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The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 is one of the defining moments in California history, with roughly 300,000 forty-niners flocking here to make their fortune from the U.S. and abroad.

The story of how a handful of 21st century “forty-niners” wound up searching for gold on a singed landscape studded with Joshua trees arcs back nearly 100 years, entangling an eclectic cast of characters.

They built a reputation for coffee and good fish among the newly arriving forty-niners, and in 1852 they relocated to the New World Market, then San Francisco’s central produce market, on Commercial Street.

"Like the frontiersman and the forty-niner, the traditional cowboy is a peculiarly American type, now following them into an honorable extinction," the story noted.

Several forty-niners glimpsed precious metal as they dragged themselves over the mountains.