Trivia

In an early scene in which Jared Whitney (George Brent) signs a hotel register, the close-up of the register page shows that the names immediately above Whitney's are "Mr. & Mrs. Donald Siegel, Sonora Cal". Don Siegel, later to gain fame as director of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Dirty Harry (1971), and for mentoring a budding director named Clint Eastwood, was in charge of the second unit that made such insert shots for Warner Brothers movies in the late 1930s.

Second three-strip Technicolor feature film made at Warner Bros. The first was God's Country and the Woman (1937). The next would become much better known: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).

The landmark lawsuit relating to this film is Woodruff v. North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Co. in 1882. It was settled in 1884 in favor of the farmers and severely curtailed hydraulic mining in California.

Barton MacLane is credited as Slag Martin in the end credits, but he's called Slag Minton in the film. Similarly, Clarence Kolb is billed as Senator Walsh, but he's a major in the film.

A real historical character, wealthy mining magnate and U.S. Senator George Hearst (Moroni Olson) appears in one scene, joking about how you know when you've found gold. He then mentions that his son "Willie" wants to take over the running of The San Francisco Examiner, but expresses doubt that there's any money in newspapers. That's an in-joke referring to William Randolph Hearst, who had built a vast news empire by the time this film was produced. The younger Hearst's own production company, Cosmopolitan, made the film.