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working people who had moved to towns and cities where they increasingly lost control of their work. That was what made gold so appealing, the ideal of owning the fruits of one's labor. When an annual cash income of $350 in 1847 made Eddin Lewis one of the most prosperous farmers in Sangamon County, Illinois, and when a young man such as C.C. Mobley could record in his diary that his company of miners had made $350 a piece in two weeks during 1850, who wouldn't be tempted by gold? (Starr, 1986) The individual's who became the wealthy and prominent in the west were unique in the history of the world.
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