Mother Lode now strikes gold in tourism

"People are awed when they see how difficult it was," says Pat Cook, who guides tours of Placerville's municipally owned Gold Bug Mine. Crews worked the hard rock mine for more than half a century. Bee Photo: Dick Schmidt

MURPHYS -- The tourists had sipped the Chardonnay and wandered aimlessly about the Kautz Ironstone Vineyards, exploring a winery modeled after a 19th-century gold stamp mill. Then, suddenly, they were jolted by gold fever.

"Holy cow!" exclaimed a man in a broad-rimmed cowboy hat. He and his buddies had entered a bank-style vault. Glimmering before them was a 44-pound, crystalline gold nugget -- unearthed by the Sonora Mining Co. in nearby Jamestown in 1992.

Marsh Fortune never found

"I think people are still fascinated by gold," laughed Zandra Morris, manager of the winery's museum and jewelry store. "They come up on gold-panning trips and find a couple of flecks. And then they hear about this, and have to come to Murphys to see it."

The fact that the winery purchased the nugget -- valued at $3.5 million -- to show off for visitors is testament to the lure of gold in California history, and to the modern-day economic bounty that tourism brings to the Mother Lode region.

In rural Calaveras County, home of quaint, restored Gold Rush towns including Murphys, Angels Camp, San Andreas and Mokelumne Hill, tourism brings in nearly $180 million a year. And in rustic settings stretching from Mariposa to Sierra City -- along the meandering length of Highway 49 -- it is easily a billion-dollar industry.

Once rugged settlers chased golden dreams here in harsh -- and often violent -- surroundings. Now thousands more -- from foreigners retracing the steps of the forty-niners to Northern Californians seeking refuge at wineries and bed and breakfast inns -- are finding adventure and serenity in the Mother Lode.

Rose Gillick, 67, calls her native Volcano "the most picturesque of all Mother Lode towns." Hers is the fifth generation of her family to live in the historic Amador County mining town. Bee Photo: Dick Schmidt

"We get tour buses full of English tourists," said Becky Moberg, manager of the restored Sonora Inn in the historic Tuoloumne County town, which bustles with visitors touring 150-year-old Victorian homes and buying Christmas ornaments in restored boutiques. "They picture us now as "hometown America.' One woman from England sent me a postcard and said we were right out of a Norman Rockwell painting."

Characteristic of other Mother Lode towns, modern Sonora has served as a celebratory backdrop for the Gold Rush mystique -- hosting Wild West film festivals and greeting Hollywood production crews shooting the likes of "Little House on the Prairie" and "Petticoat Junction."

But step into the old Tuolumne County Jail -- now a history museum with a vast gun collection and a glistening display of gold and quartz from Sonora's heyday -- and you grasp the essence of the rough-and-tumble past.

"Here's the history of crime," says museum guide Loujuana Souza, handing over a brochure. "It tells about who hung who and what for."

The brochure entries chronicle dozens of shootouts and vigilante hangings in the 1850s mining camp. There was "Studhorse Bob" Caldwell, who killed "a very dangerous and bad man" at the Sonora gambling house. And John Barclay, who was "savagely lynched by a hysterical mob for murdering "Cofford's friend, Smith,' who was assaulting Barclay's wife."

For many tourists exploring the Mother Lode, retracing the path of history leads to something more spiritual.

At Marshall Gold Discovery Park in Coloma, park Superintendent Matt Sugarman recalls Japanese travel writers who clasped their hands together and genuflected at the site where James Marshall found a pea-sized nugget on Jan. 24, 1848, setting off the Gold Rush.

St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Church and its cemetery lie along Highway 49 on the northeast edge of Jackson in Amador County. Bee Photo: Dick Schmidt

"I asked the translator what was going on," Sugarman said. "She said, "They realize they're at a very sacred spot: where this country moved from an agrarian society to an industrial power.'"

At Placerville's Gold Bug Mine -- the only city-owned mine in the nation -- guide Pat Cook leads weekend and special guest tours into a 300-foot tunnel, retracing the steps of crews that worked the hard rock mine for more than 50 years.

"People are awed when they see how difficult it was," said Cook, chairwoman of Hangtown's Gold Bug Park. "When the miners were blasting and mucking this out, it was muddy, dirty, dusty, just awful."

But nobody's straining at the 1859 Soda Works building in Placerville, where there is an old mine shaft in the back and guests at a coffee house listen to contemporary music and sip espresso and fat-free smoothies. It is a symbol of today's more leisurely pursuits in the Mother Lode.

These days, people aren't sweating it out in a mine. They're driving up to nearby Apple Hill, where 500,000 people a year trek each fall for the wineries, pumpkin festivals and fresh-picked Granny Smiths and tasty apple deserts. Tourism from Apple Hill alone pumps $45 million into the El Dorado County economy.

In Grass Valley, visitors munch on Cornish pasties -- a meat, potato and onion concoction that miners from Cornwall, England, packed for laborious shifts at the nearby Empire and other mines.

Visitors at the 1862 Holbrooke Hotel, once a destination for Presidents Grant, Garfield, Benjamin Harrison and Cleveland, watch a dinner theater presentation featuring an impersonator of Mark Twain, another celebrated guest.

"He goes around the room and chit-chats with everybody," said hotel manager Peggy Levine. "Most people who travel here travel to learn something."

At the Emma Nevada House bed and breakfast in Nevada City, guests savor mountain berry cobbler, relaxing in a Victorian home named for the woman who was one of the mining era's first opera singers. The migration these days is a different sort of rush.

"People are coming here now to get away from the stressful environments they live and work in," said innkeeper Ruth Ann Riese. "We provide the escape -- with a sense of history."