Nopestalgia scene notes · 1849
What's wrong in 1849? A California Gold Rush camp
It is 1849 in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California. Two bearded prospectors kneel in a cold creek swirling gravel in their pans, a wooden box of gold-flecked gravel sits in the water, a mule waits by the canvas tents, and a pickaxe lies on the rocks.
Gold was found at Sutter's Mill in January 1848. Once President Polk confirmed the discovery in December 1848, tens of thousands of fortune seekers, the "forty-niners," poured into California by ship and overland trail. Few got rich, but the rush turned San Francisco from a small settlement into a city almost overnight and helped California become a state in 1850.
What belongs in 1849
Every Nopestalgia scene gets a period check before it goes live. Here's what's in this one, and why it fits the year:
- Gold pans. Panning was the simplest way to find placer gold: swirl water and gravel until the heavy gold settles to the bottom.
- A wooden washing box. Prospectors quickly moved from pans to wooden rockers or cradles, then long toms and sluices, to wash more gravel at once.
- Canvas tents. Most early camps were tents and rough cabins. Permanent towns came later.
- Mules and pickaxes. Mules carried supplies over rough trails, and picks and shovels did the digging.
- Work clothes. Flannel shirts, suspenders and wool trousers were typical. You won't see riveted blue jeans here, since Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis patented those in 1873.
What we kept out
No railroad (the transcontinental line opened in 1869), no telegraph poles (the line reached California in 1861), no barbed wire (1874), no dynamite (1867), and no signs. Only one thing in the picture is allowed to be out of place.
The answer
Show the hidden modern object (spoiler)
The modern object is a laptop computer. The first clamshell laptop, the GRiD Compass, came out in 1982, a year after the suitcase-sized Osborne 1 portable computer.
Hint, if you just want a nudge: Someone is keeping very modern records. Look near the tents.
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