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News Article
Before California there was the Georgia gold rush
By Eric C. Rodenberg

RENO, Nev. – The California Gold Rush has been celebrated in word, song and deed; but little is taught in school about the earlier Georgia gold rush even though it played a significant part of American history. It lead to the Cherokee “Trail of Tears,” a burgeoning acceptance of “Manifest Destiny” as a national ideal and the ultimate creation of the “Gilded Age.”

In 1799 the first gold nugget was discovered in the wilds of western North Carolina. The discovery was described as an anomaly. It would be another 30 years before truly substantive gold discoveries were made in North Carolina and Georgia, all by men with no knowledge of mining.

“To fully understand this, you have to remember, that in the early 1800s, the inner regions of North Carolina and Georgia were remote areas, miles away from New York, Philadelphia and Boston,” says Fred Holabird, owner of Holabird Western Americana. “This was a group of farmers and merchants. They didn’t know the first thing about mining.”

Very little was known about geology at the time. The first geologic map was printed in Europe in 1799. It would be another 25-30 years before any similar maps would be produced in the United States. “That’s one of the things that make the Georgia and North Carolina gold rushes so remarkable,” Hollabird said. “Not a single man in the Georgia-North Carolina gold rush had been a miner. They worked without any guidance, using their own ingenuity, and did a fabulous job extracting ore from the land. It was American ingenuity at its best.”

In 1828, substantial deposits of gold were found in northern Georgia. The land had already been ceded by the Cherokees to the United States by an 1817 treaty. But, it wouldn’t be long until lands retained by the Cherokees were found to also be bearing gold.

“We made a lot of treaties with the Indians, at first to live at peace with each other,” Holabird says. “But the white man got greedy. The treaty on the River Chestatee stipulated that all the lands north of the Chestatee belonged to the Indians. There was gold there and the white man wanted it.”

By 1829, thousands of miners – now known as the “Twenty-Niners” – poured into the area. The town of Dahlonega, derived from a Cherokee word referring to the yellow color of gold, became a boom town in 1832. It was a rough and lawless town, with a diverse lot of miners from throughout the young country and parts of Europe.

In very short order, the miners simply overwhelmed the Indians, pushing them off their own land. The Cherokees had little hope of protection from Georgia law enforcement.

Throughout the 1820s, Cherokee leaders and their attorneys fought the State of Georgia in courts. Georgia declared the Cherokee a northern tribe, and not indigenous to the state. Therefore, this northern tribe could not be considered sovereign over any Georgia land.

Despite a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of the Cherokees, the executive branch of the federal government and the State of Georgia in 1832 divided up the Indians’ property and sold off parcels of 40-acre gold lots. In 1836, a faction of Cherokee leaders, lead by an American military officer, signed the Treaty of New Echota, which ceded all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi River to the government and made provisions to be relocated to the Indian Territory – now the State of Oklahoma.

In 1838, Georgia and the federal government began forcibly removing Cherokee families who had neither applied for state citizenship nor moved to the Indian Territory on their own. “The Trails of Tears” had begun.

So much gold was extracted from northern Georgia that the U.S. Congress chartered a branch mint at Dahlonega in 1835. During the next 23 years the Dahlonega Mint coined more than $6 million in gold. Quarter eagles ($10 face value), half eagles ($25 face value), and eagle ($50) gold dollars. Three-dollar coins were also struck for one year at Dahlonega.

Coins minted in Dahlonega were of high quality and are highly prized by coin collectors.

A collection of these rare and beautiful coins from the Appalachian Gold Belt is among the highlights of a large 3,000-lot, four-day sale at Holabird Western Americana Collections’ Reno gallery on March 15-18. About 1,200 lots in the sale come from the collection of Al Adams, a 40-year collector, specializing in material from the Georgia-North Carolina gold rushes, 1799-1840s.

“This is the largest and best collection of Eastern gold rush material ever amassed in private hands,” Holabird said. “I knew he had been collecting for years and had a massive collection, but I was surprised at the content and quality We displayed some of the material at a large coin show in Florida in January, and it just blew people away. There’s a lot of interest in this sale.”

By the early 1840s, the gold mines in Georgia and North Carolina were pretty much played out. It was estimated that 870,000 troy ounces of gold were mined in Georgia, which was only a percentage of what was soon to be mined during the 1848 California Gold Rush. “Move West, thar’s gold in them thar hills,” was reportedly coined during this era in north Georgia.

“The California Rush changed everything,” Holabird said. “It was a game-changer; it literally catapulted us to the top as a world power. It was new money that came into play. It helped build a transcontinental railroad. It expanded our country.” And much of the work was done by these same miners who began in Georgia.”

Although the Adams collection is the anchor of his large auction, it is complemented by a several other large collections.

Contact: (775) 851-1859

www.fhwac.com

3/9/2018
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