In the past, students wanting to learn about the gold rush had to spend hours at the library pouring over books and hoping to develop an understanding of what it must have been like. Today, children can experience this time in history in ways that have never before been available to them. By simply doing an online search for gold rush museums, any student can quickly find themselves taken virtual tours of history and learning about it in an interactive way and not trying to imagine it from books.
Alaska One such online resource is http://www.library.state.ak.us/goldrush/. Here, students of all ages or anyone who is interested can peruse maps, read stories, examine a miner’s life and even meander through what they call the Alaska Gold Lode. This is a section of the website devoted to photos and other images from the Alaskan gold rush. As an added bonus, this library offers information for teachers to help them teach this historical event in a way that all students can understand.
California The website http://www.museumca.org/goldrush/ is another resource on any student’s path to gold rush understanding. In 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, which kicked off the great California gold rush and this, along with a veritable fountain of other vital information is just a few mouse-clicks away. Like the Alaskan state library webpage, this site offers curriculum materials, images, stories and even information on the rush for silver and the effects of this push on Native Americans in the area.
The Klondike
Historical gold rush information can also be found on the Internet at http://www.lib.washington.edu/specialcoll/exhibits/klondike/. This site specializes in information from the Klondike gold rush that includes stories, photos, art, and many other ways that a student can begin to understand the nuances of being a miner in this area at that time. When the promise of gold drew men to the area, they often arrived without prior understanding of the bitter cold. This meant they were often horribly underequipped, but suffering gold fever so badly they wouldn’t leave.
Where else can a student learn of these events so completely as when they travel through the Internet to some of the most important gold rush locations? The Klondike, California and Alaskan gold rushes were some of the most important events in mining history. There is no longer any good reason why any student should have to learn these events in the back room of some stuffy library when they are easily accessible online with a variety of options for students to use in order to learn as much as they can about the gold rush.
