Gold Rush Festival Isn’t Panning Out

One hundred fifty years after the first argonauts began panning and scraping and blasting the local riverbeds dry of much of their hidden treasure, Joe Bilotta and a small band of other modern-day gold miners are still combing the region for the precious metal that changed the face of California.

Bilotta hasn’t done too badly so far. He and his two sons spend weeks at a time prowling streams with a vacuum-like dredge, extracting dirt and minerals and--occasionally--gold. Their prized find came a year or so ago: a 3-ounce nugget that the retired engineer carries in a pouch to show the curious and the envious. “The ‘holy cow’ nugget,” he calls it.

“You always think the next crevice you go into is going to have that big nugget,” said Bilotta, 62. “You feel the energy of how much work it must have taken for these guys to do this back then--all the freedom, all the gold just there for the taking.”

The foothills and streams east of Sacramento are still very much Gold Country, in history and in spirit. But for all that people such as Bilotta have done to affirm the region’s storied beginnings, the glitter has faded a bit of late, dulled by disappointment and frustration over what many locals say should have been a grand commemoration of the defining event.

This Saturday marks the 150th anniversary of the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma--a pea-sized find that caused little stir at first but would soon set off the hysteria of the Gold Rush and spark one of the largest, most rapid migrations in modern history.

At the Gold Rush’s birthplace, local organizers once envisioned as many as 70,000 people visiting this tiny town to mark the occasion this weekend, matching the throngs of visitors and celebrities who flocked here for the 100th anniversary in 1948. Such talk now seems like fool’s gold: To date, about 500 tickets have been sold.

People in Coloma still hope to attract several thousand people, including the governor, who is promising to attend. Alan and Cindi Ehrgott’s country inn will be filled, but even so, they believe the once-ballyhooed weekend marks an opportunity lost. They wonder whether the state is forgetting a critical part of its history.

“Deep down in my heart, I feel Jan. 24 belongs to Coloma. That was the watershed event,” Alan Ehrgott said. “And there could be so much more.”

A state Sesquicentennial Commission is responsible for planning events over the next 33 months to commemorate the Gold Rush and statehood. Many here blame that panel for what they see as inattention, broken promises and a failure to support the local event. And a legislative task force in Sacramento has begun to review whether the hundreds of thousands of dollars the commission has spent have produced much more than slick logos, color brochures and pricey consulting contracts.

The gold legacy will be remembered in several events around the state this weekend hosted by the commission and other groups. There will be a pregame salute at the Super Bowl in San Diego on Sunday, as well as a touring exhibit highlighting the Gold Rush’s contributions and its often-overlooked tragedies, including the environmental destruction wrought by early miners, and the killing of Native Americans and other ethnic groups.

Mindful of the controversy over how Christopher Columbus was remembered on the 500th anniversary of his voyage, “we made the decision right from the start that we would not try to smooth over the tragic consequences of the Gold Rush, pretending that it was all happy miners singing in a Donizetti opera,” said state librarian Kevin Starr.

Commission officials acknowledge that the panel’s fund-raising arm has been sluggish in recruiting corporate sponsors and is falling far short of its goals. Sutter’s Mill has paid the price, receiving virtually no direct aid despite what the superintendent of the state park in town says was a promise of $150,000.

The commission hopes to raise more than $20 million from private sources over the next several years to help Californians rediscover their roots. But to date officials have collected about $200,000.

“I can understand there being an anxiety, because we share the same anxiety about raising the funds,” said the commission’s deputy director, Oscar Wright.

The commission has spent $200,000 of its $2.3 million in state funding on consulting contracts that had to be canceled after the lagging fund-raising prompted cutbacks. One consultant, ironically, was assigned to do fund-raising.

Matt Sugarman, the superintendent of Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, said he has seen little in the way of results besides a fancy “California 150” logo that was developed and trademarked.

“Seems like a lot of money for a logo,” he said.

The consulting contracts have attracted the interest of the state’s Legislative Staff Task Force on Government Oversight, which is reviewing records and interviewing people involved in the anniversary planning.

Richard Steffen, senior consultant to the task force, said he is concerned that for all the money being spent on fancy brochures, events like those in Coloma “aren’t getting any benefit.” He said he wants to avoid a repeat of recent problems surrounding the California Veterans Memorial Commission, which was plagued by charges of cost overruns and inefficiency in its scaled-back effort to build a memorial in Sacramento.

Even some on the Sesquicentennial Commission are frustrated. Steven Lund, a panel member, questioned why the commission is waiting until today--a day before the Sutter’s Mill anniversary--to adopt a business plan, including a revised mission statement and goals. “It would have been nice to have done it long before now,” he said.

Beyond the weekend’s events, many are concerned about missing another chance to highlight Coloma’s role in the Gold Rush. J.S. Holliday, a Gold Rush author and commission member, says the state has lagged for years in developing Sutter’s Mill as a true historical monument, comparable to the elaborate attraction at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.

“Coloma is the birthplace of American history in California. It’s our Plymouth Rock, the nest out of which California took wing, and we haven’t done enough to honor its place,” Holliday said. “It’s regrettable. We’ve been rushing headlong into the future so fast we don’t have time to pause and consider where we’ve been.”

Workers in Coloma weren’t even looking for gold that day in January 1848. They were building a sawmill for a Swiss immigrant businessman named John Sutter.

Earlier reports of gold in California--including one in the Newhall area in 1842--hadn’t amounted to much. So when James Marshall found a dull flake of yellow rock, perhaps half the size of a pea, under a few inches of water at the mill site, there was little rush of excitement among his crew.

Marshall would say later that he was struck “by something shining in the bottom of the ditch. . . . I reached my hand down and picked it up. It made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold.”

But reports at the time indicated that the men were not really sure what they had found. They pounded the nugget with a rock, then later smashed another nugget with an anvil and dropped it in a soap pot to test it. “This day,” one of the men wrote in his diary for Jan. 24, “some kind of mettle was found in the tailrace that looks like goald.”

Sutter was cautious. Back at Sutter’s Fort--Sacramento’s original settlement--a few days later, Marshall brought him a sample wrapped in a handkerchief, and they tested it with nitric acid from a medical kit to confirm that it was gold. But it did not even merit a mention in the fort’s logbook for the day, and Sutter seemed most concerned with ensuring that his sawmill be completed.

Word got out slowly and generated no immediate swarm, even after a Bay Area newspaper blared “GOLD MINE FOUND” on March 15, 1848.

The real trigger for the Gold Rush appears to have come a few months later, when Sam Brannan, a newspaper publisher and businessman, decided to check the gold reports for himself. As legend has it, he returned to San Francisco, waving a bottle of gold dust at startled passersby on Montgomery Street and shouting: “Gold! Gold! Gold in the American River!”

And, as historian Holliday noted in the title of his book, the world rushed in.

Men from the coast and the ranches led the way. Word made its way back east--along with a tea caddy full of gold for the government--and President James Polk hailed the discovery in his message to Congress in December 1848. The floodgates were opened as men from around the nation left their homes for Gold Country, soon followed by would-be miners from Europe, South America, Australia and elsewhere around the world.

Up to half a million people flocked to the region. Nearby towns emptied. Families and military posts were deserted. Ships were abandoned in San Francisco Harbor.

“And why not? This was the first time really in the history of the world that you had a resource such as this that was free for the taking. If you could get here, you had a chance to change your life,” said L. Thomas Frye, a museum curator who is director of the California Gold Rush Sesquicentennial Project.

Towns with evocative names such as Dry Diggins and Pinchemtight (named for pinching gold dust) sprang up through the region, and local economies boomed. Bad coffee reportedly sold for $4 a pound, flour for $400 a barrel, and iron pans--a mining essential--for as much as $16.

And there was gold--bags and bags of it, a haul that Holliday says would, over the course of the next decade, amount to $10 billion in today’s dollars.

The most famous nugget--the one that Marshall reportedly found that day and later sent to Washington via military escort--is returning to California for the first time in years. It will be on display in Coloma for a few days and then at the Oakland Museum.

This will be park Supt. Sugarman’s first chance to see the real thing. “It’s an exciting time--finally bringing the nugget home,” he said.

Seventy-six-year-old Beverly Cola, a local history buff in neighboring Placerville, started picking her outfits weeks ago for the weekend costume gala and festivities in Coloma.

But she doesn’t sense nearly the same buzz as there was for the anniversary 50 years ago, when her husband even grew a fluffy beard to replicate the miners’ look. She can’t mask her disappointment. “You lose the excitement, the history,” she said.

Bilotta is concerned too. He will be at the commemoration in full regalia, donning the 19th century miner’s outfit he wears when he volunteers as a park docent--if he’s not out doing some real mining. But given the lackluster support from the state, Bilotta wonders how many others will be in town to pay tribute to the Gold Rush legacy.

“Maybe people just don’t care,” he said.

Times researcher Nona Yates contributed to this story.

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Events Mark a Golden Anniversary

The Gold Discovery Days Sesquicentennial celebration marks the discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills 150 years ago. Events at the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park in Coloma include:

* Living history skits

* Wagon train encampment

* Mining camp tent city

* Gold discovery reenactments

* Pioneer mining demonstrations

* Gold Rush-era music

Tickets are $6 for adults. For information call (530) 622-0390.