Australian gold rushes a £1,000 reward as "the first actual producer of alluvial gold for the market". The following goldfields were discovered in New South Wales during July 1851: On 20 July 1851 gold was found near present-day Castlemaine, Victoria (Mt Alexander Goldfields) at Specimen Gully in today's Castlemaine suburb of Barkers Creek. The gold was first found by Christopher Thomas Peters, a shepherd and hut-keeper on the Barker's Creek, in the service of William Barker. When the gold was shown in the men's quarters Peters was ridiculed for finding fool's gold, and the gold was thrown away. Barker did not want his
Klondike Gold Rush Dawson alone during a single week in August. The Klondike gold rush was over. Only a handful of the 100,000 people who left for the Klondike during the gold rush became rich. They typically spent $1,000 ($27,000) each reaching the region, which when combined exceeded what was produced from the gold fields between 1897 and 1901. At the same time, most of those who did find gold lost their fortunes in the subsequent years. They often died penniless, attempting to reproduce their earlier good fortune in fresh mining opportunities. Businessman and miner Alex McDonald, for example, continued to accumulate land