Land of Gold explores the making of John Adams and Peter Sellars' San Francisco Opera premiere of their latest collaboration, Girls of the Golden West, dramatizing the turbulent history of the California Gold Rush. With the new opera's title referencing Giacomo Puccini's 1910 romantic favorite The Girl of the Golden West, Adams and Sellars' work tells a harsher and more accurate story through the letters of writer Louise Clappe, who lived in a miners' settlement for a year and a half.