Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 65

Marshall was a skilled carpenter and all-around millwright who
located for the cutting a heavily wooded area next to a fork o f the
American River, some forty miles away from Sutter’s Fort—
present-day Coloma. He set up a mill there and on January 24,1848
made a casual inspection of the millrace flowage ditch. There he
discovered a yellow nugget and then another in the stream bed and
brought them to Sutter, riding through a beating rain to announce
their good fortune. Sutter actually greeted the find with mixed
emotions, for if there was gold in quantity, his valley o f the
Sacramento would be tranquil no longer and his lands would be
overrun by trespassers seeking the treasure. Although word leaked
out immediately, because of the find’s remoteness, the East did not
learn of the event to shape the nation until August of 1848.
Besides the local Sandwich Islanders, Mormons, Indians and
farmers filtering on down from Oregonland to search for gold,
sailors now caught the news and responded to it as catching a
mighty wind in their sails. They ran before it, leaving their vessels
as ghost ships in the harbor at Yerba Buena, later to be called San
Francisco. By the middle o f June, the great port city itself was a
ghost town. There was little hyperbole in the observation that “The
farmers have thrown aside their plows, the lawyers their briefs, the
doctors their pills, the priests their prayer books, and all are now
digging gold.” (1) Just as the dumbest farmers were said to grow the
biggest potatoes, with respect to gold, “ the veriest greenhorn was
as likely to uncover the richest mine on the gulch as was the wisest
ex-Professor of geology.” (2)
The California strike was a true “bonanza,” not a “borrasca”
(the former in Spanish, refers to “sunny skies,” the latter to “ barren
rock” or a “bust”). Here was a rich mother lode that extended some
one hundred and twenty miles long and whose width was frorti six
to eight miles, and it all lay between the reasonable altitudes o f two
to three thousand feet. Virtually all the rivers touching the area, the

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