See Vivid Vintage Photos of California Gold Rush Territory
See Vivid Vintage Photos of California Gold Rush Territory
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Caption from LIFE. In the grocery store in Volcano, oldtimers who have spent their lives in the worked-out gold fields play a game of poker at twilight.Herbert Gehr—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
One of the great ironies of the California gold rush is that the first man to discover gold in the region, James W. Marshall, ended up dying “penniless and alone,” not far from the place of his discovery. When LIFE recounted his story on Jan. 24, 1948—one hundred years to the day after Marshall saw that first glistening speck on the American River—the magazine was following up on the legacy left behind by the legions of hopefuls who flocked to the area once word of Marshall’s find got out. What photographer Herbert Gehr found in the towns of Jackson, Downieville, Columbia and Volcano was a still-beautiful landscape, if worse for the wear, populated by next-generation forty-niners still searching for treasure.
Alongside photographs of the men’s leathery faces and the quiet rivers that once held fortunes, LIFE described the current scenery:
…the once clamorous and swarming boom towns are in ruins, except for a few like Columbia and Volcano, where a handful of oldtimers still play poker, repeat their timeworn stories and hunt for gold. In the summer they are joined by optimistic tourists who wander along the riverbanks to try their luck with picks and pans. But the oldtimers and the tourists seldom find more than random traces of color in the gravel, which has been picked clean both by hand and by the great dredges that snuffle along the river bottoms with the efficiency of vacuum cleaners.
By the late 1940s, miners in the region had been largely supplanted by loggers, and those miners who still worked the land did so a mile beneath the earth’s surface, eking out just $10 per ton (close to $100 in today’s dollars) and relying on company machinery to get the job done. But for those who kept up the hobby for leisure, there was little pleasure greater than an afternoon on the riverbank. Said one: “I would rather have the gold that’s left here than all they took out in the last hundred years.”
Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Caption from LIFE. In the grocery store in Volcano, oldtimers who have spent their lives in the worked-out gold fields play a game of poker at twilight.Herbert Gehr—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. On the Stanislaus River at Melones decaying gold-mine buildings and trestles are still standing. Near the bridge (left) in 1850 an enterprising ferryman collected $10,000 in tolls in six weeks.Herbert Gehr—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesA sign along California State Route 49.Herbert Gehr—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCalifornia gold rush country.Herbert Gehr—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Hubert Brady, 69, sits in the sunny streets of Columbia and tells tourists tall tales of the Gold Rush days. His father sold groceries to the forty-niners.Herbert Gehr—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Albert Trubody, 75, searches for gold traces in the quartz of a defunct mine near Sierra City. His father came west in 1847, made $50,000 and retired.Herbert Gehr—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. With a pan and a sluice box, the two old Californians glean the gravel of the Yuba river for what little gold dust remains after 100 years.Herbert Gehr—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Modern gold town of Jackson retains much of the old atmosphere as the low price of gold and California's antigambling campaign will permit. In 1849 Jackson was a roaring frontier settlement called Bottileas because of the great piles of empty bottles in its streets.Herbert Gehr—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Assay office still does business testing ore samples in the gold country. Office first assayed ore from the famed Comstock Lode in 1858, is now run by 78-year-old Emil J. N. Ott, a veteran of the Klondike Rush.Herbert Gehr—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Modern gold mining is a far cry from operations of the forty-niners. Here a truckload of miners emerges from shaft of the Empire Mine at Grass Valley, where they have been tunneling through the quartz seams more than a mile below the surface.Herbert Gehr—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Howard Hartsell, 79, pans gold on a riverbank "just for the exercise." In two months of leisurely summer mining, he got one ounce of dust worth $35. Herbert Gehr—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Tom Purdy, 87, hunts underground in the Morgan mine, where the largest nugget in U.S. history, a 195-pound lump worth $43,534, was found in 1854.Herbert Gehr—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCalifornia gold rush country.Herbert Gehr—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesNeon sign outside of a bar in Jackson, California, 1948.Herbert Gehr—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesAn old barn in gold rush country.Herbert Gehr—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Man-made canyons near Nevada City resulted when huge hydraulic nozzles washed away entire hillsides between 1860 and 1880. With the earth reduced to sludge, gold was extracted by sluicing.Herbert Gehr—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
