New ‘Land of Gold’ Film Digs Deep Into California’s Troubled Gold Rush Origins

Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and MacArthur fellow Jon Else is known for films like The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb, Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven and Cadillac Desert. Else’s new film, Land of Gold, is a behind-the-scenes documentary about what it takes to bring an opera to the stage. It’s also the complicated story of Girls of the Golden West, an opera whose plot hinges on the true story of Josefa Segovia, a Mexican American woman who killed a gold miner in self-defense in 1851. On July 4th of that year, an angry mob lynched Segovia over the Yuba River in Downieville. 

The California Report Magazine’s host, Sasha Khokha, sat down with filmmaker Jon Else to talk about Land of Gold, which premieres on the PBS series Great Performances this week.

Below are excerpts from their conversation. For the full interview on The California Report Magazine, listen to the audio at the top of this story.

On deciding to make Land of Gold

Jon Else: I had done films before with the composer John Adams, and John contacted me and said, “I’m going to do an opera about the Gold Rush. Do you want to make a movie about it?” I was not interested! I grew up in Sacramento in Gold Rush country. I was heavily schooled in the cleansed version of the Gold Rush. I thought I knew it all — kind of been there, done that — and I was just not interested. 

Then John said, “Well, we’re basing it on a diary by a woman named Louise Clappe, who was one of the very few women in the gold fields during the Gold Rush in a hardscrabble, rough-and-tumble little mining settlement called Rich Bar.” John said, “Why don’t you read the diary?”

I read the diary, and I was flabbergasted. It was all the history I had not been taught in my public school in Sacramento. It turns out it was hell for most of the people involved who were not white Anglos. It was terrible for women. It was terrible, of course, for Native Americans. 

Also, what was new to me was the notion that the Gold Rush was this tremendously diverse migration. Miners came from Polynesia, they came from France, from Germany, from Mexico, from China. There were a lot of Canadians. There were freed slaves. The California gold fields were this huge rainbow of folks. Now, it was not a rainbow of equity. The white guys were in charge, and it was very, very tough on everyone else. 

So, I read the diary, and I called John Adams back, and I said, “Wow, when do we start?”

On the drama of Girls of the Golden West

The film and the opera both track a collision course between Josefa Segovia and this fellow Joe Cannon, who’s a mean drunk, a demonic loser, 49-er miner. You can just feel Joe getting more and more unhinged as the opera goes on. You know this is going to end badly. You know that Joe and Josefa are going to collide at the end. 

There actually was a woman named Josefa Segovia who [stabbed a miner in self-defense and was then] lynched from a bridge by a mob [of angry men] in Downieville, California, on July 4, 1851. She’s the only woman ever lynched in California.

On releasing this film just before the 2024 election

I don’t know whether it’s ironic or tragic, but we were editing [the scene of Josefa’s lynching by the Downieville mob] on the day that the mob assaulted the Capitol. What was happening in America changed drastically during the making of this film. We never imagined that a mob of miners would resonate with a mob of real American men assaulting the Capitol. I mean, who knew? History caught up with history.

I never imagined when we started this film almost ten years ago that it would be airing on the eve of what is the most contested election in my lifetime by the most divided population in my time. If people can look back at the struggles that America went through more than 100 years ago and say, “Listen, let’s not do this again. Didn’t we learn something from the havoc of the Gold Rush?”

For me, the main political message of this film is to look at these incredible, diverse young people in the present who are trying to make sense out of this horrible history in the past — and succeeding! That’s the lesson for me. That’s what gave me joy and hope every time I went to work with these guys. 

On the surface, the film is about the making of an opera. It is also about the actual history behind the opera and the excavation of this darker, grotesquely flamboyant side of the Gold Rush that I never knew. But it’s also a story of a hundred and some years later, these incredible young people coming together and having a great creative time telling this history. The more time we spent with the artists, the more I realized that what’s important here is the contradiction between the darkness of the history that they’re playing and the exuberance and hope and joy of the people who are doing it. 

On what the opera’s story tells us about California

I think this story tells us a lot about present-day California. The DNA of California was spawned in the Gold Rush. I came to California as a 5-year-old and drove out across the Great Plains from New York with my parents. We sang 49-er songs in the car when I was a little kid. We sang some of the songs that are in this documentary, actually, such as “Plenty of gold. So I’ve been told on the banks of the Sacramento.”

The ethos of the Gold Rush was very much part of the national sensibility about California. It’s very often cited in reference to Silicon Valley. And I think the parallels were very much in our mind when we were doing this film about Silicon Valley. I mean, Silicon Valley, in many ways, is the Gold Rush without the violence. It’s a lot of mostly young, mostly white men making a lot of money really fast. 

The curse and the blessing of California is that it’s the land of unlimited opportunity. You can do what you want. There was no law in California in the Gold Rush. And I think a lot of that spirit has lived on in California.