Price of Gold: As Influential as a Global Power

Italian Bar Camp, Calif. Lee Mace knelt on a sun-dappled riverbank in the heart of California's mother lode. For two hours, he'd been taking turns with his wife and their three children, shoveling dirt into a home-built oak box, pouring buckets of water over the top, and rocking it back and forth like a cradle. Gravity carried the heaviest particles through a series of screens to a trap at the bottom, where Mr. Mace removed them to cull by hand in a shallow prospector's pan.