On the morning of January 24, 1848, a laborer spotted some shiny glitter in the mill race. He was working for James Marshall in Coloma, CA at a saw mill where they were cutting lumber for the settlement around Sutter’s Fort called Sacramento. He dutifully carried the golden pieces to his boss who then excitedly carried them down to his boss, Captain Sutter. They began to test the small nugget by pounding on it and cutting on it. They soon realized that it was indeed gold. It took the remainder of that year for the news of the gold discovery to reach around the world.
The next year, 1849 saw the largest migration of people in history. The world literally rushed in. Towns in California became deserted overnite as people sold or merely abandoned their stores and farms and headed for the gold fields. People on the east coast trekked overland or sailed around the tip of South America to reach the El Dorado. They packed what they could and left families and friends behind, many never to return. Men pulled two wheeled carts, pushed wheelbarrows and walked two thousand miles across deserts and mountains. The more prosperous could afford horse or oxen drawn wagons. Many died along the way. Families were decimated by disease and hardship. Some turned back but most kept coming.
When they finally arrived in the gold fields of California, they discovered that the gold wasn’t just lying about to be picked up. It required hard labor to move the rocks and gravel. If the gold was hard to come by, the necessary supplies were even more scarce. When they were available, they were extremely expensive. Most of the miners barely kept even and after a few months or at most a year or two, gave up the dream and either turned to a job or returned home in defeat. This whole experience was referred to as "Having been to see the elephant."
The mountains of Northern California are magical, even to the occasional traveler. Steeped in rich history, the river canyons literally echo with the cries of the 49ers, the crazily wonderful body of men and women who rushed to California to make their fortune. Evidence of their herculean efforts abound and one cannot help but get caught up in a feverish energy that pervades your spirit. The first time I experienced the North Fork of the American River was in April of 1978. It had been a wet spring and I was there with my friend, Jim, for the annual trout opener. Like most openings, the water was too high for fishing but hey, we were there to party.
Every little gully was filled with roaring rivulets plunging down the verdant hillsides, creating miniature Yosemites around each corner of the road. Wild flowers cascaded over the rocks tangled with ferns. The rich smell of fresh earth and the pungent odor of pine mingled to fill my senses. The road, nearly non-existent on the map, was a one lane rock strewn trail that meandered down into the canyon for 8 miles. The steep sides dropped vertically for what looked like thousands of feet although 80 to 100 feet was probably closer to the truth. The deeper into the canyon we went, the more magical it became. At the bottom of the canyon was the confluence of the North Fork with Shirttail Creek and an old, rickety suspension bridge that shook and swayed as we crossed. I was an amateur historian of the gold rush so when Jim told me about the gold that was plentiful in Shirttail Creek, my ears perked up like a dog on point.
I had dabbled in a little gold dredging with my Uncle Morris when I first got out of the Navy. A gold dredge is a motorized, floating suction device very much like an underwater vacuum that sucks up rocks, gravel and hopefully gold and transports it up to the surface where it is then classified across a set of riffles. You need underwater breathing equipment as well as a wet suit to keep you warm. Since gold is significantly heavier than rock, it settles out immediately and the rocks and sand are carried off, back into the river. I immediately began planning a few gold diving trips to Shirttail Creek. As events occurred, it wasn’t to be for another two years.
I’d like to say that when I walked away from my career of 20 years in 1981 and headed for the mountains of Northern California, I knew what I was doing. To be honest, I didn’t have a clue. They say that God looks out for fools and children. I must have fit one of those categories because I certainly needed all the help I could get. It wasn’t that I was going toward anything, it was more of a running away. Running away from life. Oh, I had some wild fantasies about living on the river, mining for gold and becoming my own man so to speak. But those daydreams had no connection to reality. Little did I suspect how closely my reality would come to fit my dreams.
At the time, I was a 40 year old computer programming burnout at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, California. Although I had worked my way up from a lowly technician to a computer programmer and was making fairly decent money, I had become disillusioned by working at a "job". In particular, the work that I was doing seemed empty and meaningless. I had been married for almost 20 years but just like my job, the marriage was a burnout too. The year, 1980 was the lowest of the low for me. The divorce rode on my shoulders like a set of gargoyles, leering down at my pathetic efforts to make the most of a bad situation. I wandered through my job in a trance for most of that year. My friends wanted to know how long I had to live since I looked like death warmed over. Like a drowning man, I clutched at anything that seemed less dark than the corners of my mind. One of those lighter images came in the form of Charlotte, a fellow burnout on the van pool that took us to and from our jobs. Like me, she had recently divorced and was looking for life’s alternatives, not sure what they even looked like. We traded our stories and our dreams and, in the process, fell in love. That, as they say was the beginning of the rest of my life.
One of Charlotte’s dreams was to live in the woods or in the country at least. Using each other’s dreams to validate the other, we came up with a "plan". So now we had a set of fools or children on the loose. We would quit our jobs and go live on the river in a tent. Sounded like the simple life to us. I cashed out my retirement and off we went, happy go lucky and all. Our first home as husband and wife was a tent, an awning with a cupboard and campstove and a makeshift outhouse in the bushes on the bank of Shirttail Creek.
