The Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.
Six years before James W. Marshall found a nugget of gold at Sutter’s Mill, a Californio named Francisco Lopez fell asleep beneath an oak tree alongside the San Feliciano tributary to Piru Creek in Ventura County.
According to legend, Lopez dreamed he was surrounded by gold, and upon awakening, he plucked some wild onions from a nearby field and saw flakes of gold clinging to their roots.
California’s first gold rush was about to begin.
As word spread, hundreds of would-be prospectors stormed into the area, seeking that mother lode.
By 1847 the rush was over, and the gold strike at Piru Creek would be overshadowed by the more famous discovery to the north the following year.
But it was not the last time gold would be found on the Central Coast.
Gold has been called humankind’s greatest obsession, and for good reason: there are 6,500 years of history to support that idea.
Long before recorded time, people have fallen for the luster and beauty of Au79. The quest for gold has caused wars, migrations, the enslavement and murder of indigenous people.
More blood has been spilled by the hunger for gold than any other metal.
Gold has been the driving force behind classic novels like The Call of the Wild (1903) by Jack London: “Men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal …” and equally classic movies like the 1964 James Bond film, Goldfinger: “This is gold, Mr. Bond. All my life I’ve been in love with its color, its brilliance, its divine heaviness.”
Tradition holds that as Christopher Columbus set off on his voyage in search of the New World, King Ferdinand told him, “Get gold, humanely if possible, but at all hazards, get gold!”
As he sailed across the Atlantic, Columbus prayed that he could fulfill the king’s request, and two days after he landed on Hispaniola it seemed his prayer had been answered:
“Some of them,” (the natives) he wrote, “had a small piece of gold hanging from a hole they have in the nose …”
“I will take some of them,” he wrote the next day, “so that they may learn our language and give us information” — on where to find gold.
Before long he had enslaved the native Taino people and forced them to search for gold in the rivers and streams of the island. Those who did not fulfill their daily quota were beaten, sometimes to death.
The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 and the gold rush that followed were major factors in the settlement of the American West.
Gen. George Armstrong Custer led the 7th Calvary into the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1876 and met his fate at the Little Big Horn because gold had been discovered there in 1874.
The Boer War (1899-1902) began in South Africa because British imperialists wanted the gold mines of the Boer Republics.
The Central Coast has seen its share of gold fever.
In 1878 another Californio, Efranio Trujillo, hunting in the La Panza region of eastern San Luis Obispo County, about 20 miles east of Santa Margarita, lost track of a deer he had shot at.
Stopping at a spring, he peered into the crystal clear water and saw glittering in the sand flakes of the King of Metals.
Once again a mini-gold rush followed, and before long 600 people had swarmed into La Panza.
Faster than you could say, “Eureka!” a saloon, a dance hall and a general store appeared.
No one struck it rich at La Panza. Only $100,000 worth of gold was taken out — a very meager haul by most standards.
The gold rush lasted long enough for a post office to be established in 1879 (it closed in 1908) and sporadic mining went on until 1913.
Before the dawn of recorded history, human beings saw gold as something of value.
At Varna Necropolis in Bulgaria, archaeologists found rings, necklaces and other jewelry made of gold dating back 6,500 years.
The ancient Egyptians associated gold with the Sun god, Ra. In India gold is closely connected to the goddess of plenty, Lakshmi. The Incas believed gold to be “the tears of the Sun.”
Gold has been found on the Central Coast from Ragged Point to San Juan Creek near Shandon (where some panning still goes on) in San Luis Obispo County.
In San Luis Obispo County alone there are at least 36 gold active gold sites. Last Chance Mine, near Pozo, is also the site of some latter day prospecting.
Frazier Mountain in northeastern Ventura County is the home of at least 50 gold mines.
Next time you travel the back roads of the Central Coast, you might catch a glimpse of someone shoveling dirt on the Frazier Mountain or dipping a tin pan into Pozo Creek.
If you do, you are seeing people carrying on a tradition that goes back more than 6,000 years, searching for gold, humankind’s greatest obsession.