Fever Pitch

Gold!

It was Jan. 24, 1848, and sawmill operator James Marshall had just discovered the first nugget at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, igniting a frenzy of fortune hunting that was to reshape California.

Marking the 150th anniversary, on Jan. 24 the Oakland Museum of California will open a major multimedia exhibit as the showpiece of its six-month “Gold Rush! California’s Untold Stories” project. The exhibit will move on Sept. 19 to the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in Los Angeles, where it will remain until Jan. 24, 1999.

Artifacts, many on loan from other museums, including the Smithsonian Institution, will include that first nugget found by Marshall, tableaux and diaries depicting miners’ lives, tools, a simulated subterranean archeological dig and the

copper-clad stern of the ship Niantic, whose bow is buried beneath San Francisco.

This will be no mere “gee whiz” attraction. L. Thomas Frye--the museum’s chief curator emeritus of history and project director for “Gold Fever! The Lure and Legacy of the Californa Gold Rush,” largest of three interrelated exhibits--set out to dispel stereotypes and examine the dark side of the Gold Rush, including racism and environmental destruction.

He observes that thousands of prospectors who rushed to California from all over the world left disillusioned and empty-handed. There wasn’t enough gold to go around. “The meanness and the selfishness became overpowering. Those who were considered to be weaker, like the native people, were driven out, shot and killed, and literally hunted.”

The Chinese, left to rework mines abandoned by others, met violence if they moved into virgin territory, says Frye, and, “most ironic of all, the Spanish-speaking people were persecuted, especially by the Americans, who had a strong sense that somehow God in his providence had kept the gold hidden from Spanish eyes. That was part of the justification for trying to drive out, intimidate and physically assault ‘foreign’ miners, some of whom were born here.”

To this day, Frye says, the landscape bears the scars of the Gold Rush. Miners blasted down mountains, letting the debris wash into the rivers and valleys and destroy farmlands. They decimated forests for lumber. In the rivers and streams of the Central Valley, there remain “toxic cocktails” of mercury and other heavy metals used in the extraction process.

Illustrating the impact of the Gold Rush on California’s ecology will be such exhibits as a 3,000-pound dredge bucket, scarred and worn from gouging the earth, and photographs of the eroded hillsides that were byproducts of the frenzied quest for gold.

Assessing the impact of the Gold Rush, Frye mentions, too, the freedom it gave people to reinvent themselves--a notion that still lures people to the state.

“No matter what you had been--a farmer, a blcksmith, an office worker--there was a certain equality. you could strike it rich. You could also come here and fail and try something else. If you were a woman, you might bake pies and sell them to miners, as a number did, and make very large amounts of money.”

The Gold Rush project, which will include a symposium with scholars and writers and a lecture series, is funded through a $500,000 grant form the National Endowment for the humanities and corporate sponsorships.