Sara Wheeler

The lure of fool’s gold

In a review of Gold Fever by Steve Boggan Sara Wheeler discovers that the search for gold is as addictive as crack cocaine

In 2008, the price of gold lofted above $1,000 an ounce for the first time in history, inspiring a rush of small-scale panners to head for the diggings with hope in their hearts. As the price of the metal fell and rose again — it nearly touched $2,000 an ounce in 2011 — journalist Steve Boggan contracted a touch of gold fever himself. He set off for California to find out who these chancers were. And to find some gold.

I’ve taken Route 49 through inland California — Coloma to Sonora. The largely empty highway, which slices through heartbreaking landscape, is named of course after the fabled ‘Forty-niners’, and you can still smell, in those small towns with their jails and saloons and crummy hotels, the romance of possibility, the human capability to bet against all odds.

Boggan, whose first book was Follow the Money: A Month in the Life of a Ten Dollar Bill, has produced a lively narrative history of those heady days, when tented camps rose and fell and cholera prowled. The people who made money were those mining the miners: an eating establishment in one camp charged a dollar for a slice of bread, and two dollars if it was buttered (equivalent to $60 today). Boggan quotes judiciously from the sources.

He is, however, more interested in contemporary panners. Gold Fever includes a series of biographical sketches of the oddballs and drifters that he meets on the trail. He sucks down beers with them at some lonely RV camp after another failed day panning the creeks, and lards his prose with direct speech as his new friends tell their stories. This book would make a wonderful television film.

The reader follows our man from camp to camp as he pursues the gold trail in a rented four-by-four.

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