Hey, Gold Rushers: Southern California found gold first! And we’re still looking
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Now don’t go all weak at the knees and soft in the head when you read this:
Gold! In the Mojave Desert!
It’s a gold rushlet so far: lots of wishful thinking that half-forgotten old mines still have new gold to yield up a dozen or so decades after the first ore was dredged out there.
Right now, as gold prices are tippy-topping again, real estate sales of mines long abandoned in the Rand Mountains are getting practically brisk.
So far, this part of gold fever-dreaming hasn’t changed: as with most gold rushes, it’s the merchants who sell stuff to miners who usually come out winners. The Californians who got seriously rich in the 1850s didn’t pick up pickaxes; they sold them, along with eggs and boots and soap to the men who did.
There was Leland Stanford, who was once a wholesale grocer in Sacramento and later became governor and founded a university bearing his name. Mark Hopkins and Collis Huntington were partners in a hardware store not far away. The partners and Stanford later founded the Central Pacific Railroad.
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Back then, even Southern California, so far from the action, managed to profit from the gold fields up north, from selling cattle to feed the hungry prospectors.
Ah, but — and you should remember this for “Jeopardy!” — the Golden State’s first documented gold strike happened here, in Newhall, in 1842, six years before gold gleamed in the hurrying waters of Sutter’s Mill.
A land supervisor named Francisco Lopez was in what is now Placerita Canyon out inspecting cattle, or looking for horses, riding with a companion or two when he went digging for wild onions to sass up his dinner, or to bring them home as his wife had asked.
The fairy tale version of this is that the men napped beneath an oak tree, where Lopez dreamed of gold and then woke up and dug out the magic onions.
He saw gold flakes clinging to the roots. He recognized it, his relatives said, because he had gone to Mexico City’s school of mining as a young man, and he knew what he was looking at. Delight all around, and more digging. Lopez hired experienced prospectors from Mexico to bring up more gold. A sample was sent to the governor of Alta California, who was rumored to have had some made into earrings for his wife.
Over 10 years, at least $2 million in gold and maybe three or four times that was taken from the Newhall site. In 1843, scores of ounces of Placerita Canyon gold were shipped from here around Cape Horn and all the way back east by Abel Stearns, one of those industrious Yankee-turned-Californio merchants who married prosperously to a local heiress and prospered, himself.
On July 8, 1843, the gold was deposited at the Philadelphia Mint by the Philly banking and commodities firm of Grant & Stone. It was presumably dropped into the federal melting pot to become the first but unacknowledged coinage of California gold.
The state’s recent population growth comes with caveats, but hopefully will put an end to the premature death notices and hyperbolic takeaways. At the least, it should end the groundless talk of mass “exodus.”
It may have been unacknowledged because relations between the U.S. and Mexico had been matchstick-hot since Texas’ independence from Mexico. A discovery of gold near Los Angeles — which is almost as far from Mexico City as it is from D.C. — might have tipped that balance into something ugly.
Things did get ugly a few years later, with the Mexican-American war. Ygnacio del Valle, the owner of the Rancho Camulos land that encompassed the Placerita Canyon find, was supposed to have blown up the mine to hide its entrance from the Yankees. Even 20 years ago, people were still sneaking onto the land to try their hands at panning. In a wonderful bit of symmetry, Pico Canyon, the site of the state’s first oil strike — California’s “black gold”— is just a few miles from Placerita.
Far to the north, almost six years after Lopez’s strike, on Jan. 24, 1848, a carpenter named John Marshall was partnering with a landowner named John Sutter to build a sawmill on a branch of the American River. As Marshall looked over the work on the millrace, he saw something “shining in the bottom … I reached my hand down and picked it up … I was certain it was gold.” He called out, “I have found it.”
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Found it, and lost it. That morning’s find altered the destiny of California. The arriving hordes of the gold-fevered accelerated the decline and death of California’s Native peoples and the end of its Californio era. It also propelled California’s leap into American statehood, and brought an eager world crowding into and crowding out its immense wonders and beauties.
Marshall’s exclamation, “I have found it,” was translated into the state motto, in Greek — “eureka.”
The thing about gold is that it can move around; placer gold, to take an example, gets loosened from its original lode where it started out, gets shaken or broken free or just gushes down to someplace else, which is often a streambed.
That’s probably how some of it turned up again in Southern California, not quite 20 years after Francisco Lopez’s “onion strike.” Considering that this basin of ours is encircled by mountains, and mountains keep leaning toward their angle of repose even without any help from earthquakes, it’s not surprising that gold makes repeated appearances.
So it was that as early as 1854, miners made camp in Azusa Canyon, a few miles up the east fork of the San Gabriel River. In 1859, there was enough critical mass for some 300 miners to christen their settlement “Prospect Bar.”
And pretty quickly thereafter, some slamming winter rains did their own kind of christening and Prospect Bar got washed away, to be replaced almost at once by the even more grandly named Eldoradoville. It was a roustabout settlement with three stores, a blacksmithy, a boarding house, a half-dozen saloons, gambling hells and dance halls.
The Los Angeles Star, in March 1861, deplored the criminality of Eldoradoville [which was in fact not too different from that in Los Angeles]: “If death is not the result, there is no notice taken of the number of assaults with knife or pistol. … one Mexican or Indian killed another by stabbing him in the breast with a knife. The apathy with which the white men received the news was, to say the least, degrading to our sense of civilized refinement.”
And then, once again, those sins were washed away, lock, stock and poker chips, on Jan. 17 and 18, 1862. These were the “Noahic floods” that truly drowned Southern and Central California. Three feet of rain fell on Los Angeles in one month, and presumably more in the mountains. Years later, the Azusa Herald quoted an old codger of a prospector — aren’t they all codgers? — that the Eldoradoville inundation “never stopped until it brought up in San Pedro Harbor.”
Some of the most important names in L.A. Latino politics were born in Arizona mining towns or traced their lineage there. I share those roots.
And still, people kept going back to try their luck, men who gloried in nicknames such as Twitchlip Kelly and Two-Gun Don Rosenkrantz. Miners hauled in hydraulic equipment to dig and dredge and strip the mountains, polluting the runoff so badly that in 1874, the flatlanders who depended on that water went to court to stop the despoiling.
Every few years, another wave of gold-hopefuls assaulted the San Gabriels’ mining sites, even into the Depression. Again, the weather gave, and the weather took away. The stupendous floods of 1938 — floods so profound that they marooned movie stars on their San Fernando Valley ranches and delayed the Oscars by three days — sent whole prospecting families hustling back down the mountains.
In 1980, The Times noted, a report that two hefty gold nuggets had turned up in the Sierra Madre foothills sent a new generation of dreamers back into the hills. It was a hoax to promote a stage version of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
In total, the region gave up maybe $8 million in gold over the years. In September 1897, The Times counted more than 3,000 mines in Southern California, some working, some not.
One of them was the Tropico gold mine, near Rosamond, a town neighboring Edwards Air Force Base.
Ezra Hamilton was a Civil War veteran living in East Los Angeles and making something of a living by making clay pipes. As the story goes — and these stories sometimes go too far and sometimes not far enough — the search for clay near Rosamond yielded gold; usually it’s the other way around.
Another story is that Hamilton was out there personally hunting for gold. Before it was found, in 1894, Hamilton’s “health failed, his family abandoned him, his money ran out.” But then, triumphant, he posed for a photo dancing atop his Tropico mine and waving his hat.
A couple of weeks before Christmas 1900, he sold the mine for a stupendous $100,000, which equates to about $3.7 million today. The Tropico kept yielding for a while before it didn’t, and was shut down.
Farther to the east, at one point it seemed as if the Mojave Desert was as hole-pocked as a colander.
About a year after Ezra’s find, the mining town of Randsburg sprang up around a big gold find — the town and the mine named optimistically for the immense Witwatersrand gold fields in South Africa. In time, more mines yielded up gold, mines with names such as Bully Boy, King Solomon, Napoleon and Monkey Wrench.
A dozen buildings — if wood and canvas confections are properly “buildings” — constituted the town, which attracted gold seekers from around the world. But what floods had done in the foothills, fire did here. Two fires incinerated the original Randsburg in 1898.
Around 1908, other miners hit it big in northwestern San Bernardino County — in tungsten. MIT physicist William Coolidge had discovered tungsten’s laudable properties for light bulbs and later for X-ray tubes, and for nearly a dozen years, until about 1920, Atolia, the desert mining town that tungsten built, thrived. Still, shouting “Eureka — Tungsten!” just doesn’t deliver the same thrill as gold.
Gold is usually in the top 10 of most valuable elements, but not at the top. A gram of californium, a radioactive synthetic element discovered at UC Berkeley 108 years after Lopez yanked his gold out of the ground, would bring $27 million. But you’re not going to find that clinging to a wild onion.
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