Event of the Month

Text by Joseph Stocker An optimist is a man who knows he can drive from Southern California to Wickenburg, Arizona, every year for 22 years to pan for gold at Gold Rush Days and get enough out of it to pay expenses. Jack Roberts is therefore entitled to be called an optimist. So is his son Don. Jack is a retired Los Angeles-area aerospace worker with a pure-white handlebar moustache that twirls out at both ends like waxed rope. Don is a computer programmer. If they show up this month at the 44th annual Gold Rush Days, it'll be the 23rd year for them. Don has won the big climactic gold-panning contest there 13 times, his father twice. Between them, from this and other gold-panning contests all over the country, they've gone home with enough to pay expenses and then some. (Jack won more than $5,000 one year alone.)

PAN FOR NUGGETS, TURN BACK TIME AT WICKENBURG'S GOLD RUSH DAYS

Panning for gold isn't the only thing that goes on during Gold Rush Days, but it's the raison d'être for Gold Rush Days. What Wickenburg set out to do, when it invented the celebration, was resurrect and reenact its history. Gold is what created this tidy little town 55 miles northwest of Phoenix more specifically, the gold that Henry Wickenburg discovered in 1863. Result: the Vulture Mine, which disgorged $30 million worth of the stuff. At the peak of the gold rush, there were some 80 producing mines in that general vicinity.

It's intrinsic in our mythology that when you think about the West and about Western mining towns, you think hard-rock miners and ladies of the night and shoot-outs and that sort of thing. And so Gold Rush Days makes its obeisance to Western lore by launching the celebration with a street fight between Wickenburg's Gold Shirt Gang and the Arizona Gunslingers from Phoenix. The appropriately provocative Garter Girls are on hand. And the whole thing takes place in front of the chamber of commerce, which is in Wickenburg's restored railroad depot. There's a mile-long parade, a rodeo, and a melodrama in the town theater (last year: The Ratcatcher's Daughter or Out Wickenburg Way in a Daze, the story of a lot of very nice people trying to save the orphanage from a dastardly villain named Whiplash Snivel, Esq.).

And there's the mucking-anddrilling contest. Mucking is or was when mining out Wickenburg way was at its peak and its most primitive simply the business of shoveling ore into a little cart and dragging it out of the mine on a narrow-gauge track. Mucking, Gold Rush Days-version, means loading the car, pushing it up the track, then back, and dumping it in the shortest possible time. Fastest mucker wins. Drilling involves hand drilling a hole in a rock, ostensibly to plant dynamite, and doing it faster than the next guy. "Cowboys have their rodeo, right?" says Angel Morales, a rancher who traditionally emcees the mucking-and-drilling contest. "Well, miners have got this. It's an era that's been forgotten."

But panning for gold is what attracts the most people and the most persistent. They come often and from all over. William Cook of Phoenix started showing up in 1959 and, when I saw him at Gold Rush last year, hadn't missed once. The locals salt some gravel with genuine flakes of gold. Then William Cook and scores of other hopefuls with strong backs hang over those water troughs, panning patiently, hour after hour, for all three days of Gold Rush. They don't figure on getting rich. They just want to find and Cherish and exhibit to folks a little bit of the real thing."

WHEN YOU GO

Wickenburg Gold Rush Days will take place Friday through Sunday, February 14-16. From Phoenix, travel via U.S. Route 60-89 or Interstate 17 to State Route 74 (Carefree Highway), intersecting with Route 60-89.

For more information, contact the Wickenburg Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Drawer CC Wickenburg, AZ 85358; (602) 684-5479.