California Gold Rush: Who got rich?

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (California Gold Rush mini-series, episode 244) is a short documentary about who really got rich in the Gold Rush. It opens on a gold pan, a metal dish in which miners moved sand and water round and round so the heavy gold stayed at the bottom. Thousands of people came to California, but most of them did not get rich: finding gold was hard work, and food and tools were very expensive. In 1848 a shop owner, Sam Brannan, bought all the pans and shovels he could find, then walked through San Francisco with a bottle of gold, shouting the news. He bought pans for twenty cents and sold them for fifteen dollars each. In 1849 Luzena Wilson was cooking on her camp fire when a hungry miner offered her five dollars, then ten, for her biscuits, a kind of small bread; she understood that cooking could pay more than digging, and later she opened a hotel for the miners.

It is a listening comprehension episode in the past simple, with one past continuous (she was cooking ... when): learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app, 8 on facts and 2 on vocabulary (gold pan, biscuits). The closing question (Would you prefer to look for gold, or sell things to the miners?) opens a short class discussion about work, risk and money.

Materials & prerequisites

The folder holds the audio, the slideshow and the script; there is no lesson plan. The pupil pack and the teacher pack (answers highlighted) are one A4 page each, with the text, three pictures (an 1860 engraving of a miner panning, a portrait of Sam Brannan, a Nevada City street in about 1856), key words and the 10 questions; a one-page pupil sheet and a teacher sheet with the answer key are also included. Learners should know the past simple. The script explains its new words as it goes (gold pan, biscuits), and it gives the value of five dollars in 1849 in today's money.