{"id":63,"date":"2026-05-20T07:05:44","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T07:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=63"},"modified":"2026-05-20T07:05:44","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T07:05:44","slug":"how-americans-caught-gold-fever-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=63","title":{"rendered":"How Americans Caught Gold Fever Again"},"content":{"rendered":"
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One morning this past January, I set out in a rental car on the road to El Dorado\u2014not 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\u2019t 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\u2019s historic boom towns, I pictured myself tumbling into the river below, like the miner\u2019s daughter Clementine, of \u201cOh My Darling\u201d fame.<\/p>\n

Read more Do We Think Too Much About the Future?<\/a><\/p>\n

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. \u201cOh, there\u2019s a bar called that in Nevada City,\u201d 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 \u201cgeneral store\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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But, lately, people around these parts aren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

The eye-popping price has sparked what many people are calling Gold Rush\u00a02.0, with everyday Americans buying gold-panning kits and signing up for \u201cpay dirt of the month\u201d 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 \u201cDig Deep\u201d and \u201cUnearthed\u201d and subscribe to The Nugget<\/em> newsletter. Membership to the subreddit r\/Prospecting has increased by more than a thousand per cent since 2020. \u201cDoes anybody else ever just want to take pyrite and punch it in the face?\u201d a recent post read, referring to the yellow-tinged mineral better known as fool\u2019s gold.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s a good time to get a metal-detecting hobby,\u201d Albert Fausel, an amateur gold prospector and the owner of Placerville Hardware, in Placerville, California, told me, when I visited his shop. (\u201cPlacer\u201d gold is findable in water and in dirt, unlike \u201clode,\u201d 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\u2014some even come in Barbie pink. By the register, there were barbecue lighters in the shape of double-barrelled shotguns for the \u201cgunslinging grillmaster\u201d 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. \u201cIn the past couple of weeks, it\u2019s really picked up. When everyone knows it\u2019s five grand, it\u2019s a milestone,\u201d he said, before dashing off to help some customers.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The man also mentioned that he watched \u201cthe gold-rush shows.\u201d After a spike in gold prices in 2010, the Discovery Channel green-lit a slew of reality series about amateur miners. The first, \u201cGold Rush,\u201d 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\u2019s top cable series for men under fifty-five, and inspired spinoffs, including \u201cGold Rush: Mine Rescue with Freddy & Juan,\u201d a Gordon Ramsey-style business-makeover show for struggling mines.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Fausel has appeared on Discovery\u2019s \u201cAmerica\u2019s Backyard Gold,\u201d a travel show about mining destinations. In an episode on Placerville, cameras follow Fausel as he goes \u201csniping\u201d\u2014searching for gold underwater, with a snorkel. Within thirty minutes, he finds half an ounce of gold, then worth eight hundred dollars. \u201cThat\u2019s a little better than minimum wage,\u201d he jokes.<\/p>\n

Gold has also got a boost from its biggest hype man since King Tut. \u201cGold will not be Tariffed!\u201d 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\u2019s 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n

These days, hitting the mother lode looks different than it did in 1849\u2014brand deals, reality-TV guest spots\u2014but there\u2019s 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. \u201cNow I just need a YouTube video to go promote it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

I arrived at Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, in nearby Coloma, for the day\u2019s 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. \u201cVarmint stew,\u201d one grumbled, before introducing himself as Monterey Jack. \u201cIn the eighteen-thirties, we were mountain men and fur trappers in the Grand Tetons,\u201d he explained, with a theatrical twang. \u201cWe ended up at Fort Sutter. John Sutter got us payroll to bring in meat.\u201d In his real voice, he added, \u201cProbably raccoon.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014pieces 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<\/em> gold, which doesn\u2019t oxidize. Marshall told Sutter, who, afraid of losing his workers to prospecting, suggested that they keep the discovery quiet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s land, collected gold dust and took it in a bottle to San Francisco, where he ran through the streets shouting, \u201cGold! Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!\u201d (In some tellings, he had already bought up every shovel in California.) Brannan\u2019s scheme to drum up business became a useful tale of American ingenuity. (And it was American by then. On February\u00a02nd, Mexico and the United States signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which Mexico ceded fifty-five per cent of its territory, including California.)<\/p>\n

As the historian Malcolm\u00a0J. Rohrbough writes, in \u201cDays of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation,\u201d \u201cThe changes in California over a few short months were those characteristically associated with a plague or war.\u201d 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\u2019s harbor risked losing its crew. Mexican nobles couldn\u2019t keep household help. \u201cThese gold mines have upset all social and domestic arrangements,\u201d the first American mayor of nearby Monterey observed in his diary, \u201cAnd the hidalgo\u2014in whose veins flows the blood of Cortes\u2014[has] to clean his own boots.\u201d Local newspapers suspended production, but, across the country, the Washington Daily Union<\/em> declared, \u201c\u00a0\u2018El Dorado\u2019 is certainly found at last.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gold fever quickly became a pandemic. Among the first foreigners to arrive were miners from Chile, who brought bateas<\/em>, or gold pans, introducing the technology to the region. The Irish also joined, becoming a potent force in the gold rush. (Edward T. O\u2019Donnell, a history professor at the College of the Holy Cross, has suggested that the \u201cassociation of the Irish with mining fortunes led to the expression \u2018luck of the Irish.\u2019\u00a0\u201d) 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.<\/p>\n

I wandered over to a log cabin with a sign that read \u201cMiner\u2019s Store: Groceries and Provisions.\u201d I explained to a woman in a wide-brimmed black hat and a red wool overshirt that I was a reporter. At this, the re\u00ebnactor\u2014whose name was Jen Roger and whose real job was director of the Nevada State Museum in Carson City\u2014went into docent mode. \u201cThe biggest myth that came out of the gold rush is that poor kids were striking it rich,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s the people who mine the miners\u2014land speculators, shop owners\u2014who got rich. Sam Brannan made a pile of money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many American corporations were gold-rush startups. Wells Fargo provided armed gold transport to banks back East. Domingo (n\u00e9 Domenico) Ghirardelli, an Italian immigrant, sold chocolate to miners out of a tent. Not every enterprise got past the beta stage. A re\u00ebnactor named Chuck, whose day job is running a call center in San Jose, brought up a company that hawked \u201cgold salve.\u201d \u201cYou supposedly covered yourself in it and rolled down the mountain to gather gold,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Only a small percentage of miners made a fortune. Yet the story of the toiler turned tycoon persisted. It had to\u2014how 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\u2019s 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\u2019s no mistake that Jay Gatsby models himself on Dan Cody, \u201ca product of the Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since seventy-five.\u201d The forty-niners didn\u2019t conceive of themselves as settlers; they imagined that they\u2019d get rich and head home. In reality, many couldn\u2019t even afford a return ticket.<\/p>\n

In the Gold Discovery Museum lobby, I met Ed Allen, a re\u00ebnactor 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\u2014\u201cThat was another gold rush,\u201d he said\u2014and retired at fifty. \u201cWow, you really are James Marshall,\u201d I joked. Allen corrected me. \u201cMarshall never made a dime,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople came here and demanded he show them where this gold was, as if he had some kind of Midas touch\u2014which, of course, he did not.\u201d Marshall\u2019s sawmill eventually failed, and, after investing in an unsuccessful mine, he nearly went bankrupt. \u201cIn his old age, he would tell anybody who would listen, \u2018They\u2019re going to make a big fuss over me when I\u2019m dead.\u2019 And that\u2019s exactly what happened,\u201d Allen said. \u201cThe state of California paid nine thousand dollars for a monument to a man who died in poverty.\u201d I looked the monument up later. I don\u2019t know what I was expecting. It was just a bronze-ish figure of Marshall pointing at the ground.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019t have much success prospecting, but he wrote a short story called \u201cThe Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,\u201d about the loutish, hardscrabble culture of miners. It was based on an anecdote he\u2019d heard in Angels Camp, a nearby town, about a real-life gambler who lost a frog-jumping bet in a miner\u2019s bar, and it launched Twain\u2019s literary career. Twain started a trend: if gold mining didn\u2019t \u201cpan out\u201d (a term that dates to the era), a person could always create gold-mining content.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cWe Almost Walked Past This Rock\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Then We Looked a Little Closer!\u201d I came across a sizzle reel on YouTube from an outfit called 530 Gold Mining\u2014530 is the area code for gold country\u2014which featured drone footage of three white men walking around the Sierra Nevada with metal detectors and pickaxes to the tune of \u201cBet on Myself,\u201d a royalty-free rap track.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cDo you mind not telling anyone exactly where we are?\u201d Johnson asked. This wasn\u2019t a problem\u2014I 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. \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t have been able to get into this area otherwise,\u201d Upton, the group\u2019s founder, said, explaining that the terrain would have been too thick with manzanita shrubs.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cOld Timers Missed This Spot LOADED with GOLD NUGGETS!\u201d 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 \u201clight detection and ranging,\u201d which can reveal anomalies in topography. In December of 2025, California\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The trio has also pored over California\u2019s vintage newspapers, which are newly digitized, to find old mining companies\u2019 reports on promising hot spots. But those leads aren\u2019t always a sure thing. \u201cA lot of these companies were publicly traded, so they were trying to raise money,\u201d Johnson explained. \u201cThey\u2019d embellish to attract investors.\u201d 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\u2019s true that he typically posts when he gets a good haul. As he pointed out, \u201cNo one wants to watch you not<\/em> find gold.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cThat\u2019s worth about five dollars,\u201d he told me. Fortunately, YouTube supplements the three men\u2019s 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. \u201cAt heart, most guys just enjoy digging a hole in the woods,\u201d Cleary said.<\/p>\n

Read more The Prehistory of A.I. Slop<\/a><\/p>\n

Men\u2019s 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. \u201cWhy Do Men Buy Shoes That Are Too Big?<\/em>\u201d a recent headline in the Times<\/em> 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 \u201cJoe Rogan of the left\u201d and launched a twenty-million-dollar project called \u201cSpeaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The Discovery Channel has become appointment viewing for men aged twenty-five to fifty-four, powered by the network\u2019s cache of gold-mining reality series. The ur-show of Discovery\u2019s gold programming, \u201cGold Rush,\u201d premi\u00e8red 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, \u201cThe recession has decimated the aviation industry,\u201d 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, \u201cYou\u2019re all millionaires. The only thing is, you got to get it out of the ground.\u201d Five months and ten episodes later, the men\u2019s 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. \u201cWe were never going to do that,\u201d Sam Maynard, a showrunner on the series, told me. \u201cThe real strength of the show wasn\u2019t gold\u2014it was about the promise<\/em> of gold.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I was surprised to learn that it was Hoffman who pitched the show. Inspired by extreme-job-themed reality programs like \u201cDeadliest Catch\u201d and \u201cAmerican Chopper,\u201d he thought he\u2019d 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 \u201cpeople who thought they could survive an apocalypse.\u201d It had been sent out by Maynard, who was developing a docudrama called \u201cAfter Armageddon,\u201d loosely based on Cormac McCarthy\u2019s dystopian novel \u201cThe Road,\u201d for Raw TV, a British production company. Maynard was taken with Hoffman, whom he described to me as a \u201cSvengali-like character,\u201d and flew to Alaska to start shooting. \u201cGold Rush\u201d was an instant blockbuster. \u201cI remember when we beat \u2018Shark Tank,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Hoffman said. \u201cIt\u2019s Middle America, that\u2019s the fan base. It\u2019s blue-collar guys who want to come home, crack open a beer, and go on an adventure.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGold Rush\u201d is still the network\u2019s 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\u2014he bears a striking resemblance to the actor Adam Driver\u2014he\u2019s been interviewed by People<\/em> about his love life; he told the magazine that he had trouble explaining his job to dates \u201cin a way that doesn\u2019t sound like Mad Max.\u201d When we spoke, he sounded more like Pioneer Ken, casually dropping that his family was run out of Kansas for making \u201cbootleg moonshine during Prohibition\u201d and that his grandfather \u201cput everything he owned into a wooden box, got on a steamship in 1938, and moved to Alaska.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a harrowing \u201cGold Rush\u201d scene, the British production crew nearly drowns amid a river torrent as Todd Hoffman grumbles to the camera, \u201cThey\u2019re from London.\u201d He told me, \u201cA lot of them don\u2019t even own a vehicle. They take the tube. They call it \u2018the tube.\u2019\u00a0\u201d \u201cGold Rush\u201d may be unscripted, but it is telling a particular story of American<\/em> masculinity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The show has its critics, who see it as settler cosplay and plunder porn. The environmental historian Brian Leech has categorized it as \u201cMacho TV,\u201d a genre that features \u201cmostly heterosexual white men, joining in small bands, braving extreme conditions, and practicing the tough work of natural-resource extraction.\u201d But that prototype is resonating. \u201cMen have kind of lost their way,\u201d Maynard said. \u201cThey don\u2019t make stuff with their hands anymore. They don\u2019t take stuff out of the ground anymore. This show is about the sense of men\u2019s 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\u2014you know, for millennia.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2014from the Golden Age of America collection\u2014a gold Mar-a-Lago serving tray or a pickleball paddle emblazoned, in gold, with the Trump crest. (\u201cMake your next round of pickleball a golden one!\u201d) Trump\u2019s 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 \u201cthe fabled Fort Knox, to make sure the gold is there.\u201d He added, \u201cIf the gold isn\u2019t there, we\u2019re going to be very upset.\u201d<\/p>\n

I always figured that Trump\u2019s relationship to gold was purely decorative. The metal\u2019s association with kings melds perfectly with his conception of himself as one. But the right\u2019s relationship to gold predates its latest, and loudest, spokesperson. President Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard on August 15, 1971\u2014what the historian Quinn Slobodian calls \u201cDay X for goldbugs\u201d in his book \u201cHayek\u2019s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right.\u201d In the early seventies, goldbugs were \u201ccatastrophe libertarians,\u201d Slobodian writes\u2014survivalist Republicans typified by the politician Ron Paul. Newsletters such as The Ron Paul Survival Report<\/em> 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 \u201cnow building boats to sail to the United States of Welfaria.\u201d (Paul has since denied writing these reports, or even reading them at the time.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI mean, this is all bullshit,\u201d Slobodian, who teaches at Boston University, told me. \u201cBut the \u2018great replacement\u2019 theory requires a means of payment.\u201d 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\u2019s goldbugs commune at the annual FreedomFest conference, in Las Vegas, which offers such panels as \u201cBitcoin vs. Gold.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Trump was running for President in 2016, he told GQ<\/em>, \u201cBringing back the gold standard would be very hard to do, but boy, would it be wonderful.\u201d That is unlikely to happen, but Trump\u2019s 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 \u201cMoney Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto,\u201d said that central banks in developing countries tend to buy gold when they lose confidence in the U.S. dollar: \u201cThey\u2019re questioning whether the U.S. is a reliable economic, political, financial partner.\u201d But that wasn\u2019t enough, he cautioned, to explain gold\u2019s stratospheric rise. \u201cI 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s conference of the Reform Party were greeted by a cardboard cutout of the Party\u2019s 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 \u201cTriggered,\u201d has partnered with a company called Birch Gold Group, which helps you \u201cconvert your 401(k) into gold.\u201d It sells a gold bar engraved with a picture of a miner in overalls panning in a river; on the back, it reads \u201cCredit Suisse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other than branding, what does a gold bar today have to do with the California gold rush? I couldn\u2019t 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 \u201cusable past.\u201d 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\u2019s\u2014transformed from a miner\u2019s uniform into a symbol of rebellious cool by the likes of James Dean\u2014to 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, \u201cfetishize the idea of the supposedly lawless West\u201d\u2014a 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 \u201cfirst time in human history that ordinary people could touch gold. Before then, it was only for kings.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t a history that everyone is nostalgic for. In 2022, a pair of Levi\u2019s from the eighteen-eighties, discovered in a mine shaft in New Mexico, were auctioned off; a label inside read \u201cthe only kind made by white labor.\u201d 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\u2019s settler past; members had to be white men born in the state.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cFor us, the gold rush didn\u2019t end,\u201d 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. \u201cIt 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,\u201d he said. During the rush, under California\u2019s 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. \u201cIt was a genocide,\u201d Governor Gavin Newsom said, in 2019. \u201cNo other way to describe it, and that\u2019s the way it needs to be described in the history books.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scrolling through old newspapers like the Mountain Democrat<\/em>, 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. \u201cLet\u2019s look forward, not backward,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Why can\u2019t we stop looking back? In \u201cWhere I Was From,\u201d Joan Didion writes about her maternal grandfather, whose family \u201cmigrated from the hardscrabble Adirondack frontier of the eighteenth century to the hardscrabble Sierra Nevada foothills in the nineteenth.\u201d He once wrote a letter to the editor of a fifth-grade textbook, frustrated to see the story of California told as a \u201csunny progression from Spanish Se\u00f1orita to Gold Miner to Golden Gate Bridge.\u201d What incensed him, Didion writes, was the suggestion that the settlement of California had been \u201ceasy.\u201d<\/p>\n

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, \u201cWe make an honest living!\u201d I wanted to dismiss\u00a0that posture as science denialism tinged with macho bravado. But then I imagined how I\u2019d 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\u2019s the U.S. Mint, which sells a billion dollars in gold coins annually. A recent Times<\/em> 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.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I hadn\u2019t got my hands dirty, either, and the miners I spoke to told me that if I wanted to understand gold\u2019s magnetism I\u2019d 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<\/em> magazine called \u201cWhere\u2019s the Gold?\u201d When I told Fausel that I already had plans to meet Hoagland, he gave me a clear plastic case to fill with nuggets.<\/p>\n

A few days later, I was sitting across from Hoagland, who\u2019s 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 \u201chand-crank dry washer with an old galvanized tub.\u201d 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: \u201cEternity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hoagland was hooked. His mother bought him a build-your-own-metal-detector-kit, but after putting it together he determined that it wasn\u2019t powerful enough, so he went to RadioShack. \u201cI was constantly driving those guys crazy,\u201d he said. \u201cI was, like, \u2018I need this to be able to have a lower field response.\u2019\u00a0\u201d 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, \u201cOn the Gold,\u201d and just finished a novel\u2014\u201ca murder mystery,\u201d he told me, about an Irish family killed during the gold rush. He appeared on \u201cMine Rescue with Freddy & Juan,\u201d helping an amateur miner who\u2019d lost his day job during the pandemic turn his hobby into a career. Gold is in Hoagland\u2019s bones. He\u2019s had almost two grams of it injected into his knees, an F.D.A.-approved treatment for rheumatoid arthritis. \u201cI\u2019m going to be cremated, and little bits of my ashes are going to go to all my friends,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re going to pan me out at different places in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s been revived by the Lost Dutchman\u2019s 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. \u201cI\u2019m flooring it, and we\u2019re barely moving,\u201d 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, \u201cThat\u2019s cow dung.\u201d He continued, \u201cAnd if you\u2019re 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\u2019ll give you a good hot fire.\u201d I made a mental note to do that if I couldn\u2019t find\u00a0a cactus needle to jam into my jugular first.<\/p>\n

Hoagland handed me a small metal detector\u2014the Minelab Gold Monster 2000\u2014and 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. \u201cI come out here, and I\u2019m reciting Blake\u2019s \u2018Tyger Tyger, burning bright,\u2019\u00a0\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cSon of a bitch!\u201d Hoagland said. \u201cGold!\u201d I screamed.<\/p>\n

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\u2014a cycle that I hoped wouldn\u2019t last for eternity. On the way back to my hotel, Hoagland told me that he couldn\u2019t believe how quickly I had found gold. \u201cOh,\u201d I said. \u201cWell, I\u2019m half Irish.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more What the Gerrymandering Wars Mean for the Midterms\u2014and 2028<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Soaring gold prices, viral panning influencers, gold-rush shows on Discovery TV, and Trump\u2019s gold obsession have ignited a craze for prospecting not seen since the forty-niners headed West. Jennifer Wilson reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":62,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-letter-from-california"],"yoast_head":"\nHow Americans Caught Gold Fever Again - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=63\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Americans Caught Gold Fever Again - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Soaring gold prices, viral panning influencers, gold-rush shows on Discovery TV, and Trump\u2019s gold obsession have ignited a craze for prospecting not seen since the forty-niners headed West. 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