JAMESTOWN, Calif.

I wasn’t sure this column would pan out.

But with my savings and salary shrinking, it seemed worth a try. Heck, how hard could it be? I’d seen “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” the 1948 classic starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by John Huston. (“Badges? ... I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!”) That movie was the best meditation on prospecting for gold, and falling prey to greed, ever done  until the Bernie Madoff story.

Besides, with the American dream wobbling and the Golden State’s luster dimmed, it seemed fitting to return to the Mother Lode of the Sierra Nevada foothills where the dream of audaciously striking it rich overnight was born 160 years ago, a Gold Rush that stimulated the world economy.

The 49ers  who Mark Twain described as “a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society” of “unspeakably happy” men  stopped in San Francisco, two-and-a-half hours west of here, to buy supplies, such as bullets, salt meat and Levis. (And to buy shady ladies, or “soiled doves,” as they were known, but we won’t get into that.) My San Francisco supplies were more modern: pre-torn jeans, a skim latte, a G.P.S., a cellphone and a laptop to get updates on the price of gold. With the dollar diminished and financial institutions in the doghouse, a hard nugget suddenly seems a safer bet than an ephemeral derivative. (Gold is trading at about $880 an ounce.)

News reports are heralding a neo-Gold Rush from Modesto to the Mojave Desert, a revival in prospectors at California’s streambeds, spurred by the sputtering national economy, the state’s 10.5 percent unemployment rate leaving many with free time and the weighty price of gold.