Budapest museum shows Hungarians in the Californian Gold Rush

Hungarian 1848/49 emigre officers in California’s Gold Rush and their career in gold is the focus of an exhibition that opened in the Hungarian National Museum on Friday.

The first nuggets of gold were found in California in January, 1848, triggering a inflow of hundreds of thousands within a few years to the wild west, the director of the museum said.

Among them were a group of highly qualified, well-educated, foreign language speaking military officers who emigrated to the United States after the crushing of Hungary’s 1848/49 War of Independence, Benedek Varga told a press conference.

They however made their fortune and career not as “average gold diggers”, but thanks to their skills and newly acquired knowledge as engineers, metallurgists, smelters and assayers, he said.

One of them, Count Samuel Wass from a family of Transylvanian aristocrats, arrived in San Francisco in Sept. 1850 and founded the Wass, Molitor and Co. assaying office with Ágoston Molitor and Károly Uznay in the following year, Csaba Tóth, the exhibition’s curator said.