Sonora (California) understand · Sonora (California) tourist information
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Sonora (California) tourist information
Sonora (California) tourist information
Sonora was originally founded as a gold mining camp by white settlers from back east. Gold had been discovered in Woods Creek, initially in the summer of 1848 near what is now Jamestown. The name Sonora was derived from the Mexican workers the whites employed at slave-like wages to work their mines.
The City of Sonora was incorporated in 1851 by whites, not Mexicans, primarily as a means of creating a badly-needed hospital. Many miners were sick, and dying, mainly from scurvy, mainly white miners who never learnt the importance of fresh vegetables and fruits in their diets.
Sonora became the business center (and county seat of Tuolumne County) for the mines around the county and, indeed, for the entire Southern Mines region south of Placerville.
When the placer mines began to give out in the 1860s, Sonora survived in part because it had become a business center. It also had what were known as "pocket" mines--underground deposits of highly concentrated gold. Such pocket mines are distinguished from ordinary quartz mines, in which the gold is much less concentrated and requires much work and technology to mine, and which were not profitable until the 1880s when better mining technology had been developed.
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Sonora (California) Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.