Living: Gold Rush ’77

Back to them thar hills

They come pouring in by the hundreds every weekend, avaricious tourists with gleams of glory in their eyes. The onslaught created such confusion and congestion in tiny Downieville, Calif, (pop. 500), that Sheriff Albert E. Johnson had to halt the frantic activity for four days last month. The cause of the stampede: old-fashioned gold fever.

The rush is on in a thousand old mining locations across the country, including parts of New York, Pennsylvania and Georgia. The richest—and most crowded—site is the Mother Lode, a network of streams cutting through the High Sierra in Northern California. There at General John Suiter’s mill, 90 miles south of Downieville, James Marshall set off the great gold rush of 1849 by discovering a shiny gilt object smaller than a pea. While the Mother Lode has yielded a billion dollars’ worth of gold since then, geologists estimate that the vast majority of the region’s treasure is still waiting to be found.

Two events are behind the bonanza. First, the rise in the price of gold from $35 an ounce to $145 since the federal ban on private ownership of the metal was lifted in 1975. Second, the development of portable dredges, some weighing only 25 lbs., thatsuck in gravel and sand and separate the heavier gold grains and nuggets. A dredge costs as little as $160; diligent—and lucky—prospectors can make $200 ormore on a weekend.

“Finding gold is like playing blackjack in Reno—it’s a sport and a game of chance,” says James Manion, 29, an unemployed Sacramento warehouseman. He claims to have found two nuggets last month worth $1,500. In search of more, he put on scuba gear and spent four hours under water one Sunday, searching the Merced River near Mariposa with his dredge. On the family’s pontoon raft, his wife Joanne painstakingly watched the discharge for the sight of gold. Suddenly she squealed with joy and tumbled overboard in her excitement, but not before she had grabbed an ounce of gold in her fist. His bloodshot eyes glistening, Manion later reckoned that the day’s haul, which included a few more nuggets, was worth about $200. Good, but not good enough. Said he: “I’m still looking for that glory hole and the nugget that takes two hands to hold.”