City that was almost empty as people rush to the hills to find gold

Question

Sierra Nevada mountains

James Marshall

Sam Brannan

forty-niners

San Francisco

1848

1850

Sutters sawmill

Answer 1

Hi Allie, from the potential answers on the list you provided we can see that only one of them is a city: San Francisco. It's helpful to recall the California Gold Rush of mid-19th century. About 300,000 prospectors came to California to try their hand at getting rich from gold. San Francisco, from your example above, went from just a couple hundred residents to tens of thousands by the height of the Gold Rush!