Hey, Gold Rushers: Southern California found gold first! And we’re still looking.
LA TimesNow don’t go all weak at the knees and soft in the head when you read this: Gold! In a wonderful bit of symmetry, Pico Canyon, the site of the state’s first oil strike — California’s “black gold”— is just a few miles from Placerita. That’s probably how some of it turned up again in Southern California, not quite 20 years after Francisco Lopez’s “onion strike.” Considering that this basin of ours is encircled by mountains, and mountains keep leaning toward their angle of repose even without any help from earthquakes, it’s not surprising that gold makes repeated appearances. As the story goes — and these stories sometimes go too far and sometimes not far enough — the search for clay near Rosamond yielded gold; usually it’s the other way around. About a year after Ezra’s find, the mining town of Randsburg sprang up around a big gold find — the town and the mine named optimistically for the immense Witwatersrand gold fields in South Africa.
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