IN EXCESS

“Gold! This is gold, amigos. “

There were sparkling flakes clinging to the muddy roots of the wild onions Francisco Lopez had just dug from the earth. The two other cowboys with him that day in Oak--soon to be Placerita--Canyon, hoped he was right. Lopez had attended a mining college, after all. He was right; he’d struck gold.

It was March 9, 1842; the vaqueros probably rode into the canyon searching for stray cattle, only to begin the first California gold rush. Dwarfed by the 1849 rush to the Sierra Nevada (the mother of all lodes), the Placerita strike, a few miles east of present-day Santa Clarita, has been all but forgotten except by local history enthusiasts. Within two months of Lopez’s discovery, about 200 miners swarmed into Placerita and nearby canyons. But their elation was short-lived--only 125 pounds of gold were found in the first year and soon all but a few had abandoned their picks and pans.

Several versions of just why Lopez was probing in the ground with his knife have been recorded. One says Lopez’s wife asked him to gather herbs on his journey. Another holds that Lopez wanted some onions to liven up his dried-beef lunch. The most colorful and popular tale, says Jerry Reynolds, curator of the Saugus Station Museum in Newhall, contends that while his companions sat by the stream, Lopez napped beneath a nearby tree and dreamed of gold all around him. The tree has been known ever since as the “Oak of the Golden Dream.”