Auraria & The First American Gold Rush

Etowah River, near Auraria, Georgia

Auraria is a ghost town in Lumpkin County, Georgia, southwest of Dahlonega, the county seat.

In 1828, a man walked along Findley Ridge and kicked a rock–and discovered it was full of gold. This was in Cherokee territory, and part of present day Lumpkin County, Georgia. The first American gold rush subsequently ensued. 

The Indians were dismayed at the influx of unauthorized settlers. Cherokee leader Major Ridge (aka Pathkiller II, whose maternal grandfather was a Highland Scot) long opposed U.S. government proposals for the Cherokees to sell their lands and remove to the West. However, rapidly expanding white settlement and Georgia's efforts to abolish the Cherokee government caused him to change his mind. Advised by his son John Ridge, Major Ridge came to believe the best way to preserve the Cherokee Nation was to get good terms for their lands from the United States before it was too late. On December 22, 1835, Ridge was one of the signers of the Treaty of New Echota, which exchanged the Cherokee tribal land east of the Mississippi River for land in what is now Oklahoma. The treaty was of questionable legality, and it was rejected by Chief John Ross and the majority of the Cherokee people. Nevertheless, the treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate. The Supreme Court under John Marshall forced the treaty on the Cherokees, and the Cherokee removal from Georgia began. The land east of Auraria was purchased by U.S. Vice President John Calhoun, and he established the Calhoun Mine there. The banks of Etowah River, Camp Creek, and Cane Creek had many mines (e.g., Barlow Mine, Battle Branch Mine, Ralston Mine, Whim Hill Mine, Hedwig-Chicago Mine, Gold Hill Mine, Etowah Mine).

(Source: Wikipedia)

The North Georgia Gold Rush (part 2)

From The New Georgia Encyclopedia, by David Williams (Valdosta State University); the Georgia Humanities Council and the University of Georgia Press:

By late 1829 north Georgia, known at the time as the Cherokee Nation, was flooded by thousands of prospectors lusting for gold. Niles' Register reported in the spring of 1830 that there were four thousand miners working along Yahoola Creek alone. While in his nineties, Benjamin Parks recalled the scene in the Atlanta Constitution (July 15, 1894):

The news got abroad, and such excitement you never saw. It seemed within a few days as if the whole world must have heard of it, for men came from every state I had ever heard of. They came afoot, on horseback and in wagons, acting more like crazy men than anything else. All the way from where Dahlonega now stands to Nuckollsville [Auraria] there were men panning out of the branches and making holes in the hillsides.

The sudden influx of miners into the Cherokee Nation was known even at the time as the Great Intrusion. One writer said in the Cherokee Phoenix, "Our neighbors who regard no law and pay no respects to the laws of humanity are now reaping a plentiful harvest. . . . We are an abused people." But there was little the Cherokees could do; it seemed the louder they protested, the more eagerly the miners came.
Gold rush towns sprang up quickly in north Georgia, particularly near the center of the gold region in present-day Lumpkin County. Auraria became an instant boomtown, growing to a population of 1,000 by 1832. The county seat, called Licklog at the time, in 1833 became known as Dahlonega, for the Cherokee word tahlonega, meaning golden. Within a few months after its establishment nearly 1,000 people were crowded into the settlement, with about 5,000 people in the surrounding county.