Gold.
``I can take the most stand-up citizen in the world and turn him into a greedy, green-eyed monster,'' says Benny ``the Sheriff'' Chester, ``and all because of gold.''
The confluence of a lousy economy and a $1,000-an-ounce gold rate has unleashed a modern-day gold rush into the rivers and creeks around this old mining town, right back where the nation first caught gold fever in the 1830s.
Chester, the big-bellied, overall-wearing membership director for the Weekend
Gold Miners Prospecting Club Inc., counts 60 to 70 new members this year alone.
Eighty families showed up at the nearby Crisson Gold Mine last Tuesday to pan for gold, fun and, occasionally, profit. Midweek days last year, half that many families headed to the tourist spot 75 minutes north of downtown Atlanta, co-owner Tammy Ray says.
Ray also sells all manner of prospecting gear: dredges, sluice boxes, trommels, wet suits, pick-axes and pans. She has sold 15 four-inch floating dredges this year; she sold three in all of 2008.
``You got a lot of guys being laid off or their hours have been cut,'' Ray says. ``They come up here, buy a sluice box and go into the river. But I don't tell anybody they can make a living on it.''
Prospecting is like gambling: see that gold swirling in your pan and the fever hits. The waters around Dahlonega (taken from the Cherokee word Talonega, meaning ``gold'' or ``golden'') are filling with bearded men from Georgia, Florida, Missouri and the Carolinas who mostly call themselves hobbyists or recreational prospectors. But make no mistake: They're dead serious about gold.
``There's a nice piece,'' says Vic Wunderlich Jr., kneeling by the side of the Tesnatee Creek while swirling a pan full of water, sand, mud and a few flecks of gold. ``I like to see the flash in the pan.''
Wunderlich, along with his father, has been visiting North Georgia's rivers most springs since 2003. But the auto-repair business where he was a mechanic disappeared back home in Missouri. So Wunderlich, 45, will camp out this year in a nearby field run by another prospecting club until August.
Mark Turner will also spend the summer camping along the river. The convention business in Tampa dried up, so Turner, 59, hopes for a big strike. But he'll settle for just enough ``color'' (gold) to sell to wannabe prospectors at flea and farmers markets.
``I got nothing at home anymore,'' Turner says after a 90-minute stint dredging the Tesnatee, which runs northeast of Dahlonega. ``It'd be nice to get a little bit of income, but I don't expect it. I'm living off savings.''
The price of gold topped $940 an ounce Friday, a four-week high that's sure to make North Georgia rivers more crowded. In March 2008, as the economy went sour, gold bettered $1,120 an ounce the highest price ever. Factor in inflation, though, and prospectors were earning a better rate of return when gold hit $850 in 1980.
Gold shines brightest whenever the economy, and the U.S. dollar in particular, fades.
``With the demise of the stock market, people lost half of their life savings,'' says Pat Keene, who owns a California prospecting-equipment company.
Business jumped 30 percent this year. ``So people look at other commodities, especially gold, as a safe haven.''
Keene counts 730 dealers worldwide. Dahlonega's Crisson is his No. 3 retailer. California and Alaska tally the most prospectors and gold deposits. But Georgia, too, is revisiting its golden past.
Benjamin Parks, a deer hunter, claimed to discover gold near the Chestatee River in 1828. Two years later, at the peak of the gold rush, an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 prospectors worked the Georgia gold belt stretching from Cherokee to Rabun counties. Dahlonega, where the federal government opened a mint in 1838, was the belt's buckle.
That same year, the last of the Cherokee Indians were rounded up and forcibly moved to Oklahoma. Their land was given away via lottery.
By 1861, the mint had turned 12.3 tons of Georgia gold into $1, $2.50, $3 and $5 coins, according to the Dahlonega Gold Museum. War, and better stakes out West, took the shine off Georgia's gold frenzy.
Commercial mining disappeared near the turn of the century. Yet the miners' legacy lives on, most noticeably with the gold leaf that covers the state capitol dome in downtown Atlanta.
Dahlonega, whose newspaper is the Nugget, perpetuates the gold mystique. At the Crisson mine, tourists 85 percent from metro Atlanta, Ray says pay $12.50 for a five-gallon bucket of crushed rock. They try their luck separating a few gold flakes from the sludge. A more serious prospector by the name of Johnnie Walker used a trommel (a cylindrical sieve) to sift through $75 worth of sand and rock.
``It's just a thrill, like a treasure hunt or deep-sea diving,'' says Walker, 43, from Illinois. ``That gold bug bites you the more you find. It's like gambling.''
True prospectors, the hirsute, bug-eyed ones with a fondness for rolled cigarettes and cheap beer, spend their days in the Chestatee and Etowah rivers or the Tesnatee and Yahoola creeks. Nights they can be found on property owned or leased by the Lost Dutchman's Mining Association or the Gold Prospectors Association of America.
Chester's group, the nonprofit Weekend Gold Miners, charges $90 for a basic membership that allows access to three leased properties in Lumpkin and White counties. (A lifetime membership costs $1,250.)
Jim Hayes stepped away from his Honda-motored dredge along the Tesnatee this week to talk gold. The trim Floridian says he averages $100 a day in gold flakes, an amount that garners a nod of approval from Benny Chester.
Prospectors, though, are a tight-lipped bunch, wary of thieves or, worse, other gold diggers discovering their riverine sweet spots.
``If you did find something, you better keep your mouth shut,'' says Hayes, 63.
He does allow, though, that the Tesnatee is a fine prospecting spot. ``This river here has got good gold in it,'' Hayes says. ``Of course, I've never seen bad gold.''
Information from: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, http://www.ajc.com
(Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
Dahlonega Gold Museum
http://accesswdun.com/article/2009/7/221570