Starting a Mariposa in the south you pass through beautiful scenery and colorful Gold Rush era locations like Angel's Camp, Columbia, Coloma, Grass Valley and Placerville.
Well, you used to pass through them now you whizz by adjacent to most of the towns and the area has been hurt by over-building and the by-passes which were instituted to help and protect the historic towns and like many well meaning modernization schemes-they basically killed the towns in the process.
The first time I visited this area was back when I was about 12 or 14 on a family vacation.
Like many of the vacations the folks planned there was lots to see, lots of history and most of it was very inexpensive or free.
There were ruins along the road carefully preserved and actual towns with iron shutters to help protect from fires ( a constant threat in those days), historic bars, hotels and other structures.
The road wound through the foothills-2 sleepy lanes most of the way and always went straight through each of the mining towns and camps.
Columbia had been a project of the state Historic Societies and is now a state park and registered Historic Site-many think its like Knott's Berry Farm-built for tourists but Columbia has a checkered past back to 1850 and was past it's prime by the 1860s.
It was a filming location over the years starting back in the 1920s and still features amny of the shops and businesses that it has for over 150 years.
I remember well that we had stopped for dinner in Jamestown which was south of Columbia near Sonora-my sister was about 7 and she asked for a menu-the waitress was surprised and said "Can you read?'-I guess literate little girls of 7 were a rarity in Jamestown?
We had a lovely, homey dinner and chatted with the server-the cafe wasn't real busy and I suppose she appreciated the company...
My Dad asked her how far it was to Columbia which was our first stop for the next day and the lady offered that she thought it was about 30 or 40 miles, she didn't know exactly she had never been there.
It was less than 10 miles.
The Gold Country in those days was still quiet and rural and had charm.
Over the years I went up or down Highway 49 many times-and I watched it change.
There was a fear that the constant traffic was not good for the "delicate" historical buildings so the highway was changed into a series of bypasses-one had to leave highway 49 and use the bypass through the town in order to visit them.
In places like Jamestown the historic route went in front of the businesses and the bypass went behind-sometimes even closer than the original road.
So which was best? Cars slowly traveling through the business district or barreling down a "freeway" which rattles the structures day and night but benefits no one.
Since many towns were barely a block of businesses that mostly operated during the tourist season-the reputation that the area was mostly CLOSED started circulating and more people went past than went through the towns.
Some Towns like Sutter's Creek did OK since it was not possible to go around the town which is nestled into a small picturesque Valley below Placerville.
I actually almost bought a historic Building with a gift shop and lamp business up there but was warned it was a seasonal business and might not be the best investment.
Friends of mine at various times had shoppes along 49-one had a used book store in Placerville that did quite well and another had shoppes in bot Grass Valley and Nevada City that flourished for awhile but like most other tourist dependent businesses eventually succumbed to the fight between merchants associations, historic societies and fluctuations in the economy.
The gold Country is on the East side of the San Joaquin Valley and summer temperatures can be brutally hot and dry-winters can be cold and snowy.
The history of the area is rich and there is much to be learned, characters like Belle Starr, Mark Twain and Black Bart.
In its approx. 300 miles of road one passes ny the Marshall Gold Strike State Park where the original 1849 discovery of Gold started the Gold Rush and along the way many of the sites of mines and towns that make up that portion of the history of California.
Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks are also a part of this area.
At the North end the road ventures into Alpine terrain and eventually disappears-Placer Mining and other highly destructive mining practices were common up this way and the scarred landscape has been preserved for future generations.
The question will ultimately be whether or not the historic towns with their Gold Rush flavour will survive the onslaught of Condos, Walmarts and Gentrification that has been intruding on the area for the last 30 years.
Bear Valley was once the portal to a daunting series of switch backs and hairpin turns which traversed a 1500 foot descent into Hell's Hollow:
A main highway goes across the state, through Placerville and on to Reno or Lake Tahoe.
The modern day trend to rush from one attraction to another is also killing the tourist industry in this area.
One wonders (over 40 years later) if MINERAL KING a proposed Disney project for a ski resort and tourist town near Sequoia would have changed the area for the better?
Working with the state Disney would have created a mining town/ski resort that was pristine, maintained the natural beauty of the area and kept cars at a distance-forcing visitors to park in a central lots and be shuttled into the resort.
Many "theme park" style attraction have come and gone in the Gold Country-the simple truth is people want history and real gold rush flavour-not processed "Hollywood" repackaged attractions that rewrite history.
It seems that in many ways the mining days and the colourful characters that sprang from them are becoming dim memories and less of an attraction in this century.
I have a strong wave of nostalgia for those vacation days of my youth and the sites and sights my family visited.
I doubt my Niece and Nephews will ever find their way up into those foothills even if the quaint little mining camps manage to survive.
How many generations will it take before its all artifacts behind glass in a dusty museum?
The USA has not done a great job of preserving and presenting its history (in the way Europe has for instance)-we thankfully do seem to have a love affair with beautiful scenery and natural wonders and in the process we manage to save some portion of the contributions of humans like Mesa Verde and Canyon De Chelly.
On the other hand seedy or controversial sites like the red light districts of Big Cities or ethnic settlements like Chinatowns quickly vanish if their own inhabitants don't fight to save them.
Bodie, one of the best preserved mining towns is a GHOST TOWN on the Eastern Slope of the Sierras-it is protected by the state in a condition of "arrested decay"-fires and weather have taken their toll and little of the rough and tumble parts of the town remain-although 2 of the churches still stand.
If you ask they will vaguely gesture to an area where the "cribs" of the prostitutes "may" have been.
It comes back to that repressed side of American's and their history-rather than laugh and take joy from our diverse history we varnish over what embarrasses us.
We never stop to think that those tough, hard boiled, thick skinned people of history all were a part of what it took to create this country.
No matter how much we would like to portray it otherwise we did exploit Chinese workers on both the Railroad system and in mining.
Someday we have to find a way to accept all of our rich history and not apologize for it but rather see it as the rich tapestry it was and how it has affected our lives today.
Its astonishing to me that many Americans refuse to believe there was a time in the east when many businesses had prominent signs that said No DOGS, NO JEWS, No IRISH and it was about 1970 before the FAGGOTS STAY OUT sign came down off the wall in Barney's Beanery in West Hollywood.
Herein is the danger of presenting history as it was-the Gold Rush is portrayed in many films and TV shows (not to mention books and stories)-Saloon Girls, Chinese Workers (remember Hop Sing?) picturesque Mexican Bandidos (including the gone and long lamented Frito's Bandido), there must be many others, a cleaned up and sanitized version of what actually was going on in the USA of our history.
I love the film McCABE AND MRS MILLER-it's a haunting, gritty and at time beautiful film about life in a Sierra Nevada Mining Camp in 1902.
Robert Altman who directed the film called it an ANTI-WESTERN because it circumvented so many of the dull Hollywood stereotypes and conventional plot points to present a more realistic portrait of greed, lust and life in that period.
Like CASINO which takes a similar look at the glitzy gambling empire of Las Vegas-McCabe is a movie which deserves the honor it received by being preserved in the library of Congress as culturally and historically significant.
For the same reasons we need to be sure that our historic towns and sites are maintained, preserved and shared with not only our population but with the people of the world.
If we let developers take the best land and condoize it eventually the will want the adjacent property to improve property values and to improve the view-how long will it be before our history just fades away amongst the Burger Stands and Gas Stations?
This started out to be a memory of a part of California that I love and have loved for many years-it turned into a rage against the loss or potential loss of the places from which the memories spring.
Even more it's anger at how we have allowed the world to just forget and pass by inconvenient parts of our history, less attractive parts of our past.
Twenty years ago on a well traveled road in Pennsylvania we passed a spot where the highway was deserted around a small fenced off plot about 8 x 10 feet maybe that held some family graves...no one seemed to find that unusual...I remember saying "That would never happen in California."
Here we would have moved the remains into an established cemetery...maybe.
OR we would have created a bypass that didn't require people to slow down and understand why they were going around a part of history.
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