Gold mining in California – Historic Print
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
A window into the past: Gold mining in California, preserved in this antique lithograph. An authentic image from the Library of Congress, it carries the weight of the real historical record.
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Gold mining in California
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Issued by the New York firm Currier & Ives around 1871, this hand-colored lithograph looks back at California's gold fields more than twenty years after the rush of 1848 transformed the territory. By the early 1870s the easy surface gold was largely gone, and mining had shifted toward hydraulic methods, quartz mills, and deeper digging that required capital and machinery. Currier & Ives sold inexpensive prints to households across the country, turning scenes like this into affordable images of western enterprise. The firm's catalog raisonné lists it as number 2622, one of many western subjects the company produced in this period.
| Created / published | New York : Published by Currier & Ives, c1871. |
|---|---|
| Medium | 1 print : lithograph, hand-colored. |
| Genre | Lithographs Hand-colored 1870-1880. |
| Notes | Currier & Ives : a catalogue raisonné / compiled by Gale Research. Detroit, MI : Gale Research, c1983, no. 2622 |
| Subjects | Gold mining--California--1870-1880. |
| Source | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division |
| Original scan | 1,536 × 1,122 px · prints to 5 × 4 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-HPA-173920 |
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