Author's Note: This is a piece I wrote for social studies, it is on the California Gold Rush. I wrote this piece from my perspective as a piece of gold. I worked on using A/B transitions and a clear thesis statement.
I sat there for days on end waiting for someone to find me. My color glistened in the sun while I sat in the water and stared at the blue sky. The earth felt cool against my shiny, gold outside. Suddenly, I heard a noise coming towards me, it sounded like a horse. Then a man named James W. Marshall discovered me in a river near Sutter’s mill. He murmured loud enough for me to hear, "I found gold!" He then grabbed a lot of us gold nuggets from the river and gave us a whirl in a bowl. This sparked the California Gold Rush on Jan. 24, 1848. I've been waiting for someone to find me so I can fill my inner gold with knowledge about this "California Gold Rush" and you too can learn about it, as you accompany me on my journey.
About a day later, while on my expedition, tens of thousands of people came to find us while digging up 12 billion tons of earth. Only a few hundred people lived there in the 1840s, but the discovery of us gold nuggets brought unimaginable growth to the big city. San Fransisco soon averaged 30 new houses and two murders a day! A plot of San Francisco real estate that cost $16 in 1847, sold for $45,000 just 18 months later. In less than two years, the city burned to the ground six times, but there was always money to rebuild it bigger and better. Nearly a half-billion dollars worth of us gold nuggets passed through the city in the 1850s.
Besides all of the new houses being sold for huge amounts of money, I learned that the lure of gold unleashed the largest migration in United States history! It drew people from a dozen countries to form a society. Every day I found myself with a new person learning amazing new things. For example, the miners used mercury to extract gold from the ore, contaminating local rivers and lakes with 7,600 tons of the toxic chemical. "EEW!", I thought. In 1852 the take for the year was $80 million. Believe it or not, that would come to be worth $1.9 billion in 2005. But as time went on, we gold nuggets started to become sparse and disappear.
Even though toxic chemicals were being released into the rivers and lakes, and the take for the year was $80 million, people were soon having a hard time finding us little gold nuggets. Eventually there were none of us left. After seven years of mining for my friends and I, the California Gold Rush was over. It wasn't a bad thing that there weren't anymore of us left because San Francisco already had more millionaires than New York or Boston! As time passed, I kept up my travels all over until I was lost. Eventually, I was found and put into a museum as one of the first gold pieces ever discovered. At last I found a new home to retire to! Now everyone can admire my gold sparkle behind a glass case where I am kept safe. I feel honored that I became a part of history and was able to share my story and the part I played in the California Gold Rush.
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