After the Gold Rush, my Californian Mining Adventure

News of the discovery of gold in California in 1848 signalled the start of the world’s first major gold rush. Within the year of 1849 alone the population of the new American territory swelled five-fold as the eighty thousand ‘Argonauts’ hurried there in the hope of claiming a share of the gold riches. Many more followed, including Jeremy Mainwaring-Burton who arrived in California 145 years later to claim his share. Jeremy’s talk is a mixture of ancient and modern, ancient being an account of the 1849 gold rush, and modern being about his adventures in the 1990s prospecting for gold in Venezuela and Columbia, then mining in California.