RP352 Gold Fever

 RP352 Gold Fever

In a tent nestled deep within the Canadian wilderness, a prospector named John heaves a sigh. It's 1865, and he's caught up in his third gold rush. This time, it's Big Bend Country in Canada, but it could be anywhere. After all, it's always the same story. Some lucky soul discovers a gold nugget, and before you know it, people are flooding in from all around the world. They all come with the same dream, but only a few of them get to walk away rich.
He closes his eyes and listens to the rain pounding on his tent. He remembers his first chance, the Georgia gold rush of 1829. He was just a boy back then, swept up in his father's gold fever. The trek to Georgia was hard, and by the time they got there, thousands of other miners had already arrived. The early comers had already uncovered most of the convenient gold by panning for it in Georgia's rivers. Panning was a cheap and simple technique by which you used a pan to search for gold in the riverbed. The Georgia that John and his father discovered was one with no easy gold left. Only rich people could retrieve what remained, because they had enough money to buy the equipment necessary to dig underground.
Although his father died poor having never discovered his pot of gold, John inherited his gold fever. In 1849, John was one of the 90,000 people who traveled west during the California gold rush. This was the biggest gold rush of all time. It wasn't easy to get to California overland because there were no railways, so John took a ship that sailed from the east coast of America all the way around the southern tip of the continent of South America. Once he arrived, he set out for the mountains immediately. Since all of the land was owned by the government, prospectors were allowed to keep whatever gold they found. They just had to stake a claim to prove they got there first. Unfortunately, the only thing that John ever found was a terrible case of dysentery in San Francisco, the city that the gold rush built.