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Under a concrete bridge built in 1926, where slow-moving Bear Creek flows into the Merced River near Briceburg, David Hester was working hard.
With a wooden-handled shovel in his hands, and a white plastic bucket on the ground, Hester stooped in the shade of the bridge on a bright October day and scooped up a shovelful of dirt and rocks.
Looking down at his feet as he walked, carefully watching for holes and pant-snagging weeds, Hester stopped next to a small metal box hunkered down in the running water of the creek. He poured the bucketful of rocks and sand into the sluicer.
Merced Sun-Star - SUN-STAR PHOTO BY MARCI STENBERG A vial filled with gold dust shimmers in the October sun on Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2009. With gold selling for more than $1,000 an ounce, more people are turning to panning to make money.
Merced Sun-Star - SUN-STAR PHOTO BY MARCI STENBERG Ron Loya, left, and Ed Drechsler get ready to run a stamp mill at the Mariposa Museum Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2009. The stamp mill crushes large pieces of granite down to a fine powder, which can be panned to get the gold out of it.
Merced Sun-Star - SUN-STAR PHOTO BY MARCI STENBERG Doug Wager, left, and his brother, Ron Wager, run sand through their sluice box on the Merced River near Briceburg Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2009. The brothers come to the river once a year to pan for gold, which has risen to more than $1,000 an ounce.
Merced Sun-Star - SUN-STAR PHOTO BY MARCI STENBERG Ed Drecshler of Mariposa holds a piece of granite that will be crushed into sand so the gold can be recovered. With gold selling at more than $1,000 an ounce, more and more people are coming to the Mariposa area to get the precious metal.
Merced Sun-Star - SUN-STAR PHOTO BY MARCI STENBERG Gold shows in a pan at the Mariposa Museum in Mariposa Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2009.
"I've been gold panning for eight years," Hester said quietly. "I have found a lot of gold, but I'm not rich. There's not much big stuff here."
Hester is a member of a growing number of Americans who are looking to gold to help them through a tough economy and hard-to-find jobs. Worth more than $1,000 an ounce, the precious metal and its draw are easy to understand -- but it's not an easy game to play.
"I don't work, I'm disabled," Hester said. "This is a good spot for me, I don't have to move around a lot. But it's been tough since dredging was outlawed."
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger banned dredging in California streams and rivers in August to help fish spawn. That left a lot of gold seekers with useless equipment.
"I have five dredgers sitting in a trailer," Hester said, as he dumped the bucket full of gravel, rocks and sand into his sluicer. "Makes it pretty tough."
After the bucket is dumped, Hester squats near his sluicer, watching the cold water of Bear Creek take away the lightweight sand and gravel and leave behind the tiny flakes that people have sought since the 1840s in California. Hester is looking for the metal that gave California its nickname, the metal that changed the state from home to about 20,000 American Indians and only 2,000 non-natives in 1847 to a state with more than 100,000 people by 1850.
And most of those people were in California for one reason.
Gold.
Millions of dollars of gold from Sierra towns
California features a long history of gold fever. From the day it was first discovered, Jan. 24, 1848, by James Marshall who saw something shiny in Sutter Creek near Coloma, gold has attracted a lot of starry-eyed people from all over the world who believed they could make their fortune.
Gold has been taken out of the Sierra Nevada foothills in many ways -- from the lowly gold panner working solo on a river to huge dredgers that could scoop up thousands of pounds of dirt a day and turn it into gold.
And gold is what made Mariposa the town it is today. In the 1850s, Mariposa County comprised one-fifth of the entire state. It was made up of land in what is now Mariposa, Tulare, Merced, Fresno, Kern, Madera, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Inyo, Mono and San Benito counties.
Millions of pounds of gold have come out of the county, but there is still gold in the hills, and more and more people are showing up in the now small rural county to find the elusive yellow mineral.
Gold is so prominent in the mountains around Mariposa that during the 1930s, when a big rainstorm came, gold would be washed down from the mines in the nearby mountains. Residents of the town would pan for gold in the downtown gutters, finding the precious metal the easy way.
History of gold-seeking goes back 150 years
At the Mariposa Museum and History Center in Mariposa, Ron Loya looks like an old-time gold panner. The Mariposa resident wears a long beard and knows pretty much everything about finding gold.
