The California Foothills

Subterranean frontier: The heavy timber-framed portal of the 1888 Gold Bug drift mine in Placerville, the only municipally owned hard-rock gold mine open to the public in the United States. In October 1849, along the dry gravel ravines of what was then called Old Dry Diggins, three men accused of highway robbery and murder were given a cursory thirty-minute frontier trial and hanged from the sturdy bough of an oak tree on the main thoroughfare. Almost overnight, the rough-and-tumble boomtown abandoned its founding name and embraced a moniker that stuck like wet clay: **Hangtown**. While civic leaders successfully petitioned to incorporate the city as **Placerville** in 1854—seeking to scrub away the vigilante notoriety as law, order, and Victorian families took root—the town's true identity remained forged in gold and iron. Just one mile north of historic Main Street, tucked inside the steep, pine-scented folds of Big Canyon, lies **Gold Bug Park & Mine**. It is the o...