El Dorado County, California along with the population since the 1960 Winter Olympics, hosted at Squaw Valley Ski Resort in neighboring Placer County. The present-day site of El Dorado County was once home to the Maidu, Washoe, and Miwok Native American tribes, and is notable for being the site of the 1848 gold discovery that sparked the California Gold Rush. The County of El Dorado was one of California's original 27 counties created effective February 18, 1850 (the number has risen to 58 today). Its name is derived from the Spanish meaning "the gilded/golden". The final segments of the Pony Express mail route ran
El Dorado In 1536 Gonzalo Díaz de Pineda had led an expedition to the lowlands to the east of Quito and had found cinnamon trees but no rich empire. In 1536, stories of El Dorado drew the Spanish conquistador Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada and his army of 800 men away from their mission to find an overland route to Peru and up into the Andean homeland of the Muisca for the first time. The southern Muisca settlements and their treasures quickly fell to the conquistadors in 1537 and 1538. On the Bogotá savanna, the Spanish received reports from captured natives about El