![]() ![]() “I have no hesitation now in saying, that there is more gold in the country drained by the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers than will pay the cost of the present war with Mexico a hundred times over,” he wrote. Near the end of the report, Mason described how abundant the precious metal was and how it could be easily extracted from the land. “At the time of my visit, but little more than three months after its first discovery, it was estimated that upwards of 4,000 people were employed ,” Mason wrote in the letter. Mason wrote in the letter that he saw “whole route mills were lying idle, fields of wheat were open to cattle and horses, houses vacant and farms going to waste.” But when Mason arrived at the gold fields, he discovered swarms of people sifting through the streams and dirt in a mad search for gold. On his journey to the region, he described finding parts of California towns that were suddenly abandoned by people fleeing to the Sierra Nevada foothills. “Everyone went to the gold fields.” The summer after Marshall’s unexpected find, the American military governor of California, Colonel Richard Barnes Mason, decided to travel to the area to draft a report for the U.S. “The whole town and the rancheros around the town essentially were deserted,” he says. Rohrbough says the immediate effects of the discovery of gold on San Francisco were nothing short of drastic. It is said that San Francisco emptied after businessman Sam Brannan walked down the city’s Montgomery Street with a bottle containing gold flakes, grains, and dust, shouting: “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” An historian and author of 1997’s Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation, Malcolm J. ![]() By the spring of 1848, people poured out of San Francisco hoping to strike it rich. Eventually, word of the gold spread across the region like a Western wildfire, igniting the curiosities of the citizens of the nearby city of San Francisco. After picking up the flake and applying rudimentary tests to the metal, Marshall came to a conclusion: he had discovered gold! San Francisco Empties Outįour days later, Marshall informed Sutter, who urged him to keep the discovery secret so that work on the sawmill would be completed. As he looked in the millrace, a fast moving stream that powered the mill wheel, Marshall spotted a glint of color. He was building the mill for his boss, John Sutter. ![]() That day, in a remote region of the Sierra Nevada foothills, a man named James Marshall was overseeing the construction of a sawmill on the American River. On January 24, 1848, a thin piece of metal the size and thickness of a corn flake altered the history of California and, by extension, the history of the United States. ![]()
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