So did thousands of itinerant fortune seekers, who beat down the dust trail leading to the village, swelling its population.
Across this fertile land, clouds of dust trail into the light of dusk, farmers busy planting and breaking up the soil.
That said, there is an undeniable romance surrounding the idea of gold in places like Sutter Creek, a picturesque town of 3,000 where there is a Eureka Street, a Gold Dust Trail and Oro Madre Way.
The shower occurs when the Earth hits a dust trail that came off the Comet Swift-Tuttle over 1,000 years ago, and the meteors seem to come from the direction of the constellation of Perseus, hence the name.
In 2007, the easy credit allowed the couple to buy a new two-story stucco home on Silver Dust Trail in Hemet, one of the many small towns where a Lehman-financed company, SunCal, turned empty desert into endless cul-de-sacs of tract homes.
The intensity of the beams, he wrote, "will be more or less like that of vehicles on a dust trail in Arizona, and our detectors will be like poor souls dozing on the side, thumb up for a hitchhike in case a car stops".
