The New Gold Rush

The Washington Post reports that with the economy in rough shape and gold prices still near $1,000, folks are out there paning for gold. Literally.

Maybe it was the nail in Ray’s head. Maybe it was the economy. His wife said one as much as the other drove the decision to auction off everything that wouldn’t fit in the trailer and leave Vermont for the mother lode.
“Thought we’d try to make a living at it,” Kim Lague said, standing in a mining camp that was busier during the Great Depression than it was in the Gold Rush of 1849, and is busy once again.
And so, 18 months after a co-worker’s pneumatic hammer drove a 2 1/2 -inch stainless-steel nail into Ray Lague’s skull — “the plunger of the gun brushed my hat and discharged” — the once-thriving contractor took his place among the prospectors lining the steep banks of the South Fork of the Stanislaus River, 40 miles west of Yosemite National Park. The bearded man helping him drag the mining gear into the water was a jobless logger who lost his home to foreclosure.
Fifty feet downstream, an unemployed concrete-truck driver scoured the river bottom beside a laid-off furniture mover, back to prospecting after a day spent wrestling with the unemployment office.
“You have to consider the economy,” said Gary Rhinevault, caretaker of the Lost Dutchman’s Mining Association campground, where 45 prospectors pay as little as 30 cents a day to pitch their tents. “In 1932 there were more prospectors out trying to make a living than in the 1850s.”

Posted by on August 24th, 2009 at 10:44 am


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