My daughter Carolyn has a penchant for finding unusual and fun activities when she comes out here for her summer vacation with her family. This year is no exception to that despite this being the fourth year of coming out for the month of July. But we’ve done most of the regular activities within striking distance of our hilltop already. This year she mentioned that they had never been to the town of Julian, which surprised me since its one of the go-to places we go with visitors. I particularly like that we live so close to what I would call the Wild West and California ranch country. I regularly ride my motorcycle up to Mount Palomar, into the Anza Borrego Desert or out to Julian and Cuyamuca. I have been to Julian countless times and given that the whole town is about two blocks long, that’s saying a lot about how quaint a destination it is. When you think of San Diego you think of beaches and bays. You might add in deserts given the general awareness of places like nearby Palm Springs, the Mojave Desert and the Anza Borrego. What most people do not think about is the alpine areas that stand between those two extremes…and that’s where Julian comes into play. Julian is a little slice of Lake Tahoe in an unlikely spot and without a lake.
Carolyn found a gold mine tour online and that gave us a theme for our visit to Julian today. I’m not sure I realized that Julian got its start as a gold mining town since its mostly known for its apples and therefore its apple pie and therefore pies in general. San Diego County’s gold mining history centers almost entirely on Julian, and it was the county’s only real gold rush in a state known for it’s gold rushes. In the winter of 1869, twenty years after Sutter’s Mill, Frederick Coleman, a freed slave turned rancher, discovered gold while riding his horse along a creek in eastern San Diego County, after previously working as a miner in Northern California. Coleman had settled with his Native American wife near the Cuyamaca mountains, and found the gold while watering his horse and panning in shallow waters near Spencer Valley. The creek was later named Coleman Creek in his honor. That same year, Drury Bailey, an ex-Confederate soldier who owned much of the surrounding land, made his own discovery, leading to the establishment of the area’s first hard-rock mine, the Washington Mine, filed at the county assay office on Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1870. Hundreds of anxious men and families rushed to Julian to stake claims, and the town became a tent city almost overnight. More than 100 claims were eventually recorded, with about 60 active mines getting started in the Julian-Banner district. It was a modest rush by California standards with total gold production for San Diego County through 1959 about 219,800 ounces, the vast majority from the Julian district, with only around 700 ounces coming from placer deposits elsewhere in the county. The boom was short-lived with most mining work ending by 1880. But several factors that limited the rush’s lifespan also kept the gold dream alive. Gold-bearing gravels and quartz veins were present but just not abundant, and seasonal streams (the surrounding desert made that an unavoidable reality) made placer mining inconsistent. The quartz veins were often low-grade, and the unusually rugged terrain made transportation costly.
During our mine tour today we got to pan for gold in a seeded trough to see how challenging it is, but also to see how it can, indeed, be done by anyone. We were told that some guy recently took out 2 ounces of gold flakes from two days of panning. That’s about $8,000 for a weekend’s work. We were also told that some of the veins in the Eagle Mine that we toured (and even touched) held 10-12 ounces of gold per ton. When you do that math you wonder why more people aren’t panning and why some entrepreneur isn’t restarting the hard-rock extraction. The answer, of course, is that even if true, both datapoints are just that, single datapoints and not average production or concentration statistics. I guess that’s what makes gold a fever sport…the fact that someone can hit a mother-load as a fluke at any time.
The pursuit of gold stretches back to the earliest human civilizations and has shaped economics, exploration, and conquest for thousands of years. Gold artifacts date back over 6,000 years with the ancient Egyptians being among the first to mine gold systematically, starting around 2000 BC in Nubia (the name “Nubia” is thought to derive from nub, the Egyptian word for gold). Pharaohs used gold for religious, ceremonial, and funerary purposes, as most famously seen in Tutankhamun’s death mask. Gold’s association with the divine and eternal (it doesn’t tarnish or corrode) made it central to burial practices, temple decoration, and royal regalia across many ancient cultures. Rome ran extensive gold mining operations across its empire, particularly in Spain (Las Médulas), using hydraulic techniques to blast hillsides, an early precursor to methods used millennia later in California. West African empires like Ghana, then Mali, then Songhai became fabulously wealthy through trans-Saharan gold trade. Gold from West Africa flowed north into the Mediterranean and Islamic trade networks, becoming a major currency basis for medieval Europe and the Islamic world.
The search for gold was a primary driver of European exploration and colonization from the 15th–17th centuries. Spanish conquistadors pursued legendary gold sources like El Dorado (“the golden one,” originally referring to a ritual, later imagined as a lost city) deep into South America. The conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires (who also valued gold) was driven substantially by the desire for gold and silver, resulting in massive extraction (often through forced Indigenous labor) that funded the Spanish Empire and reshaped global trade, flooding Europe with New World bullion and contributing to centuries of inflation (“the Price Revolution”). Gold mining in North America spans centuries and regions, well before the famous 1849 California rush. The first U.S. gold rush was actually in North Carolina in 1799, when a boy found a 17-pound gold nugget. After the California gold rush, California became the “Golden State”, but there were rushes in Colorado (Pikes Peak and Cripple Creek), Nevada (the Comstock Lode of 1859), the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Klondike and Alaskan gold rushes. The common threads across all these rushes was the displacement and violence against Indigenous peoples (treaty violations, forced removals, or organized violence against Native nations), boom-and-bust town cycles, technological escalation with placer/panning methods giving way to hydraulic mining, then hard-rock/quartz mining, then large-scale industrial and dredging operations as accessible gold diminished, resultant environmental damage and economic and political reshaping. By the early 20th century, most surface and placer gold across North America had been exhausted, and mining shifted to large-scale industrial hard-rock operations, a shift from individual prospectors chasing fortune to corporate extraction, which largely defines gold mining in the region today.
What’s intriguing about Julian and its history with gold starts with the discovery by a black man, who made a personal fortune from his discovery even though he was not at all quiet or secretive about it. For fifty years, Julian was the center of the African-American community in San Diego. But the community of Julian was a strange and open blend of blacks, Native Americans and even ex-Confederates, making it a very diverse community. The focus on placer and then hard-rock mining and the lack of conversion to strip mining meant that the area was neither ecologically altered nor driven to extreme change in a socio-economic sense. How much friendlier could a town be than to be the local home of the best apple pies to be had. If I am panning for historical and sociological gold, I’m thinking that Julian is a great place to go.