The Blue Bucket Mine

In 1845 the lost Meek wagon train, wandering the high desert, camped on a creek where the children gathered heavy yellow pebbles, enough to fill a blue wooden bucket, and hammered them flat on the wagon irons. Years later, when California taught everyone what gold looked like, the survivors realized what the children had been playing with. Nobody ever found that creek again, and the hunt for it kicked off the real gold rushes into the Blue Mountains.