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p r o l o g u e “Glorious” “My eye was caught with the glimpse of something shining in the bottom of the ditch. . . . I reached my hand down and picked it up; it made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold. The piece was about half the size and of the shape of a pea. Then I saw another.”1 So recalled James Marshall of that fateful moment of discovery along the south fork of the American River. It could not have happened to a less likely fellow. A carpenter by trade, Marshall had wandered through life in obscurity, haunted by misfortune and his own restlessness. In August 1847, he stumbled upon work as a construction superintendent for a sawmill near the village of Coloma in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Marshall’s employer, John Sutter, wanted lumber for his own use and to sell to settlers at his New Helvetia colony, the center of trade and communication in the Sacramento Valley, about forty-five miles downstream from the mill site. As the mill neared completion, Marshall noticed that the tailrace needed to be deepened to accommodate the volume of water necessary to turn the wheel. On the morning of January 24, 1848, while inspecting the progress of his crew’s work, Marshall spotted the gleam that made his heart thump. His words send shivers down one’s spine to this day. The gold rush, the epic adventure that ensued, changed the course of history in countless ways—many familiar, even legendary, others still waiting to be told.2 The pea-shaped nuggets, grains, and flakes that Marshall found were known as placer gold, from a Spanish word meaning a place near the bank of a stream where alluvial deposits collected. They had been waiting to be found for a long time. Some 200 million years earlier, when the mighty Sierra Nevada thrust through the surface of the earth, long ribbons of molten gold ore flowed up into fissures in the granite rock. Over the centuries, powerful glacial and climatic forces tore loose particles of gold and washed them into rivers, where they lodged on sandbars, behind stones, or in potholes in the banks or in streambeds. Generations of native Californians could not have missed the gold, but they considered it of little value, while Spaniards, Mexicans, and previous Anglos simply missed it altogether. Marshall himself found it by accident. The action of the water running through the dug-out tailrace freed the glittering granules from their hiding. That very process of digging and washing became the method that tens of thousands of argonauts, armed with picks, shovels, and pans, would soon use in their search for gold. The excitement built slowly at first. Marshall’s men did not drop their tools and run o¤ looking for more; instead, they assumed that the discovery was a fluke and went back to work. On January 28, after four days of more shiny findings, Marshall could no longer contain his curiosity. Taking a few samples with him, he rode over to New Helvetia to consult Sutter. Behind a locked door, they conducted several tests that Sutter had found in an article in his copy of Encyclopaedia Americana. “I declared this to be gold of the finest quality, of at least 23 carats,” Sutter remembered.3 At that point, Marshall became the first to catch gold fever, scurrying back to Coloma in the rain in the middle of the night to start prospecting at daybreak. More concerned with lumber, Sutter rode over the next day and persuaded the men to finish the mill and to say nothing to outsiders, in exchange for allowing them to dig for gold in their spare time. Even as the news leaked out over the next several months (Sutter himself could not resist gossiping to his friends), it attracted very little attention. Nobody took it particularly seriously. Rumors , legends, and boasts of gold, after all, had fooled many a Californian since the days of Spanish exploration. The one time gold had been found in the mountains north of Los Angeles, in 1842, the deposit was shallow and very limited. Even when the two weekly newspapers in San Francisco mentioned the Sutter mill discovery—the Californian on March 15 and the California Star ten days later—the response was negligible. Sam Brannan, an enterprising merchant and real estate speculator, then took matters into his own hands. In early April, Brannan saw the diggings...

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