There's a New Breed of Forty-Niners Rushing to the Pacific

Lured by the soaring price of the precious metal, prospectors are heading for the California hills like it's 1849 all over again

  • By Abigail Tucker
  • Smithsonian magazine, July-August 2012, Subscribe
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Gold nugget
The lifestyles of the modern-day prospectors are not so far removed from that of the forty-niners. (Sarina Finkelstein)

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 The atmosphere in the camps may well be darker than in the old days. A number of miners “are desperate people and they don’t know anything about gold mining, but they have a dream that you can make a living doing this, and it’s sad,” says Gregg Wilkerson, a Bureau of Land Management gold mining expert.

“The forty-niners wanted to be a part of building a society and a community, but most of the prospectors I’ve met these days, they just want to be left alone,” says Jon Christensen, executive director of Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West.

Perhaps the starkest difference between the modern prospectors and their predecessors is age. The gold rush was a young man’s game, but many of today’s miners are cash-strapped retirees trying to add a little shine to their golden years. This gives the new mining movement, Christensen says, “the feeling of being the end of something, rather than the beginning.”

Still, Finkelstein believes the latter-day miners share something of the forty-niners’ spirit. “They don’t have to be gold prospecting,” she says, adding: “There’s a certain personality to gold prospectors. In many ways it’s the personality you get from an excited 7-year-old boy who wants to go out exploring every day, to take a risk, to gamble, to get his hands dirty.”

Most on Nugget Alley are free of car and house payments. They enjoy the shade of the riverside alders and hook the occasional trout. And every night they have front-row seats to the glorious San Gabriel sunset, which gilds the river and turns the dusty mountains gold.


Nugget Alley is a fabled fork in the San Gabriel River just an hour outside Los Angeles. Gold prospectors with names like Backpack Dave, Recon John and the Bulldozer are again flocking there, and to California’s other strike-it-rich waterways. In previous lives they were movie lighting techs and Caribbean sport boat captains and penny-stock investors and soldiers. Now all day they hunt for color against gray river rocks.

Their ramshackle camps have, by some estimates, doubled over the past four years as the unemployment rate spiked and the precious metal skyrocketed to a record high of more than $1,500 an ounce. Scores of hard-core prospectors work the San Gabriel, and perhaps 50,000 people throughout the state prowl a few weekends a year with pans and metal detectors and dowsing rods. If they’re lucky, they find yellow powder as fine as flour, “clinkers” (big nuggets named for the pleasing sound they make on the bottom of a pan) or sculptural crystalline specimens that, stared at long enough, resemble lace doilies and dragons.

Occasionally, a five-ounce nugget comes to light, and a highly skilled and tenacious prospector might pull $1,000 out of the ground on a day fortune is with him. But most find just flecks, barely enough to keep them in groceries, for all their exertions. River miners crush fingers, toes and even teeth shoving aside huge boulders to reach the gleam beneath. “I’ve been buried under the water three times,” says Bernie McGrath, a prospector and former pipeline worker. “It’s a treacherous way to make money.” It’s also, in Nugget Alley (part of the Angeles National Forest), unauthorized.

Sarina Finkelstein, a photographer at work on a book about California’s “New 49ers,” as she calls them, wonders if something besides the dream of wealth has been driving them. “You can photograph the gold,” says Finkelstein, who previously documented street performers in New York City’s Central Park. “You can photograph the landscape. You can photograph the faces. But how do you photograph a motivation?”

California’s identity is veined with gold. The modern jackpot industries (Hollywood and high-tech) inherited their air of perpetual optimism from the myriad boys and men who, upon hearing of the gold discovered at Sutter’s Mill in January of 1848, waited for the spring prairie grass to grow, then steered their wagons for the bonanza.

“The gold was available to anybody with a pick and a pan,” says Malcolm J. Rohrbough, a historian and author of Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation. “There was no license you had to buy. There was no central authority. This was one of the most remarkable examples of the democratization of the economy. It was open to all Americans, as our national myth says it should be.”

California wasn’t yet a state, but, thanks to the forty-niners, soon it would be. Within a few years, there were 100,000 prospectors, many of them factory workers and farmers accustomed to measuring profits in pennies. Some grew rich—a good miner could make $20 a day, compared with the national average of $1—and others made their fortunes supplying miners. Leland Stanford, founder of the university bearing his name, got his start provisioning prospectors. So did Levi Strauss.

The lifestyles of the modern-day prospectors are, in some respects, not so far removed from that of the forty-niners, judging from Finkelstein’s portraits. With their streaming beards, profound sunburns and fingernails caked with river mud, they could have wandered out of the mid-19th century, even though many have outfitted themselves via get-rich-on-gold websites—apparent successors to Stanford and Strauss. There is no cellphone reception at the mining camps and few modern amenities, and the tools of the trade have barely changed: many prospectors use the pan and sluice. They scour the same rivers, often looking for gold the forty-niners missed. In fact, in 2009 California banned a popular dredging technique in part because the miners were stirring up mercury deposits that the forty-niners (who used the toxic metal to attract fine-grained gold) had left behind. California environmentalists, who also fought the first gold rush, continue to raise concerns about how gold miners affect the landscape.

 The atmosphere in the camps may well be darker than in the old days. A number of miners “are desperate people and they don’t know anything about gold mining, but they have a dream that you can make a living doing this, and it’s sad,” says Gregg Wilkerson, a Bureau of Land Management gold mining expert.

“The forty-niners wanted to be a part of building a society and a community, but most of the prospectors I’ve met these days, they just want to be left alone,” says Jon Christensen, executive director of Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West.

Perhaps the starkest difference between the modern prospectors and their predecessors is age. The gold rush was a young man’s game, but many of today’s miners are cash-strapped retirees trying to add a little shine to their golden years. This gives the new mining movement, Christensen says, “the feeling of being the end of something, rather than the beginning.”

Still, Finkelstein believes the latter-day miners share something of the forty-niners’ spirit. “They don’t have to be gold prospecting,” she says, adding: “There’s a certain personality to gold prospectors. In many ways it’s the personality you get from an excited 7-year-old boy who wants to go out exploring every day, to take a risk, to gamble, to get his hands dirty.”

Most on Nugget Alley are free of car and house payments. They enjoy the shade of the riverside alders and hook the occasional trout. And every night they have front-row seats to the glorious San Gabriel sunset, which gilds the river and turns the dusty mountains gold.


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Comments (12)

You people need to get it right and do your research...the mercury while some left over from the 1800,s occurs naturaly in the san gabriel region and any miner who dredges it up is not putting it back into the water simply because it lays in the sluice box and also has gold in it.

Posted by askme on October 29,2012 | 02:26 PM

As a Liberal I'm very disappointed to see how miners are treated by the environmentalists. Most environmentalists live in Urban areas and have no idea what things are really like up in the mountains, out in the desert, etc. I say this because I was one of them, until I started to get out in nature. The small scale miners do nothing to damage the environment. It's only the larger scale operations that come in with heavy machinery that turn things into a wasteland. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the big mining interests backing the environmentalists in order to keep the small guys out. We on the left could learn a lot from those outdoorsmen, as I have. When it comes to the outdoors, we have more in common than not.

Posted by Erik on October 7,2012 | 12:03 PM

Y'all are missing the boat. If you want gold, you have to go south to Mezquital Del Oro in Zacatecas, Mexico. The name says it all.

Posted by Efrain Rojas on September 30,2012 | 08:31 PM

It's slim pickin's at all locations in the lower 48 since those have been constantly worked once any color was found. Their probably moving boulders that others shoved aside during the Depression in search for gold. We have a nearby resident that tried prospecting and soon realized the real money was in outfitting and supply. He designed a better sluice box, makes and sells those from home. The internet and Pay-Pal are his Mother Lodes.

Posted by Bill Wilson on August 2,2012 | 07:32 PM

OMG this is Wonderful Iam happy to be American. I've been a window for 20years now I have worked hard as a nurse aid for 19year husband die of cancer at 33 so I have raised 4 kids alone thank God they are big now but a year ago I lost my home of 22yrs to foreclosure living.g with a sister now and I did become. Homeless I only wish I could go there and try my hands on it and have some fun doing that and maybe I to may get lucky wow good luck to all of you's who try my best wishes and God Bless You's All American. Is Great

Posted by Sarita Bosch, Delossantos on August 1,2012 | 04:09 AM

Smithsonian is most likely read by those who enjoy history and the thrill of learning. Being a modern day small river miner, I share exactly the same traits most of your readers do. I think you are missing the point on the modern-day gold miner. True, most want to be left alone, but that is because they are working in one of the most interesting and enjoyable AND environmentally safe industries known to man. What most people miss about the small placer miner is the self-employment opportunities, the fact that you are in the most rugged an beautiful county around (areas where most people would never go, due to the remoteness of it) and at you work location, you get to experience this beauty day in and day out. Personally, on my "days off" of my office job, I look forward to a day or two of totally satisfying, back-breaking work- so back breaking that when I come home afterwards, I can barely get out of my truck, I am so tired. So, what's my draw to this? Primarily, it ISN'T the gold. The gold is a by-product of my enjoyment. So what is it? It's the opportunity to be working in situations where my mind is totally engaged, where I am constantly figuring out ways to move rocks, figuring out wintertime water flows to try to determine deposition zones, figuring out new and improved ways to stay safe and ways to recover gold. All day long, I am thinking and working in a beautiful environment. To me, it is nirvana. It is the most cathartic thing I have ever done- and it is extremely addicting. You wouldn't believe it until you tried it. Another aspect of my enjoyment is the historical perspective. I am working in canyons where the recorded history is sparsely reported. So the whole time I am there, I am wondering what the "oldtimers" did and how they did it. I spend hours in historical libraries trying to discover the history of where I am working.

Posted by Rick Smith on July 26,2012 | 12:04 PM

The miners are cranky because they are constantly being harassed by government officals and environmental groups who use their special interest to deny us ( the American people ) our right to prospect and mine. We are also tired of the environmental groups LYING and MISINFORMING the public and Legislatures about mining! We miners clean the waterways with 98 percent efficiency with no cost to the state, as per a study conducted by the waterboard. Also Hg is a LOCATABLE mineral.

Posted by Jim on July 25,2012 | 10:24 PM

@teryfadgen is correct about that, but the article nevertheless accurately captures a lot of the spirit and sentiment of the new, older prospectors. What's even more important is the fact that today's prospectors are conserving that most precious right: the right of the Public has to use and enjoy Public Lands. It also should be noted that the temporarily-banned dredging actually removes mercury from the water.

Posted by Ken Tennen on July 8,2012 | 12:14 PM

The article states that Stanford University bears Leland Stanford's name. While Leland Stanford did found the University, he named it after his son, Leland Stanford, Jr.

Posted by Jeff Utz on July 7,2012 | 03:45 PM

Regarding your article, Going for Gold-Your article States, "Leland Stanford, founder of the university bearing his name...". Actually, the university is named after his son, Leland Stanford, Jr.

Posted by John Steele on July 5,2012 | 02:49 PM

“The forty-niners wanted to be a part of building a society and a community, but most of the prospectors I’ve met these days, they just want to be left alone,” I guarantee you any forty-niner who was hitting paydirt did not want society and a community. That's why they would give a productive area a name like "Poverty Hill".

Posted by on July 3,2012 | 08:38 PM

smithsonian! shame on you! no mention of WOMEN? women and girls accompanied menfolk and some prospected alone! many women flourished during the california goldrush! the smithsonian has published atricles about these amazing women before. why is there no mention of them now?

Posted by teryl fadgen on June 29,2012 | 11:13 PM



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