![]() Nevada City, 64 miles east of Sacramento, is one of the best-preserved and most charming of the gold rush towns, a tranquil place with a strong sense of tradition and an active artistic community. The remaining settlements have faded to ghost towns or hamlets with populations in two or three digits. Here and there the road intersects towns, whose origins go back to Marshall's discovery.Īlthough almost all of the mines were closed by the 1940's, about a third of the gold rush towns still thrive, their economies buoyed by agriculture, tourism or stock-raising, their roadsides marred by commercial glut. The sparsely populated landscape of the Mother Lode is itself beautiful, if sometimes parched and inhospitable, with rolling hills, high plateaus and steep canyons. The northern sector, from Nevada City to Jackson, offers a greater concentration of mining sites, museums and Victorian architecture. The area's tourist attraction is the reconstructed town of Columbia, a state park with costumed employees, stage-coach rides and lots of visitors. The southern Mother Lode is the least densely populated part of the gold country, with the exception of two busy county seats, Mariposa and Sonora. Highway 49 runs 267 miles through the Mother Lode, a name applied loosely to the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada from Mariposa to Sierraville. A leisurely three-day tour of about 140 miles along Highway 49 touches some of the major sights in the northern Mother Lode. Today, with less discomfort, you can explore the territory that attracted those early prospectors and recreate in your mind's eye something of the atmosphere of the California gold rush. ![]() Though the discovery did neither Marshall nor Sutter any good, it spurred tens of thousands of fortune hunters to struggle by land and sea to California, hoping to find its riverbeds strewn with the stuff of dreams. IN 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall noticed flecks of gold shining in the tailrace of the sawmill he was building for John Sutter on the American River in California.
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