The northern California hunters are in a detecting and history paradise. Those pseudo martial accoutrements they manufactured and sold to gold miners are awfully neat. The prolific gold of those regions really enable a varied and robust material culture which makes for a high class of detecting finds. Your two piece buckle find is very cool.
I live in a little silver town, and most people around here ran a tab at the stores, racked up a debt, and then left town in the middle of the night. The material culture is much sparser and the ground is very stingy with finds beyond tin cans and tin can fragments.
