A view of the dredge tailing rock piles from the Gold Rush days along the American River near Folsom, California in the Sacramento metro area.  These tailings are found throughout Northern California along riverbanks of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada & show the immense amount of work miners entailed solely to extract gold from the river during the mid-1850s.  On the satellite view, this area is a small section on the north side of the river at Lake Natoma, on the south side is another area of tailings about ten times larger.