Anyone who was having a good time mining gold as the 1940's approached was kicked in the guts by
War Production Board Order L-208.

Very basically, it was the war-time government saying, "We need cigarettes and bullets and Spam and things that explode-- not gold." So, a year after Pearl Harbor, all gold mines were ordered to shut down. If you were mining tungsten, or copper, or any metal or ore needed by the War Effort, pray continue. But gold? Nope.

Needless to say, many gold miners found this annoying, since their mines contained gold and not the minerals the government was seeking. It would be difficult to sit out the rest of the war with no income, and so many simply went out of business, never to return.

From Order L-208: The Closing of America’s Gold Mines during World War II By Gage McKinney:
A specific federal order, Order L-208 issued by the U.S. War Production Board, shut America’s gold mines on December 7, 1942, one year after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. During World War II only one U.S. industry was ordered to close—gold mining—and an action taken far away forever changed the American West. Why were the gold mines closed? And who closed them? The story begins several years earlier amid America’s greatest economic calamity, the Great Depression. Following the 1929 Stock Market Crash the U.S. Gross Domestic Product plunged 25 percent. (For comparison, during the recession of 2007–8, GDP declined about 3 percent.) By 1933 national unemployed hovered near 25 percent and never fell below 12 percent during the decade.1 Yet during the same period the gold regions of the country thrived. Those investors who survived the 1929 crash sought the surety of gold and by the early ’30s a surge of investment invigorated the gold camps. The mining districts of Grass Valley and Nevada City, the richest gold districts in California, are indicative. During the 1930s more than forty gold mines operated within the districts and mine employment rose from about 500 in 1930 to more than 2,700 in 1936. The population of Nevada County, California, home to the two districts, doubled during the decade, packing the region “as tight as a sausage.” Local builders couldn’t keep up with the demand for housing, merchants prospered and automobile dealers set national sales records. The boom was attributed to mining, and the federal government helped in 1934 by raising the price of gold from $20.67 to $35 an ounce.The man who brought Nevada County’s surprising Depression-era boom to an end was Adolph Hitler. After war erupted in Europe, President Franklin Roosevelt called on the country to become “the arsenal of democracy.” Before America entered the fight, newly-created federal agencies in Washington worked with increasing energy to prepare the civilian economy for war. By the fall of 1941 the Office of Production Management (OPM) recognized that gold mines were competing with base metal mines to obtain equipment and machinery, and the base metals such as copper, zinc, and lead were the ones needed for warfare. Later that year the Supply Priorities and Allocation Board (SPAB) reported a consensus among government agencies: “In a war economy labor, materials and machinery applied to gold production are largely wasted.”

Clicking on the above link will opens a huge PDF file detailing everything you ever wanted to know about Order L-208. Clicking here will open the actual order as it appeared in the Federal Register on Friday October 9, 1942.

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