Now, don’t go weak in the knees or go soft in your head while reading this.
gold! In the Mojave Desert!
This is Gold Rushlet for now. More than a dozen years after the first ore was dredged, there is often hopeful speculation that new gold may still be produced from half-forgotten old mines.
Now, with gold prices once again at an all-time high, property sales for long-abandoned mines in the Rand Mountains are essentially booming.
So far, this part of the gold fever dream has remained unchanged. As with most gold rushes, the winners are usually the merchants who sell their goods to the miners. Californians who became very rich in the 1850s didn’t pick up pickaxes. They sold them, along with eggs, boots, and soap, to the men who sold them.
There was Leland Stanford, a former Sacramento grocery wholesaler who later became governor and founded the university that bears 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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At the time, even Southern California, far from active, managed to profit from the northern gold mines by selling cattle to feed hungry prospectors.
Oh, but this is something to remember for “Jeopardy”! — The Golden State’s first recorded gold strike occurred here in Newhall in 1842, six years before gold sparkled in the rapids of Sutter’s Mill.
When a land warden named Francisco López went to dig up wild onions for a side dish for dinner or to take home with his wife, he would carry one or two of his companions along in what is now Placerita Canyon. They were inspecting cattle and looking for horses. he asked.
In the fairy tale version of this, the men took a nap under an oak tree, Lopez dreamed of gold, and woke up to dig up a magic onion.
He saw gold flakes stuck to the roots. Relatives say he recognized it because he attended mining school in Mexico City as a young man and knew what he was looking at. Enjoy every bit of it and dig deeper. Lopez hired experienced prospectors from Mexico to mine for more gold. A sample was sent to the Governor of Alta California, who is rumored to have made it into earrings for his wife.
Over a 10-year period, at least $2 million, and probably three to four times that amount, was taken from the Newhall site. In 1843, several ounces of Placerita Valley gold were shipped from here around the Horn all the way east by Abel Stearns. Stearns was an industrious Yankee-turned-California merchant who successfully married a local heiress and prospered himself.
On July 8, 1843, gold was deposited at the Philadelphia Mint by Grant & Stone, a Philadelphia banking and merchandise company. Supposedly, it was thrown into the melting pot of the federal government, becoming the first but uncertified coinage of California gold.
This may have gone unrecognized because relations between the United States and Mexico have been in a matchstick state since Texas gained independence from Mexico. The discovery of gold near Los Angeles, as far from Mexico City as it is from Washington, D.C., may have tipped the balance toward the ugly.
A few years later, the Mexican-American War broke out and the situation worsened further. Ignacio del Valle, owner of the Rancho Camros lands surrounding the Placerita Valley discovery site, was believed to have blown up the mine to hide the entrance from the Yankees. Even 20 years ago, people were still sneaking into this land to try their hand at panning. The strikingly symmetrical Pico Canyon, the site of the state’s first oil strike and California’s “black gold,” is just a few miles from Placerita.
Almost six years after the Lopez strike, on January 24, 1848, in the far north, a carpenter named John Marshall was working with a landowner named John Sutter to build a sawmill on a tributary of the American River. As Marshall watched the mill lace work, “I saw something shiny at the bottom…I reached out and picked it up…I knew it was gold.” “I found it,” he called out.
I found it, but I lost it. The discovery that morning changed California’s fate. The arrival of the gold-crazed hordes accelerated the decline and death of the California natives, bringing about the end of the California era. It was also the driving force behind California’s rise as an American state, with a world eager to flock to and shut out its immense wonder and beauty.
Marshall’s exclamation, “I found it,” translated into Greek as the state’s motto, “Eureka.”
The characteristic of gold is that it is mobile. For example, placer gold can become dislodged from its original vein, shaken, broken, or washed elsewhere, often into a river bed.
This is probably why parts of Francisco López’s “onion strike” have been found again in Southern California, less than 20 years later. Given that our basin is surrounded by mountains, and that the mountains continue to tilt at an angle of repose without the aid of earthquakes, it is no wonder that gold appears repeatedly.
So in 1854, miners were camping in Azusa Canyon, a few miles up the East Fork of the San Gabriel River. By 1859, there was a critical mass of about 300 miners who named their settlement “Prospect Bar.”
And soon after, heavy winter rains washed away Prospect Bar, almost instantly giving way to the even grander name of El Doradoville. It was a run-down hamlet with three stores, a blacksmith shop, a boarding house, six saloons, a gambling hall, and a dance hall.
In March 1861, the Los Angeles Star lamented the criminality of El Doradoville. [which was in fact not too different from that in Los Angeles]: “The number of knife and pistol assaults is not recorded when death is not the result. …A Mexican or Indian kills another by stabbing him in the chest with a knife. A white man receives this news. ‘s indifference was, to say the least, insulting to our sense of civilized sophistication.
And again, on January 17 and 18, 1862, these sins were washed away, along with lock, stock, and poker chips. These were “Noah’s floods” that truly submerged Southern and Central California. Three feet of rain fell in Los Angeles in one month, and probably even more in the mountains. Years later, the Azusa Herald quoted an old prospector as saying: Aren’t they all miners? The El Dorado building’s flooding “didn’t stop until it reached San Pedro Harbor.”
Still, people kept coming back to try their luck at the men who flourished with nicknames like Twitchlip Kelly and Two-Handed Don Rosencrantz. As miners brought in hydraulic equipment to dig, dredge, and strip the mountain, the runoff became so polluted that in 1874 the plainsmen who depended on the water were ordered to stop the plundering. Appeared in court.
Every few years, a new wave of gold hopefuls hit the San Gabriel mining sites, even during the Great Depression. Again, the weather gave and the weather took away. The incredible floods of 1938 – so deep that they stranded movie stars on their San Fernando Valley ranches and delayed the Oscar ceremony by three days – sent entire families of prospectors scrambling up the mountain. I went down.
In 1980, reports of the discovery of two large gold nuggets in the Sierra Madre foothills brought a new generation of dreamers back to the hills, The Times noted. It was a hoax to promote the stage version of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”.
In total, the area has given up perhaps $8 million in gold over the years. In September 1897, the Times counted more than 3,000 mines in Southern California, some in operation and others inactive.
One of these is the Tropico gold mine near Rosamond, a town adjacent to Edwards Air Force Base.
Ezra Hamilton was a Civil War veteran who lived in East Los Angeles and made a living making clay pipes. As the stories go, and these stories sometimes go too far and sometimes don’t go far enough, the search for clay near Rosamond yielded gold. Usually the opposite is true.
Another story is that Hamilton was personally looking for gold. In 1894, before his discovery, Hamilton was “in failing health, abandoned by his family, and running out of money.” But then he triumphantly danced atop the Tropico Mine, waving his hat for a photo.
This image of Civil War veteran Ezra Hamilton dancing above the Tropico Mine, waving his hat, was published in the Los Angeles Times on December 12, 1900.
(Los Angeles Times)
A few weeks before Christmas 1900, he sold the mine for the princely sum of $100,000. This is equivalent to approximately $3.7 million today. Tropico continued to make concessions for a while, but then could no longer make concessions and was shut down.
Further east, at one point the Mojave Desert looked as porous as a colander.
About a year after Ezra’s discovery, the mining town of Randsburg sprang up around the great gold discovery. The town and mine are optimistically named after South Africa’s vast Witwatersrand gold mines. Over time, more and more mines produced gold, giving them names such as “Bully Boy,” “King Solomon,” “Napoleon,” and “Monkey Wrench.”
If the wood-and-canvas confection were proper “buildings,” then a dozen or so buildings made up the town, attracting gold-seekers from all over the world. But just as there were floods in the hills, there were fires here too. In 1898, two fires destroyed the original Landsburg.
Around 1908, other miners found great success with tungsten in northwestern San Bernardino County. William Coolidge, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discovered tungsten’s admirable properties as a light bulb and later an did. Still, I was shouting “Eureka – Tungsten!” However, it doesn’t give you the same thrill as gold.
Gold is usually in the top 10 most valuable elements, but not in the top. One gram of californium, a radioactive synthetic element discovered at the University of California, Berkeley, 108 years after Lopez pulled gold from the ground, would bring in $27 million. But you won’t find it attached to wild onions.
Explaining LA with Pat Morrison
Los Angeles is a complicated place. In this weekly feature, Pat Morrison explains how it works, its history and culture.
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