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4444 Orchard Lane & State Hwy 78, Wynola CA 92036
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Gold was both plentiful and - by happy geologic accident- easy to extract, making the gold-bearing gravels of California's rivers into what has been described as "the finest opportunity that, has ever been offered on any mining frontier." A contemporary newspaper put it slightly differently: "The whole country, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and from the sea shore to the base of the Sierra Nevadas, resounds with the cry of 'gold, GOLD, GOLD!' while the field is left half planted, the house half built, and everything neglected but the manufacture of shovels and pickaxes."
Today, a few mines and the remains of several boom
towns have been preserved in a variety of state parks. Most of them, including
the Marshall Gold Discovery site, the fabulous Empire Mine, the
historic town of Columbia, the rich gold deposits at Plumas Eureka, and
the controversial hydraulic mining pits at Malakoff Diggins, are located
in or near the Mother Lode region of the central Sierra Nevada foothills.
The riverfront embarcadero and commercial district of the Gold Rush preserved at
Old Sacramento teemed with activity as would-be miners
disembarked from riverboats and regrouped before setting out for the Mother
Lode. Outfitters and other merchants there thrived on the gold trade,
portrayed in the re-created Huntington & Hopkins Hardware Store.
The mining boom that Captain John Sutter himself set in motion nearly destroyed
his Nuevo Helvetia agricultural empire headquartered at Sutter’s Fort.
A portion of his Mexican land grant became the bustling Gold Rush boomtown of
Sacramento.
While gold-seekers were pouring through Sacramento and into the Sierra, deposits
of the precious metal were also discovered in the Klamath Mountains of northwest
California. Today, ruins of the historic town of Shasta
and the Chinese temple at Weaverville Joss House State Historic Park
recall the days of the Klamath gold rush. In combination, the Mother Lode and
the Klamath gold fields produced the modern-day equivalent of more than $25
billion in gold before the turn of the century, with operations continuing at
Empire Mine until as late as 1956.
Between the 1860s and the turn of the century, prospectors found gold in a
number of locations in California. One of the Wests largest authentic ghost
towns is Bodie in the eastern Sierra Nevada, now a state historic park
that preserves the abandoned buildings of the rough-and-tumble mining town that
sprang up in response to a gold strike in 1877.
In Southern California, three historic gold mining areas lie within the state
parks. Park headquarters at Red Rock Canyon State Park is on the site of
what was once an important community in a region that produced several million
dollars in gold, primarily in the 1890s -including one 14-ounce nugget.
At Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, visitors can tour the remains of the
Stonewall Mine, which produced $2 million worth of gold between 1870 and 1892.
