This Friday marks the 177th anniversary of the California gold discovery, January 24, 1848. On that crisp winter day, a carpenter named James Marshall, who was supervising the construction of a sawmill on the South Fork of the American River, spotted “something shiny” at the bottom of the mill’s tailrace . . . and by leaning down to pick it up, changed the course of history.
Unsure of exactly what he had found, Marshall submitted the samples to various tests at the campsite—biting them, pounding them thinner, even throwing one sample into the camp laundresses’ boiling, lye-filled soap kettle—growing more excited as each test seemed to prove that those shiny pieces were truly gold, and not common iron pyrite. Four days later, on January 28, Marshall rode down from the mill site to confer with John Sutter, his partner in this venture, and the owner of a Sacramento Valley trading post 40 miles downriver known as Sutter’s Fort.
Sutter was surprised to see him, not only because Marshall had ridden down during a torrential rainstorm, but also because Marshall appeared extremely unsettled, insisting on complete privacy behind locked doors before he would reveal his reason for coming. Finally secured in Sutter’s private apartments, Marshall pulled a white cotton rag from his pants pocket that was wrapped securely around some specimens.
Pouring over Sutter’s Encyclopedia Americana, the two made further tests with a set of balances and some nitric acid. Finally, Sutter pronounced the shiny flakes as definitely “auriferous,” and probably of very high quality.
Sutter and Marshall swore the mill crew to secrecy— at least until the mill was finished and operable—but the secret was too delicious to keep. Word seeped out this way and that, spreading via merchant ship around the Pacific Rim. By May, curious northern California residents were finding excuses to ride up to the mill site. By July, men from Mexico, South America, and Hawaii were mining California’s rivers. The big stampede from America’s Atlantic Coast, and Europe, began immediately after December 5, 1848, when President James Polk publicly confirmed what had heretofore just been an electrifying rumor: that indeed extensive, high-quality gold deposits existed in California’s foothills.
Thousands upon thousands of eager treasure seekers, from all over the globe, swarmed into a territory only recently acquired by the United States. James Marshall wasn’t the first to discover gold there, but it was his discovery that launched the California Gold Rush, the greatest worldwide migration in peacetime ever known up to that time.
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