gold rush

Currently I'm reading the book "Heyday" by Kurt Andersen. Actually I'm on the last 60 pages of the 620 page book. It is set in 1848 with 4 friends eventually going out to California to build a small community and find gold. Well, it got me thinking about gold. The real worth of gold is not much because it fails to produce anything. Imagine if people had left gold where it was and never pulled it out of the earth. Obviously gold was not first discovered in the California... it had to be worth something for everyone to get there as fast as possible to mine for it. When it was discovered how was it determined that it had a worth. Funny how that works in perspective.