Missing for Decades, Claude Chana Statue Returns to Placer County
The long-lost sculpture, which served as the model for Auburn’s famous 45-ton gold miner, has returned to the historic Colfax Hotel.
A statue of California Gold Rush pioneer Claude Chana has returned to Placer County after disappearing decades ago. The sculpture, created by Auburn dentist and artist Dr. Kenneth Fox during the 1960s, once stood outside the historic Colfax Hotel. Now it’s back, thanks to an unexpected discovery on Facebook.
Truckee feels like a town that learned to keep its winter boots close to a warm hearth. Born as Gray’s Station in 1863, around Joseph Gray’s roadhouse, then briefly known as Coburn’s Station for blacksmith Samuel Coburn, the place settled on the name Truckee when the Central Pacific christened its depot in 1867. The name itself was lifted from a Paiute chief—Tru-ki-zo—whose shouted “Tro-kay!” (“Everything is all right”) was misheard as a name by early travelers. 
Auburn sits where the western flank of the Sierra begins to steepen into real country — a Gold Rush town that never quite stopped being one. You still feel the geology of gold in the streets: the story of Claude Chana finding paydirt in the Auburn Ravine on May 16, 1848, is the spark that turned a cluster of camps called North Fork or Woods Dry Diggings into a named place by the fall of 1849, borrowed from miners who came from Auburn, New York. Placer claims were rich here; the Central Pacific Railroad reached town in 1865, and by 1851, Auburn was already the center stage, the county seat of Placer County.