A gold rush is a period of feverish migration of workers into the area of a dramatic discovery of commercial quantities of gold, to pan or placer mine for gold.
Gold rushes became a feature of the 19th century. Factors that led thousands at a time to abandon daily Industrial Revolution drudgery and travel to gold fields (diggings) included
- relative improvements in
- transport networks, and
- in means of communication that supported rumour-distribution chains,
- some social discontent, and
- an international gold-based monetary system.
- California (1849 onwards),
- Australia (from the 1850s),
- Otago, New Zealand (after about 1861), and
- the Klondike in Yukon, Canada (around the end of the 19th century).
Wikipedia articles cover the gold rushes in