Students dig into gold rush

Anderson Park, a fourth-grader at Valley View Elementary, spent the better half of Friday morning panning for gold. By noon, a small suede sack attached to his belt was heavy with nuggets.

But as the day wore on, Park kept his newfound riches a secret. He was wanted by the local sheriff for illegal gambling and arson — for the day at least.

Anderson's day as a law-skirting miner was part of daylong event at the school aimed at supplementing the students' fourth-grade history lessons about the California Gold Rush — a subject on the state standards test, said science teacher Holly Woodward, who helped organize and supervise the day of activities.

"We can't take them back in time, this is as close we can get," said Woodward, as teams of fourth-graders raced to wash water-soaked towels on an old-fashioned scrub board before pinning them on a nearby clothesline. "We wanted to let them experience how rugged life was."

Each fourth-grader was assigned a character for the day, from miners to merchants and even the occasional outlaw, Woodward said.

"They're a whole slew of characters, just like it would've been," she said.

So for the day, the year was 1849 — the heyday of the California Gold Rush, a year after James Marshall discovered the precious metal at Sutter's Mill, on the south fork of the American River, near Coloma.

But an era associated with riches wasn't so lucrative for everybody, student Giovanni Labellarte said.

"It was very hot days," Giovanni said. "It was hard digging. You had to bend a lot."

Giovanni and his classmates, who were divided into different miner camps, did their share of bending over a makeshift river as they panned for gold.

They picked fool's gold out of the sand and water from a plastic pool, but the games were realistic, student Eliza Arslanian said.

"We're doing a lot of what the Forty-Niners did at that time, so we're really experiencing what it was like," she said.

But not every student discovered gold, an outcome that mirrored what happened to many hopeful miners during the gold rush, Anderson said.

"After the gold rush, some got rich and went back to their home to spend freely, but not everybody found gold," he said. "But the people who didn't get rich, they stayed and helped create a growing state."

On the Valley View campus though, all the miners — rich and poor — were treated to a miner's breakfast of pancakes and sausage. Later in the afternoon, they drew from pots of hot beef or vegetarian stew, which the students had helped prepare in the morning, and cleaned their plates with cornbread muffins.

On Monday, the project continues when the students will weigh their gold and determine what kind of goods they could buy, said social studies teacher Sherry Kully.

"They'll have to decide between necessities and other things … to see if they could survive," Kully said.

Student Samantha Berthold is not thinking necessity.

"I'd go to the saloon," Samantha said. "And I'd take some of [my gold] home to my parents."