December 6th is National Miners’ Day, a holiday to remember and honor miners past and present in the United States and to raise awareness of the working conditions that miners face. Miners are important in the extraction of a variety of natural resources. Regarding the history of California, miners were the backbone of the Gold Rush, which began in early 1848. The California Gold Rush, beginning in January 1848, was considered one of the largest migrations in human history up to that time. Most of the people coming to California were involved in mining gold, which involved placer mining, initially, where people panned for gold in rivers and streams in the Sacramento Valley for at least 10 to 12 hours a day, if not more. The stereotype of an older Euro-American man as a typical miner panning for gold, however, is a bit fabricated. Some of the first people to pan for gold were California Native people “hired” by European Americans. By 1849, the “forty-niners” were typically young men...