides with jets of water?
Hydraulic mining
By the mid-1880s it had recovered an estimated 11 million troy ounces of gold, along with enormous environmental damage downstream.
Q 11Which NFL team is named after the gold rush miners?
San Francisco 49ers
The team's original 1946 logo showed a prospector firing pistols in the air.
Q 12How long did a sailing voyage from the East Coast to California around Cape Horn typically take?
Four to five months
The route covered about 18,000 nautical miles. The alternative was crossing the Isthmus of Panama by canoe and mule and hoping for a ship on the other side.
Q 13By what classical nickname were the California gold seekers also known?
Argonauts
Like Jason's crew, they were sailing off in search of a golden fleece. Most of them ended up with little more than they started with.
Q 21Which future author joined the Klondike rush but made his money mostly working for other prospectors?
Jack London
Scurvy ended his mining career, but the experience gave him The Call of the Wild and much of his best fiction.
Q 22Roughly how many people set out for the Klondike, and how many actually reached the goldfields?
100,000 set out; 30,000 to 40,000 arrived
Most who persisted did not arrive until summer 1898, by which point the good claims were long gone.
Q 23The discovery of gold where in 1899 drew prospectors away and effectively ended the Klondike rush?
Nome, Alaska
Q 14Where was the first significant gold rush in the United States, in 1799?
Cabarrus County, North Carolina
It centered on today's Reed's Gold Mine east of Charlotte. The Georgia Gold Rush followed thirty years later.
Q 15On what date was gold discovered in the Klondike, triggering the great northern stampede?
August 16, 1896
News did not reach Seattle and San Francisco until the following July, when the ships Excelsior and Portland arrived loaded with gold.
Q 16George Carmack shared the Klondike gold strike with which two Indigenous men?
Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie
The group agreed to name Carmack because they feared authorities would not recognize an Indigenous claimant. Robert Henderson had pointed them toward Rabbit Creek, soon renamed Bonanza.
Q 17How much did Canadian authorities require each Klondike stampeder to bring in supplies?
A year's supply of food
The full kit weighed close to a ton, and most men hauled it themselves in stages up the Chilkoot or White Pass.
Q 18Which town at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers grew from 500 to about 17,000 people by 1898?
Dawson City
Built of wood, isolated and unsanitary, it suffered fires and epidemics while the luckiest miners drank and gambled their fortunes away.
Q 19Which two Alaskan ports were the main gateways to the Klondike trails?
Dyea and Skagway
From there the Chilkoot and White Pass trails led to the Yukon River. Con man Soapy Smith ran Skagway until vigilantes moved against him in 1898.
Q 20What was the name of the steep final incline on the Chilkoot Trail that turned many stampeders back?
The Golden Stairs
At its base sat The Scales, where loads were weighed. Many gave up and abandoned their required ton of gear right there.
Much of Nome's gold lay loose in the beach sand and could be recovered without staking a claim. The 'Three Lucky Swedes' had found it on Anvil Creek.
Q 24Which silent-film star was inspired by photographs of the Chilkoot stampede to make The Gold Rush (1925)?
Charlie Chaplin
The film's famous scenes include the Tramp eating his boiled boot and the dance of the dinner rolls.
Q 25The 1854 Eureka Rebellion, a miners' revolt, took place at which Australian goldfield?
Ballarat
Peter Lalor led the rebels, who swore by the Southern Cross to defend their rights. The battle at the stockade on December 3 lasted minutes.
Q 26What was the Welcome Stranger, found by two Cornish miners in Victoria in 1869?
The largest alluvial gold nugget ever unearthed
John Deason and Richard Oates dug it up at Moliagul. It was so big it had to be broken on an anvil to fit the bank's scales.
Q 27Which Australian city was nicknamed 'Marvellous' thanks to the wealth of the Victorian gold rush?
Melbourne
For a stretch of years Victoria's output beat every country in the world except California, peaking at more than 3 million ounces in 1856.
Q 28The 1886 Witwatersrand gold rush led to the founding of which major city?
Johannesburg
The 'Golden Arc' from Johannesburg to Welkom was once an inland lake where alluvial gold settled. It became the richest goldfield on Earth.
Q 29Which 1874 military survey confirmed gold in the Black Hills and set off a rush onto Lakota land?
The Custer Expedition
Thousands flooded into the new town of Deadwood in 1876. The Homestake outcrop found near Lead that year became America's longest-running gold mine.
Q 30Which Colorado stampede, whose returnees coined 'or Bust,' created Denver City and Boulder City?
The Pike's Peak Gold Rush
The actual diggings were about 85 miles north of the peak that gave the rush its name.