John Jenkins Designs: The Gold Rush

THE GOLD RUSH

The discovery of gold or silver in the West was usually followed by a rush of people attempting to arrive at the new district first to get established in mining or business. New mining camps were hastily constructed out of materials that could be easily transported over great distances and on difficult terrain. The most common early structure in these camps was the canvas tent

THE GENERAL STORE

Tents were used for both shelter and to operate early businesses in the camps. The entrepreneur with the tent could be in business weeks before his rivals who attempted to build a more elaborate structure, and those first few weeks were a lucrative time to be selling goods or services to the hundreds or even thousands of people pouring into a new camp.

An advantage of tents is that they could be packed up and moved to the next camp in the event that the rush to the current camp turned out to be a bust. Many mining rushes were the result of misinformation or outright fraud. People who’s only investment in the camp was a tent on the ground could pack up and move on to the next rush with little trouble.

Tent cities usually didn’t last more than a year. Any camp that proved to have rich enough mines to last longer than a season would usually transition to wood buildings fairly quickly.

The early economy that developed relied upon entrepreneurs who arrived with sufficient financial resources to become merchants and bankers.