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Were there any questions you couldn't answer?
There were a lot of those. One was "How many people got rich in the gold
fields?" If you were a successful miner, you often didn't let anybody know.
Because if you had a lot of gold, somebody might beat you up, shoot you, or
kill you for your gold. There was a lot of dishonesty and violence. So, many
people who got rich never told anyone. Others bragged about it, and those
people we do know about. And we know that most people didn't get rich.
We also know that a lot of people failed at gold mining, but they tried
something else and succeeded. Gold miners needed someone to carry the mail.
Someone to move goods up the Sacramento River on a ship. Someone to fix mining
tools that got broken. People who failed at mining sometimes got fabulously
rich running a steamship or developing an express company to carry the mail, or
running a store. During the Gold Rush, there were lots of ways to get rich.
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