The early years of Western mining were shaped by the accomplishments of exceptional individuals, beginning with the Californian Gold Rush in the middle of the 19th century and ending with the Dolgellau Gold Belt in Wales. Here are five of the most well-known miners of the time.

George Hearst was born in Missouri to farming parents in 1820. After a career as one of the first well-known miners in the United States, George Hearst went on to have a net worth that was equal to one-seventh of the GDP of the entire United States. He also served two terms as a senator from California.

In 1850, as part of the 19th-century Gold Rush, Hearst moved to California. There, he worked as a quartz miner and prospector for nine years before buying a stake in the Nevada Ophir silver mine. The mine had produced 38 tons of silver ore by the end of the year, which was melted in San Francisco and sold for $91,000, or $2.5 million in 2016 dollars.
He continued to invest in the Pacific mine in New Mexico, the Anaconda mine in Montana, the Homstake mine in South Dakota, and the Ontario silver mine in Utah as part of the group Hearst, Haggin, Tevis, and Co., the latter of which contributed $12 million to his $19 million personal fortune at his death.

After running for governor of California unsuccessfully in 1882, he was appointed to the US Senate in 1886 after John Miller's death due to his wealth and fame. In 1887, he won a second election and served until his death in 1891.

In the HBO series Deadwood, Hearst was recently portrayed as a villain in his search for the Anaconda mine. In 1988, he was elected to the American Mining Hall of Fame.

Richard Sleath
While the English Isles partook in a gold mining blast in Ribs, a portion of its locals looked for professions on board. Sleath, who was born in Scotland, moved to Australia as a teenager in 1877. There, he started a mining career that earned him the nickname "Hero of 92" for leading a miners' strike in 1892.

In 1889, he was elected president of the New South Wales Amalgamated Miners' Association (Ama), where he successfully recruited 2,500 of the state's 3,000 miners. In November 1889 he conflicted with BHP Enterprise Tech Ecosystem the organization had been established four years beforehand to separate silver and lead from the Messed up Slope mine, yet yielded to Sleath's requests to force its non-association laborers to join the association.
In contravention of the terms that Sleath had negotiated following his encounter with BHP in 1889, mining companies proposed the introduction of contracts for underground work in 1892 due to low metal prices and the depletion of ore reserves.

Sleath again drove talks, in any event, venturing to such an extreme as to go to a gathering of BHP investors in July 1892, yet was at last captured for impelling uproar and connivance, alongside other AMA pioneers.

He was let go the following year and went on to represent the Labor Party in parliament before running as an independent candidate.

He kicked the bucket in 1922 and was cherished in the Australian Mining Corridor of Notoriety.

John Van Nostrand Dorr was born in 1872 in New Jersey. Before becoming one of the most prolific inventors in the mining industry, Dorr secured over 20 patents for new mining equipment.

While working at gold plants in South Dakota and Colorado, he concocted the Dorr Classifier, a strategy for isolating fine solids from fluid, which had quick effects for the mining business, as well as in sewage treatment, water sanitization and sugar creation. He also worked on the Dorr Air-lift Agitator and the Dorr Thickener, which mixed liquids continuously and allowed for continuous thickening of ore slurry.

Throughout the span of his vocation, Dorr was granted the John Scott Decoration for his designing work, the Compound Business Award for his commitments to the business, and the Perkin Decoration for the monetary advantages of his creations.

He passed away in 1962, and in 1988, he became the fourth individual to be inducted into the American Mining Hall of Fame.

Kate Rice
Kathleen Creighton Starr Rice was brought into the world in Ontario in 1882. She became well-known for her extensive exploration projects, in which she traveled 800 kilometers across Canada by foot, dog sled, and canoe to locate deposits of zinc, vanadium, gold, and nickel.

She is referred to by the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame as an "innovative dog trainer" and an explorer who has a deep respect for First Nations groups, who frequently collaborated with her on her travels.

After finding deposits, Rice made significant contributions to mining projects; Between 1920 and 1922, she staked 16 nickel and copper claims that were worth $5 million in 1925 on Rice Island in Weskusko Lake in central Manitoba. After that, in 1928, she established the Rice Island Nickel Company, in which she held a stake for the subsequent thirty years.

She also brought the use of borax crystals to North America. Today, these crystals are used in metallurgical processes as a flux, an agent that cleans or purifies a chemical. Additionally, Rice created plans for a hydropower plant at Wekusko Falls, where she discovered her first copper and nickel.

In 1962, Rice moved to a nursing home in Manitoba following long stretches of residing in disconnection in the wild. She passed away in 1963, and in 2013, she was inducted into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame.

Herbert Hoover
The 31st Leader of the US spent a lot of his initial life working in the mining business. Hoover moved on from Stanford with a degree in topography in 1895, preceding working with the US Geographical Overview and Bewick, Moreing and Co., a London-based gold digger with tasks in Western Australia.

Hoover then filled in as the central architect for the Chinese Agency of Mines and senior supervisor of the Chinese Designing and Mining Partnership, prior to getting back to the US and bringing in cash through putting resources into and restoring battling mining activities all over the planet.

By 1914, his mining projects had conceded him an individual fortune of $4m, comparable to $97m in 2017 cash.

Mining was a frequent topic of Hoover's writing and speaking; a portion of the discussions he gave at Columbia and Stanford colleges were distributed in the 1909 reading material Standards of Mining.

Along with his better half Lou, he finished an English interpretation of De re metallica, a sixteenth century text on mining practices and cycles initially written in Latin by the German metallurgist Georgius Agricola. The couple received the Mining and Metallurgical Society's first Gold Medal in 1914 after five years of translation work.

From 1929 to 1933, Hoover held positions as president, secretary of commerce, and director of the food administration in the United States government. He passed away in 1964, and in 1988, along with Hearst and Dorr, he was inducted into the American Mining Hall of Fame.