You spend the last of your earnings on a riverboat ride to the gold fields. Your pontoon is part of a convoy of 22 flat-bottomed boats. They all carry young men heading for the gold fields.

The heat is a hammer in the late August sun. Arriving in Coloma, you can’t believe the number of people swarming in the valley.

It’s taken you almost eight months by ship, and you fear that all the gold is gone.

In the streams and riverbeds, you expected to see men with panning boxes, but you can barely see the water through all the machines. The hillsides are swarming with men pushing wheelbarrows, axes slung over their shoulders. Despite all the activity, it is oddly quiet.

You stand there staring at the American River and the unbelievable sight before you.

“You should have been here a year ago,” says a man behind you in a thick German accent.

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