forty-niner
/fɔːti ˈnʌɪnə
/noun
A seeker for gold in the California gold rush of 1849.During the great California gold rush of 1849, thousands of forty-niners made fortunes mining gold....
- Beyond the sudden wealth, the celebrity criminals, and a few famous writers, the forty-niners ushered California into the modern age with an environmental disaster of the first magnitude.
- We identified the person in the photograph as Mary McCloskey, a young girl who sought her fortune in the California goldfields as a forty-niner.
