Mining community

[gentle music] It is a cold, dank day in 1849.

After months on the trail, we finally arrived at one of the many mining camps along the American River here in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

The long journey overland from St. Louis to California has been grueling and dangerous, but it's been worth it because here we'll stake our claim.

Here we'll strike it rich.

Glad to be with you.

Today, we're digging into the grit and glimmer of the California Gold Rush and the famous 49ers.

What was it like to arrive in a wilderness suddenly transformed into a sprawling patchwork of mining camps? What did day-to-day life look like along the American River? How much gold did they find, and how likely was it that those hopeful new arrivals would actually strike it rich? For this, we're joined by a returning guest, Stephen Aron, President and CEO of the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA.

His books include The American West: A Very Short Introduction, and Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West.

It's only changed its address.

Today it lives in mining towns and warehouse districts, in hospital corridors, in old factory cities, at grocery checkouts- All the blue skies we touched were just a start ...

in eviction notices and pension statements, in the bedrooms of grown children who move back home.

It lives in the strange realization that your parents seem to be climbing- Big birds flying across the sky ... and you're running just as hard, but you seem to stay in place.

Maybe hope isn't believing everything will be all right.

Maybe hope is deciding w- you will remain human even when it isn't.

And so here we are in our mining towns, our factory cities, our hospital rooms, our checkout lines, our borrowed apartments, our childhood bedrooms, our cars between deliveries, our warehouses at three in the morning, our farms, our sidewalks, our waiting rooms, still here, not triumphant, not untouched, not unafraid, but here.

We are the children of promises that did not always survive us.

... and you'll be very happy to hear that the fourth episode, which means I will be doing the history-

Mining Town?

Yes.

[gasps] They had to do one.

We can swap, because I know you love Mining Town so much.

No, no, no.

I think this season you're on mining duty.

Although small deposits of lead had been found as early as 1858, a well being dug at Thomas Lyle's farm in November of 1885 changed the small town for the next 100 years.

The powder charge brought up large chunks of pure galena, lead ore, and that began the birth of the mining town.

The mining in Aurora started around 1886 with shallow pits and surface stripping for lead.

As miners dug deeper they discovered massive high purity deposits of zinc silicate and zinc blend.

But what led her to do this? Did he threaten her with something? Sure.

Threatened to tell her husband? I don't know.

And this is a thing that's known in these mining towns is they would the miners would go there and then they would essentially abandon their family or abandon their wives and take off.

And then these women were forced to do things to stay alive, right? And it sounds like this might have been the case with her.

Well, look, actually, I was in Wales at the weekend to see my mum in the Rhondda Valley.

And of course, you know, I was brought up in that mining community where both my grandparents were miners.

And they were both, you know, mining down the pit from a very, very young age until the point at which they retired.

And that whole community was built around those mines.