Definition of "forty-niner" []

• One who took part in the 1849 California gold rush. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "For example, in "Das Rheingold," which begins the cycle and sets up the struggle between gods and dwarves for control of the Ring, the dwarf Alberich is a forty-niner who steals the gold from the Rhinemaidens in a pristine American West."
• "The Fed's a whiz, providing, like a forty-niner, the gold for fools it stores inside a Fort Knox vault, with all the tools that help us to delay default, which defies all common sense because we know they tell us lies about how much we're going to owe, and how much our children and grandchildren must pay when the clutch. arrives and we are dead as dust."
• "It ran along a coastal barrier the other side of Biscayne Bay from young Miami — in 1868 when Henry Lum, a California 'forty-niner, first glimpsed the island from a schooner, you may be certain it was jungle, cocoanut palms on the sand, mangrove swamp and palmetto thicket ten feet off the beach."