The Mother Lode refers to a series of gold-quartz veins stretching almost 200 miles along the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada in California. Counties listed from north to south: Sierra, Nevada, Placer, El Dorado, Amador, Calaveras, Tuolumne, Mariposa, and Madera. Other counties included in this book are Plumas, Butte, Sacramento and Stanislaus. This book does contain most of those signs with texts relating to mining activities during California's gold rush of the mid-Nineteenth Century.