During the 19th century, the discovery of gold in various parts of the United States sparked a phenomenon known as “gold fever.” An obsession with getting rich off the precious metal caused a stampede of hopefuls to rush to California and other areas where gold had been found. The 1848 discovery of gold in California wasn’t the first, but it led to the largest gold rush of the era, the California Gold Rush, which gave way to the northern Klondike Gold Rush in Canada in the late 1890s. Hundreds of thousands of prospectors flooded to these regions, sometimes enduring treacherous journeys in search of fortune. The gold rushes led to…