The authors then use a quote from a primary source, Stanley Pearce’s eyewitness account of the scene, to highlight why the crowd might catch “gold fever”:
Pearce suggests that gold was so plentiful the adventurers had to come up with creative ways to carry it: in moccasins, oil cans, and blankets.
Then, in paragraph 3, the authors move away from the scene in Seattle and break the sequential structure of events, to describe the arrival of a group of miners on another ship in San Francisco. The miners in San Francisco had also found gold in the Klondike region of northern Canada. This event came three days earlier and helped cause the “gold fever” in Seattle. Briefly breaking away from the sequential structure to use a cause-and-effect text structure helps the authors show how the San Francisco event led to the crowd waiting in Seattle, eager to learn about the miners’ fabulous discovery of gold.
