Gold Rush Days: Sacramento Fest

Old Sacramento's yearly Labor Day Weekend whoop-di-doo covers history, entertainment, more.

CALIFORNIANS, it may be said with sunny confidence, can stow a lot of spectacular and unusual must-dos in their bucket lists, all must-dos that can be found within the Golden State. And if you look to the "gold" part of that moniker, then you know that many a bucket list brims with Gold Country sightseeing. A history buff may dream of toodling down Highway 49, with stops in some of the towns that boomed in the middle of the 19th century, or visiting a museum that tells the tale of how the discovery at Sutter's Mill quickly changed history. But finding characters from the Gold Rush, and the portraits of the era embued with life, or at least the spirit of a modern retelling, is a bit harder to locate. The time of picks and pans and shiny bits of glittery river-found rock come to life, however, each September, in one of the places most associated with the days of the '49ers. It's...

OLD SACRAMENTO... we speak of, and each Labor Day Weekend the whole district puts on its rootin, tootin'-est garb for four days of Gold Rush-style celebrating. Is there a Tent City, which delves into "daily life during the Gold Rush"? It's one of the staples of the holiday weekend event, so you can count on it. Will there be old-timey dramatics, the kind that might have been staged by a traveling troupe in a mining camp? That's a whole thing, for sure. And will the Gold Rush Fire Brigade be out in bells-a-ringin' force? It's part of the plan. Eats, dancing, stories, costumes, cannon firings, wagon rides, and a bunch of other from-way-back-when haps fill out the multi-block area, one that still carries its postcard-worthy architectural cred (the buildings recall the time when the area served as a terminus of the Pony Express). Need dates for all of your Gold Rush-themed festivities? This sepia-toned slice of Sactown is doing it up from Friday, Sept. 2 through Monday, Sept. 5, 2016.

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