Now the nugget is a highlight in an Oakland Museum exhibit that opened Saturday, exactly 150 years after Marshall's find. The exhibit runs for six months, then moves to Los Angeles and Sacramento. It later will be broken up into smaller exhibits for display around the state. At the Oakland museum, visitors get help from guides dressed in authentic costumes of the period. The men wear miner's hats with the front brim turned up, trousers with buttons along the sides, suspenders, and handkerchiefs around their necks.
Women wear long cotton print dresses with shawls and white bonnets.
The Oakland exhibit portrays the Gold Rush as a phenomenon that forever changed California. The pristine state suddenly was swamped by fortune seekers from around the world whose ambitions, cultural diversity and common quest for riches shaped the character of California and set it on a course that continues today. The museum visitors also are reminded how the glorious Sierra was blighted by miners who bored into the rock and torpedoed the hillsides with powerful water cannons to wash away soil and expose the gold. But the degradation also spawned what remains a strong conservation effort in California, the museum literature notes. And as for the rest of California, signs of the gold era are everywhere.