Many horrible things can happen in the gold fields of California. One catastrophic thing that happened to us in the foothills is that, because of exhaustion, our entire mining company fell asleep needing to rest. We lost a day’s worth of mining. Blocking the entire river with a dam, a miner upstream stopped the water flow. We had no water with which we could pan or cradle. We had to bribe this miner with 25 valuable gold nuggets. This was definitely not good. Yet again, a misfortune came about: caught by falling rocks, our hands were crushed. In addition, we ran out of food, and a miner offered to give us some in exchange for half of the gold we found in one day. As you can see mining in the gold fields of California is not very easy.