- [last lines]
- Jared Whitney: This case has proved one thing, Karen: The land is for the people. The days of the 49ers, the days of the gold rush, are gone forever - but there's another gold here, a gold that we could never see. None of us saw, but you.
- Karen Ferris: It's out there, waiting for us. The greatest fruit country in the world. Richer than any gold field.
- Jared Whitney: Someday the orchards will cover this valley - and the one beyond, and the one beyond that, clear down to the sea. There'll be long rows of trees, as far as man can see, all green and golden, and heavy with fruit of every kind.
- Karen Ferris: Oh, it's a wonderful dream, Jared. A dream that you and I will help make come true.
- Jared Whitney: The future of California is our future. This new world is our world... yours and mine, for all our days together.
- Colonel Chris Ferris: Smartest lawyers in the world can't change the difference between right and wrong.
- [first lines]
- Narrator: California's fabulous gold diggings of 1849 sent a yellow flood into the treasury of the United States. Gold was king. It lay at the roots of the grass; it mixed with the sand and gravel of the smallest of streams, the largest of rivers. And wherever it lay, wild-eyed adventurers found it. The day when a man could pry a fortune from the earth by the twist of a pick or the lift of a shovel passed on; a new era came.