What is this Film/TV Show?

[BradPittsLeftTit]

Sorry but this has been driving me a bit mad!!

I only have one vague scene that I'm hoping will be familiar to someone and I can then put it to rest and identify the film or tv programme

It's set in America in the old west-but I'm not sure if it's properly old west 19th century or modern day but that sort of 'ranch' type area.

People hunting gold. A man is selling property/land in an area known to be a place to pan for gold. He loads a shotgun cartridge with gold specs and shoots it into the river, speckling it these tiny gold pellets.

Prospective buyers than pan then river for gold and find the gold pellets and think the property and land is worth loads so snap it up, not realising the realtor is the one who has planted it....

Help!

I asked dh who is a proper film buff and he didn't know but he said the first person to male a million in the gold rush was someone who bought up all the panning equipment cheap then planted gold. He then sold the equipment at a stupidly inflated price.

Could it be a film/tv show based on that?

Thanks for replying!

I think the scene I mentioned wasn't really the main plot of the film and I don't remember it being overly serious so I don't think it was based on a true story.

But thanks for asking your DH! If a film buff doesn't know then I don't hold up much hope 😬

I've got vague memories of something similar in the tv adaptation of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but that could be total bollocks.

@TimeTruthandHearts Gah, not something I've ever watched so I don't think it could be that. But I'm not entirely convinced it's a film so could very well be an episode from a tv show...

Are you thinking of The Beverley Hillbillies? Comedy first aired 1963. Jed Clampett’s shack is near a big pool of oil and the company buys it - he becomes a millionaire and the episodes are all about how he and his family adjust to their new lives. The opening sequence is him out hunting and finding the oil. I think he might be wearing glasses. It’s quite funny, I’ve watched it with my kids on Amazon Prime but remember watching it as a child in the eighties.

You can do a keyword search on IMDB which should show you a list of gold rush themed films. If you remember the era you can start narrowing it down- you might recognise photos of main players etc. There were gold rushes in California, Alaska and Yukon 1840s onward and even Australia - there's a lot of scope for searching. (And honestly it sounds nothing like the Beverly hillbillies which I watched right through more than once every day after school in the 1970s-80s back when there were only two channels in Canada).

The luminearies on TV recently was set in New Zealand but was an old town with a gold mining plot amongst other confusing ideas.
Part of the storyline was the hero put gold into the workings of the Chinese who were not allowed to work the good bits of the gold panning so they could have gold legally.
The bits they could work were the leaving of the white prospectors. Lots of racist views from the time expressed in the series

McKenna's Gold?

Gutted I don't seem to have found the answer here.

Thanks so much for your suggestions but none of them are this film/tv show.

It's probably a distraction to mention the gold rush as I don't think that was the main topic of the film. And it was definitely not an 'oldie'.

I'll keep plugging away at IMDb as it's infiltrating my dreams now 😆

It's not the series 'Bonanza' is it? Used to be on on Sunday afternoons in the 80s.

CSI Las Vegas did an episode like that. The man was shooting the gold spec bullets into cave walls.