Queen Charlottes Gold Rush Queen Charlottes Gold Rush The Queen Charlottes Gold Rush was a gold rush in the southern Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii) of what is now the North Coast of British Columbia, Canada, in 1851. The rush was touched off in March 1851 when a Haida man sold a 27-ounce nugget in Fort Victoria for 1,500 blankets. The crew of the Hudson's Bay Company vessel "Una" were the first to mine, discovering a vein 6.5" wide, 80' long at 25% gold content. As the crew began blasting, Haida would rush into the blast site to gather gold, competing with the crew.
Witwatersrand Gold Rush the growth of Cape Town, which was more than 200 years older. The gold rush saw massive development of Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand, and the area remains the prime metropolitan area of South Africa. One consequence of the gold rush was the construction of the first railway lines in this part of Africa. As a result of the rapid development of the goldfields on the Witwatersrand in the 1880s and the demand for coal by the growing industry, a concession was granted by the ZAR government to the Netherlands-South African Railway Company (NZASM) on July 20, 1888, to construct a