Gold Country The northern Sierra Nevada looms large in western myth. This may be the one region of the west where the real events exceed the stories based on them. A century and a half after the fact, the huge rush of people to this region in 1849 seems downright insane. Men abandoned families, farms, and stable jobs for the ultimate gamble, mining for gold in California. A large majority ultimately returned home penniless. It became the first, but far from the only, quest for sudden riches in the state’s history. These days, many residents of the towns in this region seek a different type of fortune, the one that arrives in the pockets of visitors looking to soak up that myth. Every town in this region contains at least one
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