Into the West

AN INTERACTIVE ACTIVITY 

Once you reach the hills, you're one of few miners looking for treasure. Things are looking up. Even though you spent the last of your money on a pickaxe and a crude map, you swell with confidence -- at least it's not shoulder-to-shoulder with prospectors, you reason. You find a small cavern and start picking away.

Your optimism is quickly validated, as you hit a lode line in the cavern.

"El Dorado!" you whisper, and your pulse quickens.

A seam of gold as long as your leg, and almost as thick, is just below the surface. You quietly pick out the gold, place it all in a burlap sack, and head back into town.

The goldsmith gives you the good news -- your find is worth nearly $2,300, which translates to more than ninety thousand dollars today.

Your first day, and you're already rich!

You live well for months. Throughout the winter you take steam baths, drink fine wine from Italy, and have steak for dinner nearly every night while courting a young woman who will become your wife.

When you return to the hillside in the spring, the gold's all but gone. Anything that remains is being mined by a corporation, the Soda Springs Prospecting Company, which managed to purchase the entire area. Whatever gold is left belongs to them.

You quickly realize you need to find a new line of work. 

You end up driving a stage between California towns, churning out a decent living and delighting the visitors with stories of the time you hit it big as a 49er. As time passes and the quest for gold fades, settlers keep coming from the East for hundreds of different reasons.

Unlike many young men who headed west seeking fortune and glory, you were able to find lasting, profitable employment into old age.

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