Chasing the Rainbow: Adventures of the Desert Prospectors

In 1900, long after the 1849 California Gold Rush and the 1859 Comstock Lode discovery, silver was discovered in Tonopah, Nevada, attracting the last wave of American prospectors and instant boom towns. In 1902, the town of Goldfield, Nevada, sprang up around a newly discovered claim, followed two years later by Bullfrog and Rhyolite. “The wealth that lies here cannot and will not be exhausted,” the editor of the Death Valley Chuckwalla magazine wrote in March 1907, just before a financial panic put an end to the boom times. Combining early film footage, archival images, and interviews with historians and family members, Ted Faye's Chasing the Rainbow explores this last Nevada-Death Valley boom and its image of the “single-blanket-jackass-prospector,” who loaded his recalcitrant burro with bacon, beans, pickaxe, shovel, and a blanket for sleeping, then wandered into the desert in search of gold or silver. Prospectors relied on “grubstakers,” usually local business men who paid for their food and tools, in return for a share of any proceeds, but few made much money, and those that did often drank away the profits. Charming misfits, con artists, loners, and nature lovers, these men (and a few women) hung on well into the Depression era, always looking for the elusive pot at the end of the mythical rainbow. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (M. Pendergrast)