Sounds great! One of the advantages of homeschooling is that you can work in "unschooling" modules when you see fit.
As for the gold, it sure looks fun - but the work involved does reinforced this part of the lesson:
But by the time they had arrived, they realized that what gold was left was going to take hard work to get. It was for many of the new arrivals, harder work than the jobs they had left behind.