How Americans Caught Gold Fever Again
One morning this past January, I set out in a rental car on the road to El Dorado—not the mythical city deep in the Amazon whose legendary riches lured legions of men to gruesome ends but the county in Northern California. My journey nonetheless felt perilous. As a New Yorker, I hadn’t touched a steering wheel in a year, and the path before me, Route 49, named for the forty-niners, the generation who ventured to the American West during the California gold rush, snakes through the dramatic Sierra Nevada foothills. Driving along the winding, three-hundred-mile stretch, which connects the state’s historic boom towns, I pictured myself tumbling into the river below, like the miner’s daughter Clementine, of “Oh My Darling” fame.
I was headed to a local state park for Gold Discovery Day, an annual commemoration of the moment when a sawmill operator named James Marshall spotted gold on the banks of the American River. Route 49, a.k.a. the Mother Lode Highway, is now a corridor of quaint, architecturally preserved cities dotted with cowboy-chic boutique hotels which have become popular getaways for Bay Area techies. At the Golden Gate Saloon, in Grass Valley, one of the oldest continuously operating bars west of the Mississippi, I scanned a menu of small plates and California wines. I told the bartender that I had expected themed cocktails with names like the Mine Shaft. “Oh, there’s a bar called that in Nevada City,” he said, referring to a nearby town that once drew Chinese immigrants and free African Americans looking to join the California Argonauts, as the forty-niners were also called. In the village of Murphys, I popped into a “general store” that sold, alongside Hydro Flasks, a board game about the Donner Party, the group of settlers who got trapped in the Sierra Nevada and resorted to cannibalism. I picked up snacks for the drive.
But, lately, people around these parts aren’t just trading in nostalgia. Gold is having a moment. With concerns rising about inflation and the stability of the U.S. dollar, investors and central banks have flocked to gold as a hedge. In January of 2024, it was priced at a historic high of two thousand dollars an ounce; when I arrived in California, the number hit a once unthinkable five thousand an ounce.
The eye-popping price has sparked what many people are calling Gold Rush 2.0, with everyday Americans buying gold-panning kits and signing up for “pay dirt of the month” clubs. In 2023, the Bureau of Land Management reported that there were more than six hundred thousand active mining claims, or permits, on federal land, a record for this century. That figure includes Big Mining, but, this year, the Gold Prospectors Association of America, an organization for hobbyists, saw its first-quarter enrollment double from that of last year. The aurum-curious listen to podcasts like “Dig Deep” and “Unearthed” and subscribe to The Nugget newsletter. Membership to the subreddit r/Prospecting has increased by more than a thousand per cent since 2020. “Does anybody else ever just want to take pyrite and punch it in the face?” a recent post read, referring to the yellow-tinged mineral better known as fool’s gold.
“It’s a good time to get a metal-detecting hobby,” Albert Fausel, an amateur gold prospector and the owner of Placerville Hardware, in Placerville, California, told me, when I visited his shop. (“Placer” gold is findable in water and in dirt, unlike “lode,” which must be extracted from rock.) The storefront, which opened in 1852, supplied early miners with dynamite and Studebaker wheelbarrows. Now it sells plastic pans and sluice boxes (troughs that use flowing water to separate gold from dirt) for the whole family—some even come in Barbie pink. By the register, there were barbecue lighters in the shape of double-barrelled shotguns for the “gunslinging grillmaster” and metal detectors hanging from a pair of deer antlers. Fausel has wide-set eyes and a gap-toothed smile, giving him a boyish appearance. “In the past couple of weeks, it’s really picked up. When everyone knows it’s five grand, it’s a milestone,” he said, before dashing off to help some customers.
A man in his thirties was looking for a digging tool; he was new to prospecting, he told me, but a friend of his, a retired mailman, had taken it up and regularly displayed his hauls on social media. Today’s gold rush is a #goldrush. On YouTube, prospecting influencers post videos of themselves fending off bears and spelunking down old mines. A content creator with the moniker Pioneer Pauly has an A.S.M.R. video of his hand caressing a pile of gold nuggets. His videos have accumulated three hundred million views.
The man also mentioned that he watched “the gold-rush shows.” After a spike in gold prices in 2010, the Discovery Channel green-lit a slew of reality series about amateur miners. The first, “Gold Rush,” now in its sixteenth season, began with a group of men in Oregon, hit hard by the Great Recession, who banded together to mine a gold claim by Porcupine Creek, in southeastern Alaska. The show was a ratings juggernaut, becoming Friday night’s top cable series for men under fifty-five, and inspired spinoffs, including “Gold Rush: Mine Rescue with Freddy & Juan,” a Gordon Ramsey-style business-makeover show for struggling mines.
Fausel has appeared on Discovery’s “America’s Backyard Gold,” a travel show about mining destinations. In an episode on Placerville, cameras follow Fausel as he goes “sniping”—searching for gold underwater, with a snorkel. Within thirty minutes, he finds half an ounce of gold, then worth eight hundred dollars. “That’s a little better than minimum wage,” he jokes.
Gold has also got a boost from its biggest hype man since King Tut. “Gold will not be Tariffed!” Donald Trump announced in August of last year on Truth Social. The original gold rush was full of business tycoons whose success relied on convincing ordinary men that they were millionaires-to-be; Leland Stanford, a merchant who became a founder of Stanford University, and Levi Strauss, the denim kingpin, made a killing selling dry goods and a dream to miners and pioneers. Similarly, Trump’s rise to power has been based in no small part on instilling in everyday Americans the idea that they, too, could have riches like his if the country and its laws were just rolled back to an era when men were men.
These days, hitting the mother lode looks different than it did in 1849—brand deals, reality-TV guest spots—but there’s still a belief that fortune favors the bold. In the hardware store, Fausel showed me a snuffer bottle for removing debris from underwater cavities which he had made using a 3-D printer. “Now I just need a YouTube video to go promote it,” he said.
I arrived at Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, in nearby Coloma, for the day’s festivities. There were gold-panning lessons at ten, eleven, one, two, and three. A crowd of children were learning to sew pouches to carry gold nuggets in. A couple of older men dressed in period wear were cooking over an open fire. “Varmint stew,” one grumbled, before introducing himself as Monterey Jack. “In the eighteen-thirties, we were mountain men and fur trappers in the Grand Tetons,” he explained, with a theatrical twang. “We ended up at Fort Sutter. John Sutter got us payroll to bring in meat.” In his real voice, he added, “Probably raccoon.”
Sutter, a Swiss immigrant, arrived in the Mexican territory of Alta California in 1839 and was given land by the governor to help fend off American settlers. Sutter established a small trading colony, which he named Nueva Helvetia, Spanish for New Switzerland, presaging the area’s future as a lawless monetary hub. He partnered with James Marshall, a carpenter from New Jersey, who built him a sawmill nearby in exchange for a share of its profits. Many of the workers were members of the Nisenan and Miwok tribes whom Sutter forced into slave labor.
On the morning of January 24, 1848, Marshall walked to the river to inspect the mill, now the site of the park. In the tailrace, he spotted some small glistening objects—pieces of quartz, maybe. He hit one against a rock and, seeing that it was malleable, suspected that it might be gold. He gave a piece to the wife of a mill worker who was making soap; when she threw it into lye solution, it came out sparkling. It was gold, which doesn’t oxidize. Marshall told Sutter, who, afraid of losing his workers to prospecting, suggested that they keep the discovery quiet.
Marshall may have found the gold, but historians credit another man with igniting the California gold rush. That spring, Samuel Brannan, a Mormon shopkeeper who owned a general store on Sutter’s land, collected gold dust and took it in a bottle to San Francisco, where he ran through the streets shouting, “Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” (In some tellings, he had already bought up every shovel in California.) Brannan’s scheme to drum up business became a useful tale of American ingenuity. (And it was American by then. On February 2nd, Mexico and the United States signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which Mexico ceded fifty-five per cent of its territory, including California.)
As the historian Malcolm J. Rohrbough writes, in “Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation,” “The changes in California over a few short months were those characteristically associated with a plague or war.” San Francisco became a veritable ghost town: three-quarters of the houses were abandoned; blacksmiths and carpenters, doctors and solicitors rushed to them thar hills. Any ship that docked in the city’s harbor risked losing its crew. Mexican nobles couldn’t keep household help. “These gold mines have upset all social and domestic arrangements,” the first American mayor of nearby Monterey observed in his diary, “And the hidalgo—in whose veins flows the blood of Cortes—[has] to clean his own boots.” Local newspapers suspended production, but, across the country, the Washington Daily Union declared, “ ‘El Dorado’ is certainly found at last.”
Gold fever quickly became a pandemic. Among the first foreigners to arrive were miners from Chile, who brought bateas, or gold pans, introducing the technology to the region. The Irish also joined, becoming a potent force in the gold rush. (Edward T. O’Donnell, a history professor at the College of the Holy Cross, has suggested that the “association of the Irish with mining fortunes led to the expression ‘luck of the Irish.’ ”) The official Chinese population of California went from three individuals in 1848 to twenty thousand four years later. In London, Karl Marx wept: the revolutions of 1848 had sown the seeds of socialism throughout Europe, and now here was capitalism roaring back like a lion, tempting the young into its den.
I wandered over to a log cabin with a sign that read “Miner’s Store: Groceries and Provisions.” I explained to a woman in a wide-brimmed black hat and a red wool overshirt that I was a reporter. At this, the reënactor—whose name was Jen Roger and whose real job was director of the Nevada State Museum in Carson City—went into docent mode. “The biggest myth that came out of the gold rush is that poor kids were striking it rich,” she said. “It’s the people who mine the miners—land speculators, shop owners—who got rich. Sam Brannan made a pile of money.”
Many American corporations were gold-rush startups. Wells Fargo provided armed gold transport to banks back East. Domingo (né Domenico) Ghirardelli, an Italian immigrant, sold chocolate to miners out of a tent. Not every enterprise got past the beta stage. A reënactor named Chuck, whose day job is running a call center in San Jose, brought up a company that hawked “gold salve.” “You supposedly covered yourself in it and rolled down the mountain to gather gold,” he said.
Only a small percentage of miners made a fortune. Yet the story of the toiler turned tycoon persisted. It had to—how else were big industrial mines, which quickly came to dominate the landscape, going to entice laborers to California? Passage by ship from New York cost as much as a thousand dollars, around twice the American worker’s average yearly salary. The myth that America is a place where anyone can become suddenly and astronomically wealthy has its origins in the gold rush. It’s no mistake that Jay Gatsby models himself on Dan Cody, “a product of the Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since seventy-five.” The forty-niners didn’t conceive of themselves as settlers; they imagined that they’d get rich and head home. In reality, many couldn’t even afford a return ticket.
In the Gold Discovery Museum lobby, I met Ed Allen, a reënactor who was playing James Marshall. Tall and white-haired, he wore a yellow handkerchief around his neck. Allen has served as the park historian for twenty-three years. His position is unpaid, not that he minds. He sold semiconductors to Intel during the dot-com boom of the nineteen-nineties—“That was another gold rush,” he said—and retired at fifty. “Wow, you really are James Marshall,” I joked. Allen corrected me. “Marshall never made a dime,” he said. “People came here and demanded he show them where this gold was, as if he had some kind of Midas touch—which, of course, he did not.” Marshall’s sawmill eventually failed, and, after investing in an unsuccessful mine, he nearly went bankrupt. “In his old age, he would tell anybody who would listen, ‘They’re going to make a big fuss over me when I’m dead.’ And that’s exactly what happened,” Allen said. “The state of California paid nine thousand dollars for a monument to a man who died in poverty.” I looked the monument up later. I don’t know what I was expecting. It was just a bronze-ish figure of Marshall pointing at the ground.
In 1864, Mark Twain was an out-of-work journalist in San Francisco when he heard about gold deposits that had been found near Jackass Hill, a mining community, and decided to try his luck. Twain didn’t have much success prospecting, but he wrote a short story called “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” about the loutish, hardscrabble culture of miners. It was based on an anecdote he’d heard in Angels Camp, a nearby town, about a real-life gambler who lost a frog-jumping bet in a miner’s bar, and it launched Twain’s literary career. Twain started a trend: if gold mining didn’t “pan out” (a term that dates to the era), a person could always create gold-mining content.
The hustling spirit of the gold rush lives on today in the prospecting influencers who toil in the content mines of the Internet, hoping to hit the viral mother lode. Before my trip, I watched what seemed like an endless supply of videos, mostly of men standing knee-deep in muddy creeks, with such ostensibly click-inducing titles as “We Almost Walked Past This Rock . . . Then We Looked a Little Closer!” I came across a sizzle reel on YouTube from an outfit called 530 Gold Mining—530 is the area code for gold country—which featured drone footage of three white men walking around the Sierra Nevada with metal detectors and pickaxes to the tune of “Bet on Myself,” a royalty-free rap track.
The morning after Gold Discovery Day, I joined Israel Johnson, Steve Upton, and Mike Cleary, of 530 Gold Mining, at one of their prospecting sites off Route 49. “Do you mind not telling anyone exactly where we are?” Johnson asked. This wasn’t a problem—I had no idea. We were standing in a burn scar surrounded by incinerated trees with snarled branches and ashen trunks. The Mosquito Fire of 2022 had ravaged more than seventy-six thousand acres in Placer and El Dorado Counties. In some ways, it had been a boon to miners. “We wouldn’t have been able to get into this area otherwise,” Upton, the group’s founder, said, explaining that the terrain would have been too thick with manzanita shrubs.
A common shtick of gold-influencer videos is that, with the benefit of modern equipment, prospectors can now find treasure left behind by the forty-niners. A four-part series put out by 530 Gold Mining is called “Old Timers Missed This Spot LOADED with GOLD NUGGETS!” Highlighting spiffy detectors or waterproof sniping-wear can attract brand deals, but it is also true that there have been significant technological advances since the gold rush. Cleary told me that they use the 3-D-mapping tool lidar, an acronym for “light detection and ranging,” which can reveal anomalies in topography. In December of 2025, California’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force made a state-wide lidar map available online, imagining that it would help researchers assess biomass destruction after wildfires. But, in historic gold-rush regions, prospectors use it to identify disturbances in the landscape that are suggestive of former mining operations, in the hope of finding overlooked stores. Cleary, a construction superintendent at Tesla, turned on a metal detector and picked up a signal. Brushing away debris, he unearthed the top of an antique-looking metal can. He said that he and his partners often find gold-rush remnants: buttons, coins, bullets.
The trio has also pored over California’s vintage newspapers, which are newly digitized, to find old mining companies’ reports on promising hot spots. But those leads aren’t always a sure thing. “A lot of these companies were publicly traded, so they were trying to raise money,” Johnson explained. “They’d embellish to attract investors.” Exaggeration and gold seem to go hand in hand. A lot of prospecting YouTubers are accused of staging their videos or enhancing them with A.I. Pioneer Pauly told me that his content is authentic, although it’s true that he typically posts when he gets a good haul. As he pointed out, “No one wants to watch you not find gold.”
It took, IRL, about thirty minutes for Cleary and his metal detector to come up with a speck of gold the size of a cookie crumb. “That’s worth about five dollars,” he told me. Fortunately, YouTube supplements the three men’s earnings. They said that they monetize their channel with ads just to offset costs (mainly gas), and that selling the gold is primarily a way to support their hobby. “At heart, most guys just enjoy digging a hole in the woods,” Cleary said.
Men’s interests, appetites, jawlines, leg lengths, testosterone levels, and friendships or lack thereof have been the object of feverish media attention in the past couple of years. “Why Do Men Buy Shoes That Are Too Big?” a recent headline in the Times read (one guess). In the aftermath of the 2024 election, in which Trump won fifty-six per cent of young male voters, the Democratic Party began a search for a “Joe Rogan of the left” and launched a twenty-million-dollar project called “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan.” Yet, amid all this anthropological interest in male behavior, a world beloved by men that is organized around the legacy of kings and a single precious metal has been hiding in plain sight, like a white Wakanda.
The Discovery Channel has become appointment viewing for men aged twenty-five to fifty-four, powered by the network’s cache of gold-mining reality series. The ur-show of Discovery’s gold programming, “Gold Rush,” premièred in December, 2010. It opens with a man named Todd Hoffman and his father, Jack, at their small airfield, in Sandy, Oregon. A voice-over says, “The recession has decimated the aviation industry,” as father and son eye gold prices on a cellphone. In preparation for the Alaskan wilderness, the Hoffmans and their crew shop for bear guns, bid their wives farewell, and are prayed over by a local pastor (who decides, at the last minute, to join them). Jack, in a rousing speech, tells them, “You’re all millionaires. The only thing is, you got to get it out of the ground.” Five months and ten episodes later, the men’s total tally was more like twenty thousand dollars, and even reaching that amount had, at times, seemed unlikely. During negotiations, an executive at Discovery had wanted the men to find gold by Episode 5. “We were never going to do that,” Sam Maynard, a showrunner on the series, told me. “The real strength of the show wasn’t gold—it was about the promise of gold.”
I was surprised to learn that it was Hoffman who pitched the show. Inspired by extreme-job-themed reality programs like “Deadliest Catch” and “American Chopper,” he thought he’d get a deal on mining equipment if brands knew that their products would be on TV. Hoffman had no Hollywood connections but saw a casting call for “people who thought they could survive an apocalypse.” It had been sent out by Maynard, who was developing a docudrama called “After Armageddon,” loosely based on Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian novel “The Road,” for Raw TV, a British production company. Maynard was taken with Hoffman, whom he described to me as a “Svengali-like character,” and flew to Alaska to start shooting. “Gold Rush” was an instant blockbuster. “I remember when we beat ‘Shark Tank,’ ” Hoffman said. “It’s Middle America, that’s the fan base. It’s blue-collar guys who want to come home, crack open a beer, and go on an adventure.”
“Gold Rush” is still the network’s highest-rated program. Its breakout star is Parker Schnabel, a thirty-one-year-old who runs a placer mine in the Yukon that brought in fifty-one million dollars last year. Young, rich, and telegenic—he bears a striking resemblance to the actor Adam Driver—he’s been interviewed by People about his love life; he told the magazine that he had trouble explaining his job to dates “in a way that doesn’t sound like Mad Max.” When we spoke, he sounded more like Pioneer Ken, casually dropping that his family was run out of Kansas for making “bootleg moonshine during Prohibition” and that his grandfather “put everything he owned into a wooden box, got on a steamship in 1938, and moved to Alaska.”
In a harrowing “Gold Rush” scene, the British production crew nearly drowns amid a river torrent as Todd Hoffman grumbles to the camera, “They’re from London.” He told me, “A lot of them don’t even own a vehicle. They take the tube. They call it ‘the tube.’ ” “Gold Rush” may be unscripted, but it is telling a particular story of American masculinity.
The show has its critics, who see it as settler cosplay and plunder porn. The environmental historian Brian Leech has categorized it as “Macho TV,” a genre that features “mostly heterosexual white men, joining in small bands, braving extreme conditions, and practicing the tough work of natural-resource extraction.” But that prototype is resonating. “Men have kind of lost their way,” Maynard said. “They don’t make stuff with their hands anymore. They don’t take stuff out of the ground anymore. This show is about the sense of men’s worth in the physical world, and that worth is encapsulated in this incredibly shiny metal that has been coveted by so many people for centuries and centuries—you know, for millennia.”
No one has tapped into the id of disaffected young men nostalgic for a bygone era as effectively as Donald Trump, who announced his first candidacy by descending the golden escalators of Trump Tower. He’s never seen a contradiction between his gilded surroundings (which now include the redecorated Oval Office) and his man-of-the-people political posturing. His hotel in Las Vegas glistens like a vertical gold bar. On the website of the Trump Store, you can buy—from the Golden Age of America collection—a gold Mar-a-Lago serving tray or a pickleball paddle emblazoned, in gold, with the Trump crest. (“Make your next round of pickleball a golden one!”) Trump’s obsession with gold has led his critics to compare him to the Bond villain Goldfinger, a bullion dealer who hatches a plan to irradiate the gold in Fort Knox in order to increase the value of his own supply. Trump once told reporters on Air Force One that he and Elon Musk were going to inspect “the fabled Fort Knox, to make sure the gold is there.” He added, “If the gold isn’t there, we’re going to be very upset.”
I always figured that Trump’s relationship to gold was purely decorative. The metal’s association with kings melds perfectly with his conception of himself as one. But the right’s relationship to gold predates its latest, and loudest, spokesperson. President Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard on August 15, 1971—what the historian Quinn Slobodian calls “Day X for goldbugs” in his book “Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right.” In the early seventies, goldbugs were “catastrophe libertarians,” Slobodian writes—survivalist Republicans typified by the politician Ron Paul. Newsletters such as The Ron Paul Survival Report warned that without gold politicians would be free to print unlimited dollars for entitlement programs. One report claimed that Haitians, lured by Bill Clinton, were “now building boats to sail to the United States of Welfaria.” (Paul has since denied writing these reports, or even reading them at the time.)
“I mean, this is all bullshit,” Slobodian, who teaches at Boston University, told me. “But the ‘great replacement’ theory requires a means of payment.” Goldbug ideology has received an intellectual sheen from places like George Mason University, a libertarian stronghold, where the Koch brothers have invested millions of dollars into research, including on gold and cryptocurrency. Today’s goldbugs commune at the annual FreedomFest conference, in Las Vegas, which offers such panels as “Bitcoin vs. Gold.”
When Trump was running for President in 2016, he told GQ, “Bringing back the gold standard would be very hard to do, but boy, would it be wonderful.” That is unlikely to happen, but Trump’s erratic policymaking and trade wars have given gold a different kind of currency. Barry Eichengreen, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto,” said that central banks in developing countries tend to buy gold when they lose confidence in the U.S. dollar: “They’re questioning whether the U.S. is a reliable economic, political, financial partner.” But that wasn’t enough, he cautioned, to explain gold’s stratospheric rise. “I would say no one knows why the price of gold has gone up by as much as it has in the past two years, but people tell stories,” he said.
Trump’s allies on the political right, here and abroad, have profited from the story of gold as a safe haven in a world threatened by currency-printing globalists. In the United Kingdom, attendees at last year’s conference of the Reform Party were greeted by a cardboard cutout of the Party’s leader, Nigel Farage, holding up a gold coin as a spokesperson for the precious-metal dealer Direct Bullion. Stateside, Donald Trump, Jr., a First Son and the host of the podcast “Triggered,” has partnered with a company called Birch Gold Group, which helps you “convert your 401(k) into gold.” It sells a gold bar engraved with a picture of a miner in overalls panning in a river; on the back, it reads “Credit Suisse.”
Other than branding, what does a gold bar today have to do with the California gold rush? I couldn’t imagine that any of these people, let alone someone whose diapers were probably changed on a golden changing table, knew what a sluice box was. But the Old West provides what the Harvard scholar Svetlana Boym has referred to as a “usable past.” Boym, who was born in Russia, argued that Vladimir Putin and his political allies came to power by fostering nostalgia for an orderly Soviet superstate after the economic turbulence of the nineties. The forty-niners are elemental to our identity as a nation of brave, rugged individualists. Even Luke Skywalker dons a pair of beige Levi’s—transformed from a miner’s uniform into a symbol of rebellious cool by the likes of James Dean—to blend in with the desert sands of Tatooine, a former mining outpost. Slobodian told me that twenty-first-century goldbugs, who mingle with tech founders and bitcoin barons, “fetishize the idea of the supposedly lawless West”—a place without pesky government regulation. The amateur miners I spoke to also romanticized the Old West, but they saw in its lack of rules a chance to upend the status quo. Johnson, of 530 Mining, said he believed that the gold rush was the “first time in human history that ordinary people could touch gold. Before then, it was only for kings.” Industrial gold mining, a forty-three-billion-dollar market in North America, has also realized the power of nostalgia. This year, three mining corporations looking to expand their operations sponsored, for the first time, Calico California Days, a festival at Calico Ghost Town with pretend panning and gun-drawing contests.
This isn’t a history that everyone is nostalgic for. In 2022, a pair of Levi’s from the eighteen-eighties, discovered in a mine shaft in New Mexico, were auctioned off; a label inside read “the only kind made by white labor.” During the gold rush, politicians stoked xenophobia and pitted workers against workers, leading to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which effectively barred immigration to the United States from China for sixty-one years. The James Marshall monument was built at the urging of Native Sons of the Golden West, a fraternal organization devoted to preserving California’s settler past; members had to be white men born in the state.
“For us, the gold rush didn’t end,” Brian Wallace, a member of the Washoe and Nisenan tribes, told me. Wallace is the C.E.O. of the Indigenous Futures Society, formerly the Sierra Fund. I.F.S. advocates for Indigenous ecological practices, such as controlled burns, that were erased during the gold rush. “It was a state-sponsored clearing of the land, and, in doing so, there was a systematic destruction of the ecologies that Indigenous people had stewarded for millennia,” he said. During the rush, under California’s first governor, the state legislature funded local militias that systematically killed sixteen thousand Native Americans, opening the territory for white settlers. More than a hundred thousand died of disease and starvation, as their waterways and other food sources were overtaken by miners. “It was a genocide,” Governor Gavin Newsom said, in 2019. “No other way to describe it, and that’s the way it needs to be described in the history books.”
Scrolling through old newspapers like the Mountain Democrat, I saw ads for quicksilver, or mercury. Back then, an estimated twenty-six million pounds of mercury was used in hard-rock and hydraulic mining. During rainstorms, it is carried into rivers and other bodies of water, where it turns into methylmercury, contaminating the fish population. The Sierra Fund treated a mine site with biochar, a carbon-rich form of charcoal that can bind to mercury, containing it in place. Wallace told me that he was sympathetic to parents who wanted to take their kids out panning as a screen-free weekend activity but thought that there were other ways of communing with nature. “Let’s look forward, not backward,” he said.
Why can’t we stop looking back? In “Where I Was From,” Joan Didion writes about her maternal grandfather, whose family “migrated from the hardscrabble Adirondack frontier of the eighteenth century to the hardscrabble Sierra Nevada foothills in the nineteenth.” He once wrote a letter to the editor of a fifth-grade textbook, frustrated to see the story of California told as a “sunny progression from Spanish Señorita to Gold Miner to Golden Gate Bridge.” What incensed him, Didion writes, was the suggestion that the settlement of California had been “easy.”
So many of the miners I talked to emphasized the difficulty of their work, a difficulty they took on themselves, as a point of pride. Some were still ruffled by a successful effort, in 2015, by environmentalist and tribal groups, to ban suction-dredge mining, a vacuum-powered technology that greatly disturbs riverbed soil, releasing mercury into the water. At a hearing of the California state legislature on the issue, a miner protested, “We make an honest living!” I wanted to dismiss that posture as science denialism tinged with macho bravado. But then I imagined how I’d feel living near Silicon Valley, whose billionaire class shows up clean-shaven and well rested at Davos to pitch toxic, water-draining A.I. data centers. (Then, there’s the U.S. Mint, which sells a billion dollars in gold coins annually. A recent Times investigation uncovered that the Mint, which is mandated to use American gold to avoid complicity in human-rights abuses and environmental destruction, has, for decades, been loose in its sourcing, and ended up minting coins with gold that can be traced to an illegal mine run by a Colombian drug cartel.)
I hadn’t got my hands dirty, either, and the miners I spoke to told me that if I wanted to understand gold’s magnetism I’d need to find some myself. At Placerville Hardware, Fausel had shown me a row of trading cards of great contemporary miners. One depicted a man named Kevin Hoagland, who had a friendly smile and a long white beard. Fausel said that if anyone could help me it was Hoagland, who lives in Arizona and writes a column for Gold Prospectors magazine called “Where’s the Gold?” When I told Fausel that I already had plans to meet Hoagland, he gave me a clear plastic case to fill with nuggets.
A few days later, I was sitting across from Hoagland, who’s sixty-four, at the breakfast buffet of the Best Western in Wickenburg, Arizona, as he told me about the first time he saw gold. He was seven years old and wandering around the Mojave Desert, where he was staying with family, when he heard a chugging sound and saw dirt flying into the air from behind a hill. He ran toward the noise and found a man operating what he called a “hand-crank dry washer with an old galvanized tub.” The man shook a rusted old pan filled with black sand, and a string of yellowish pebbles appeared. He asked Hoagland if he knew what it was, and then answered for him: “Eternity.”
Hoagland was hooked. His mother bought him a build-your-own-metal-detector-kit, but after putting it together he determined that it wasn’t powerful enough, so he went to RadioShack. “I was constantly driving those guys crazy,” he said. “I was, like, ‘I need this to be able to have a lower field response.’ ” Hoagland, who still works as a professional miner, leads a class called Gold Trails, for the Gold Prospectors Association of America; he had agreed to give me a crash course. He also hosts a podcast, “On the Gold,” and just finished a novel—“a murder mystery,” he told me, about an Irish family killed during the gold rush. He appeared on “Mine Rescue with Freddy & Juan,” helping an amateur miner who’d lost his day job during the pandemic turn his hobby into a career. Gold is in Hoagland’s bones. He’s had almost two grams of it injected into his knees, an F.D.A.-approved treatment for rheumatoid arthritis. “I’m going to be cremated, and little bits of my ashes are going to go to all my friends,” he said. “They’re going to pan me out at different places in the United States.”
Hoagland drove us in his Jeep to his claim in the Sonoran Desert. On the way, we stopped in Stanton, established in 1863, a former ghost town that’s been revived by the Lost Dutchman’s Mining Association, whose members camp there in R.V.s. They play a weekly bingo game in the old opera house; the prize is pay dirt. Back on the unpaved road, we saw a jackrabbit, wild horses, and a petrified cactus, and briefly got stuck in quicksand. “I’m flooring it, and we’re barely moving,” Hoagland said. When we finally arrived at the claim, a patch of land on a hillside, I got out of the Jeep. I was about to pick up an interesting-looking rock when Hoagland said, “That’s cow dung.” He continued, “And if you’re stranded overnight the best thing you can do is go out and find a bunch of it, put it in a pile, put rocks around it, and light it, because it’ll give you a good hot fire.” I made a mental note to do that if I couldn’t find a cactus needle to jam into my jugular first.
Hoagland handed me a small metal detector—the Minelab Gold Monster 2000—and began his lesson. He told me the only thing that moves gold across the landscape is water, so we were looking for signs of rain and flooding: trails strewn with natural debris like twigs, bushes blanched by too much hydration, disturbances in the terrain. I scanned the landscape; it looked to me like we were standing on a random hill. Hoagland told me to stop thinking. “I come out here, and I’m reciting Blake’s ‘Tyger Tyger, burning bright,’ ” he said.
The sun was beating down on me. I had stupidly not picked up a bottle of water from the ghost-town community fridge. As we walked around, I noticed two grayish bushes next to a rock. I wondered if gold might have got trapped behind the rock as water flowed down the hill. I placed my Minelab Gold Monster on the ground, tried to quiet my mind, and listened. The detector emitted a wave-like sound, which, as I moved to the other side of the rock, got louder and louder. I set the detector aside and started digging, grabbing clumps of dirt with my hand and testing each clump beneath the detector until I heard what sounded like a heart about to explode. “Son of a bitch!” Hoagland said. “Gold!” I screamed.
In the palm of my hand, I held a tiny, craggy nugget. The 530 guys had told me that the first thing I would notice about gold was its heaviness, and I felt the weight of it now, in every sense. Here it was, this relic of the past, being dug up by Americans hoping for a better future, their dreams mined once again by speculators and magnates—a cycle that I hoped wouldn’t last for eternity. On the way back to my hotel, Hoagland told me that he couldn’t believe how quickly I had found gold. “Oh,” I said. “Well, I’m half Irish.” ♦