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Russia's "Gold Rush" was different from California's. Here in the frozen wastes of the Far East the prospectors were slaves, prisoners worked to death on what became known as the "Road of Bones".
Now the retreat from one of the most inhospitable environments known to man is in full swing. The route from nowhere to the back of beyond is lined with abandoned villages, once gulag camps.
Even Susuman, an urban outpost servicing the gold mines, is in decline. The town's population has halved over the last decade and teenagers describe their home as "a tip with no future".
For those who stay, summer is trying enough. Those out on the highway built by Stalin's prisoners from Magadan, the nearest port, 400 miles away, are baked by the heat, covered with dust and attacked by huge mosquitoes.
Winter is worse. The last one was severe even by local standards, with temperatures hitting -76F. A sprinkling of hilltop snow in July was a reminder that the hot weather was already on the wane.
Under Stalin hundreds of thousands of prisoners endured those extremes and more. Kolyma, the river which lent its name to the whole region, was, in the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "a pole of cold and cruelty".
Armed only with pickaxes and wheelbarrows, prisoners, among them the founder of the Soviet space programme, generals and intellectuals side by side with common criminals, hacked and hewed at permafrost in the hunt for gold.
After the tyrant's death the camps were disbanded and most prisoners returned to "the mainland". But the search for gold went on, scarring the wilderness landscape with waterlogged gravel pits and scrap heaps.
"Originally here every stream was its own Klondike," said Alexander Talanov, head of the Susuman district. "Maybe there is still a lot of gold, but by now it is hidden deep down and harder to find."
Nowadays, the precious metal is mined by hulking dredgers, scooping the earth up through a huge proboscis, their innards sorting the rocks before spewing unrefined gold into a secure hold.
"I am here to deter attacks or robberies," said Yaroslava Volkova, a strikingly good-looking blonde with a pistol strapped to her belt who - along with padlocks and wire meshing - defends the dredger's gold from thieves.
Before communism collapsed, a new generation of prospectors arrived, volunteers attracted by wages so high that they represented the only way of legally striking it rich in the old Soviet Union.
Such adventurers planned to come for a year or two but stayed far longer. Many now find themselves stranded at the end of the world, unable to afford the passage home to the rest of a country changed out of all recognition.
"Under Stalin there were lots of camps with barbed wire and watch towers here," said Ivan Panikarov, a local journalist. "But Kolyma is one big camp to this day. There are no prisoners, you just can't escape."
Mr Panikarov is curator of a small gulag museum, three pokey rooms in a typically rundown block of flats in the town of Yagodnoye packed with mementoes of the region's dark history.
Attractions include a sign saying "Forbidden Zone. No Access. I will open fire", wooden crosses marking prisoners' graves and a picture of Othello and Desdemona painted by a camp inmate on a canvass of a US-donated sack of flour.
In fact, all Kolyma is a monument to the past. Without gold or slave labour from the gulag, the place would be an empty wasteland to this day. Every town or village was once home to a prison camp. Yet there are few reminders of its origins. The "Road of Bones" has more tributes to recent car crash victims than to the tens of thousands who perished building it.
Only one roadside cross mourns the fallen while a colossal Easter Island-type sculpture called the "Mask of Grief" gazes down at the Magadan harbour where barges carrying prisoners arrived at the start of their final journey north.
More immediate concerns for today's inhabitants are the squalor and loneliness of life on the frontier between civilisation and nature at its most unforgiving. Outlying villages are shutting down and their people moving to Susuman. Most see that move as a step towards escaping altogether.
"Every year that passes my heart is giving up and there is nothing to do," said Sergei Zanin, who spent 30 years working in a place known in the local language as "Valley of Death". "Ours is hardly a middle class life here."
A World Bank scheme, when finally approved, will finance the resettlement of pensioners, invalids and large families to the rest of Russia, but many locals want the programme expanded to allow the able-bodied to flee.
At the same time officials do not conceal another aim of resettlement: to allow bulldozers and dredgers to demolish the deserted villages and continue the hunt for gold amidst their ruins.
One nagging worry remains: after decades of struggling to survive can people adapt to life in the relatively temperate conditions of the rest of Russia? Some who tried have now come "home".
"That is the great paradox," said one. "It is impossible to live here but impossible to leave as well."