Mining Camps of Placer County

Everything in Placer County history leads to gold, from its name the Spanish term for gold-bearing gravel to the mining camps that sprouted overnight in its rugged river canyons. Ecstatic cries of Gold on the American River in 1848 launched the largest voluntary migration in the history of the world. As claims panned out, thousands of miners swarmed like locusts between the rough-and-tumble mining camps, from the crest of the Sierra Nevada to the Sacramento Valley. Some camps disappeared along with the easy placer gold; others found new methods to extract gold deposited deep in quartz veins or underground and developed into stable towns that still stand. Sometimes washing whole hillsides into rivers, hydraulic mining was outlawed in the 1880s, but the colorful characters and tall tales of the Gold Rush live on."

Author: Carmel Barry-Schweyer, Alycia S. Alvarez
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing (SC)
Published: 11/01/2004
Pages: 128
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.66lbs
Size: 9.32h x 6.68w x 0.36d
ISBN: 9780738529509

About the Author
Barry-Schweyer, Carmel: - Co-authors Carmel Barry-Schweyer, archivist and historian, and Alycia S. Alvarez, museum curator, have mined these images from the vast photographic collection of the Placer County Department of Museums to portray this most colorful era in California s history.