Dahlonega and the Cherokee gold

The first US gold rush, on Cherokee land, with a federal mint to prove it

Gold runs in a band from Virginia to Alabama, but it was richest in north Georgia, and the earliest clear record of it there is an announcement of two gold mines in the Georgia Journal of 1 August 1829. Within months thousands of "Twenty-Niners" were pouring into the mountains, and the land around Dahlonega proved especially rich, its gold unusually pure. Most of them worked the creeks with pans, cradles and sluice boxes; later came tunnels, stamp mills and mercury. The boomtowns ran wild, with gambling houses, saloons and dance halls open day and night, and the miners were a mixed crowd: enslaved men worked some mines, including one owned by John C. Calhoun, while a free Black miner from Augusta, James Boisclair, known as Free Jim, made enough to open the biggest general store in Dahlonega.

The gold lay in the Cherokee Nation. That first winter prospectors crossed the Chestatee River illegally into Cherokee country, and US troops were sent to turn them out, but by 1831 Georgia's governor saw that thousands of intruders could not be removed and saw a chance to take the land instead. The Cherokees called it the Great Intrusion. "Right or wrong they are determined to take the country," the Cherokee Phoenix wrote in February 1829. Andrew Jackson pushed the Indian Removal Act through Congress in 1830, Georgia carved ten new counties out of the Nation in 1832 and handed out Cherokee land by lottery, and when the Supreme Court ruled the encroachment illegal Jackson ignored it. In May 1838 General Winfield Scott issued the removal orders from New Echota. On the Trail of Tears that followed, at least 4,000 Cherokees, about a fifth of the people, died on the way to Oklahoma in the winter of 1838 and 1839.

The town took a Cherokee name, from dalonige, yellow. A branch mint opened there in 1838 and struck more than $6 million in gold coins, dollars to half eagles, before the Confederacy closed it in 1861; surviving Dahlonega coins are prized by collectors. By 1849 the easy gold was playing out, and the mint's assayer, Matthew Stephenson, stood at the courthouse and pointed at Findley Ridge to keep the miners home. "Why go to California? In that ridge lies more gold than man ever dreamt of. There's millions in it." Many went anyway and carried the line west, where it became a catchphrase in Mark Twain's The Gilded Age and may have become "Thar's gold in them thar hills."

The 1836 courthouse is now the Dahlonega Gold Museum, with a complete set of Dahlonega coins, and the college built over the old mint's foundations wears a cupola of Georgia gold leaf.