The Holcomb Valley Gold Rush

California's gold rush mythology lives four hundred miles north of here. The Mother Lode country, Sutter's Mill, forty-niners, the whole apparatus of a story that California has been telling about itself since eighteen forty-nine. You could drive the Inland Empire for a week and never encounter a suggestion that a gold rush happened here, in these mountains above Big Bear Lake, twelve years after the Sierra Nevada strike and on a scale that briefly made this valley the most populated place in San Bernardino County.

In eighteen sixty, a prospector named William Francis Holcomb found gold in the valley that now carries his name. The news traveled at the speed of news in eighteen sixty, which was faster than you might expect, and within months the valley had filled. At its peak, the tent city called Belleville was briefly the largest settlement in San Bernardino County. Thousands of men with picks and pans and the particular kind of optimism that gold rushes generate worked the valley floor and the creek beds.

The deposits were shallow. The logistics of supplying a mountain mining camp at six thousand feet elevation were difficult. The rush lasted a few years and ended, as they tend to, not with a ceremony but with a gradual dispersal. The men who had made Belleville the county's largest town simply left. The town disappeared. The earthworks and grave markers they left behind are still visible on United States Forest Service land north of Big Bear, if you know where to look.

The story never became myth because California already had a gold rush mythology and did not need another one, especially a shorter, lower-altitude, less-photogenic one four hundred miles south. But the ground up here gave up gold, and people came, and they are buried in this valley, and most of the people driving past on the highway below have never heard their story.