Gold Country

From the town of Chico, I again headed south.

This time to Yuba City.

Turning

eastbound on

Route 20, 

I climbed

into the

Sierra

Nevada

Mts.

This area of California is known as Gold Country. In 1849 John Sutter discovered gold at Sutter's Mill (further to the south in Coloma County). News of Sutter's strike quickly reached back East--causing a great influx of fortune seekers.

Gold fever
caused entire crews to abandon ship while still in port.


San Francisco Bay became littered with abandonded "ghost-ships"!

Boomtowns quickly sprang up to service the needs of 49'ers (as these hopefuls became known).  By the 1850s, the towns of Grass Valley and Nevada City had become hubs of California's burgeoning Gold Rush. Grass Valley is said to have been the richest gold-mining-town in all of California.

However, the gold ore in Nevada Co. and Placer Co. was not easily gotten. Sutter had found free gold flakes and nuggests in what is known as a placer deposit. The gold-ore around Grass Valley was in the form of lode deposits; this meant mining-for-gold--as opposed to panning-for-gold.

Mining hardpack gold is expensive and dangerous work. The Empire Mine in Grass Valley employed thousands of Cornish miners to dig extensive networks of extremely deep shafts and tunnels. The Cornwall region of England had a long tradition of hardpack mining of metal-ores.

The extraction and refinement process in load mining is also much more complicated requiring stamps, furnaces, and harsh chemicals.

Wthout the use of the Cornish Pump and similar ingenuities, mining in this area would have been near impossible. A visit to the Empire Mine State Historic Park in Grass Valley is the best place to learn more about how gold was mined in this region of California. A free museum in the visitor center provides a broad overview.


Empire Mine State Historic Park offers guided tours of the mine yard. There you can look down a lighted mine shaft that connnects to 367 miles of abandonded and flooded tunnels. Thousands of men where ferried down this main shaft; some reaching a depth of about one mile below the earth's surface! The Bourn Cottage, a lovely mansion on the property, is also open for guided tours.

Also in Grass Valley is the North Star Mining Museum. I was not able to view the museum, which closed for the season in mid-September. However the surrounding park was open. Picnic tables next to a lovely creek are a great spot for lunch. Large pieces of mining equipment such as a Pelton Wheel are installed around the outside of the museum.

On the way to Nevada City, I stopped at Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park. The abandonded town of North Bloomfield lies in the middle of the park in a state of arrested-decay.

Malakoff Diggins is the best place in California to view the erosive effects of hydraulic mining. Visitors can hike the main trail through the park to see remants of a pipeline which brought high pressure water several miles into the mountains.

The North Bloomfield Mining & Gravel Company pipeline was a marvel of engineering, but it had a disastrous effect on the environment. Entire mountains were washed away to dislodge gold ore. Also, the tunnels of other mine companies became flooded. An 1884 lawuit brought an end to hydraulic mining in the United States.

After hiking at Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park, I visited the town of Nevada City. The downtown of Nevada City is a historic treasure trove nineteenth-century churches, hotels, homes, and...

...the Nevada Theatre: California's "oldest existing theatre buidling".

(To be honest, I'm not exactly sure how this compare's to Monterey State Historic Park's claim to have California's "first theatre".)