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5. The Discovery of Gold in Virginia Of all the exciting periods of history one of the most overlooked is the Virginia gold rush era ... the stage was set for it while the earth's first vertebrates began to lumber across the land. Sometime, during the Ordovician period, a volcano erupted south of what is now Quantico, Virginia. In a series of dramatic convulsions the earth rumbled and shook, cracks began to open and race like snakes across its crust, a mountain peak exhaled black puffs, trembled, and wrenched horribly. Then, with one last explosive shudder, it blew. Earth and rocks and flame red iron spittle soared into the air in a vast black cloud raining down upon the land. Along with the generation of intense heat, a molten yellow fluid formed, filling the crevices as they opened noisily in the layers of shifting and fracturing rock. It would be eons before men would find this glittering treasure, deposited with such sound and fury, in a place called Virginia. The recorded history of gold in the state goes back more than two hundred years before America's first gold rush to reports of the precious metal which lured colonists there from England. Discoveries of enormously rich gold and silver mines in Spain's South American colonies aroused the greed of the English and set them capturing and looting Spanish treasure ships. In 1577, Sir Frances Drake's ship, the Golden Hind, successfully attacked the Spanish treasure ship, Spitfire; 55 56 The Gold Seekers and it was well worth the chase for the Spitfire carried thirteen chests of coins, eighty pounds of pure gold, and twenty-six tons of silver. Looting the ships of England's rival, Spain, paid well for in 1580, Drake captured another vessel from which he took the equivalent of more than five million dollars in gold and silver. Sir Walter Raleigh, who also sought gold, writes in his Discoverie in 1596 of a fabled King, the furnishings of whose home, table, and kitchen were made entirely of gold and silver. It was tales like this that made the Europeans ready to risk their lives on dangerous ocean voyages across the Atlantic to explore the New World. Thomas Hariot, one of the first English settlers, reported finding Indians with an abundance of copper, which they used for chains, collars, and drinking cups; and this interested others for they knew copper is sometimes accompanied by gold. Taking for granted that he could profit from vast deposits of gold and silver in Virginia, James I granted the London Company the right "to dig, mine and search for all Manner of Mines of Gold, Silver and Copper" provided they yielded to him "the fifth Part of the same Gold and Silver and the fifteenth Part of all the same Copper." Gold fever came over with the colonists of Jamestown, Virginia in 1608, and their precarious settlement was tossed like a tiny vessel and almost swamped by the excitement of gold seekers. Labor needed to lay the foundations for a selfsufficient , permanent settlement was ignored. How could anyone work on long-term goals what with excited talk about gold, digging gold, washing gold, refining gold, and loading gold! Ridicule from Captain John Smith did not stop Captain John Martin and President Christopher Newport from load128 .203.143] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 04:10 GMT) Discovery of Gold in Virginia 57 ing a ship with yellow dirt and sending it to London where it was found to be pyrite. Hopes of the English promoters and the colonists died. The real gold was soon discovered to be the gold leaf rather than the gold metal and the next craze in Jamestown involved planting tobacco in every available plot to cure and export to England. Interest in gold slumbered in Virginia and it was almost two hundred years before it awakened. Nothing is even written of gold until1826, when Thomas Jefferson reported that a seventeen pennyweight piece was "found on the north side of the Rappahanoc about four miles below the falls" he had no idea that in less than fifty years the confluence of the Rappahannock and the Rapidan rivers would be an important gold mining area. Among the gentle hills of the Virginia Piedmont in the early 1800s, interest in gold was a drowsing giant beginning to awaken and stretch; and by the 1820s the giant was on a hungry rampage. Excitement had spread from North Carolina into Virginia and the...

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