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   It was another era when the gold rushes of the mid-eighteen hundreds took place.   People world wide left their lives behind to pursue a new life.   A life that held promise of wealth beyond imagination.  Families were torn apart as thousands upon thousands left their homesteads, family farms, closed businesses and abandoned professions to head west where it was said that anyone could merely walk along a river bank and pick up one's fortune at their feet.

   Unfortunately, "The West" was a greater distance than most were prepared for.  The majority of individuals from America were coming from towns and settled urban territories in the east.   They had no idea of the strife and struggles that lay before them.    Prior to "GOLD"  being shouted from the roof tops after the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in California, very few had ventured much further west than the Mississippi River.

   The over land route was a journey traveling thousands of miles across rough terrain, over the undaunting Rocky mountains and barren deserts with little or no water, only to be confronted with the Great Sierra Mountains.   Travel via the over land route was very timely.   It could take an average of 6-8 months to make the journey.  Entry into the mountain ranges had to be timed at the right time of year to avoid blistering snowstorms and freezing to death.   Diseases, starvation, dehydration and indian attacks were but a few of the deathly risks that awaited the pioneers willing to take the long trek across land to seek their new livelihoods.   The alternative to the over land passages was to travel by ship sailing down along the Atlantic coast of South America around the dangerous stormy waters of Cape Horn and back up the Pacific side to California.   Another way would be to land the ship in Panama and take a shortened land passage across the wet jungle isthmus finally reaching the Pacific coast and hopefully get passage on a ship traveling north towards San Francisco.   This may cut some time off the western route across the U.S., However, the venture by sea had just as many risks and was by no means any less treacherous.   Cholera and Malaria ran rampant, starvation, lack of fresh water, theivery and murder were a daily occurrance.

   Miners of today take it for granted the luxuries of modern transportation, food stores around every corner, clean bottled water, topography maps and GPS systems to pinpoint your exact locations, as well as equipment that is made from light weight materials significantly lightening the load to be carried.   Most of our favorite mining locations were discovered by those miners of long ago that came before us.   Modern prospectors have much to thank them for.   Present day miners do not have to disengage their lives and chance losing everything they have to get some gold in their poke.   Now days it is done more for fun and recreation and to melely add to the incomes of their everyday jobs.

   Next time you pack up and head out to get your share of the gold, be thankful for the pioneering spirit of those men and women that endured all the hardships and pain paving the way ahead of us, so we can make out mining experiences more pleasurable and profitable.