The Age of Gold (3 page)

Marshall and Sutter worried about the danger upstream, but, realizing there was nothing they could do till the water fell, they decided Marshall should stay by the forge to see the ironwork finished. On January 14 he loaded the irons into a wagon, hitched up three yoke of oxen and, with the assistance of two Indian boys, set out for Coloma. The journey went slowly along the muddy road. After forty-eight hours they were only halfway there. But en route they encountered a party returning from a previous delivery; these men brought the welcome news that the dam had held. At Coloma, Henry Bigler recorded, “Clear as a bell and the water is a-falling and the mill safe.”

B
UT WINTER WAS JUST
starting, and more storms would follow. Marshall was impatient to complete the work. His impatience increased,
on reaching Coloma, at learning of the revolt against Jennie Wimmer and at having to grant the rebels’ demand of time to build their separate quarters. Meanwhile he examined what the crew had accomplished in his absence. The headrace—the portion of the race above the mill—met his approval, but the tailrace—below the mill—was too shallow and narrow to accommodate the volume of water necessary to drive the saw. It must be enlarged.

Marshall decided to enlist the force that had nearly destroyed the project. The excavation of the headrace had had to be done more or less precisely; if the water overflowed the banks of the headrace it would erode the foundations of the mill. But once past the mill, the water’s specific course mattered little. The only essential was that the water return to the river without backing up under the mill. Marshall decided to let the water cut its own course beyond the mill.

The mill’s design included an undershot wheel, with the water rushing beneath the loading platform. Until the construction was complete, Marshall couldn’t let the water flow while the men were at work, crawling around and underneath the mill. But at night, when the work was suspended, he could open the gates at the head of the race and let the water pour through. While the men slept, the water would carve out the tailrace. The process shouldn’t take long; within a few weeks, barring an act of God or other disruption, the mill would be ready for its first logs.

Marshall supervised the work of nature as closely as he supervised the work of the men. Each morning he closed the gate and cut off the water through the race, and walked the channel below the mill to see what the flow had accomplished overnight. One morning not long after his return from Sutter’s Fort—the date generally given is January 24, although Marshall’s memory wavered on this point—about half past seven, he stepped along the race toward its confluence with the river. The night had been cold, and a rime of ice covered the rocks where the water had splashed. This, and the water still in the bed of the channel, gave a gleam to the pebbles and sand in the morning light. A few particular sparkles caught his eye, but at first he thought these were merely pieces of shiny quartz. Near the lower end of the race, however, just above its junction with the river,
some two hundred yards from the mill, where about six inches of water pooled in the bed of the tailrace, he decided to investigate further.

“I picked up one or two pieces,” he recalled, “and examined them attentively; and having some general knowledge of minerals, I could not call to mind more than two which in any way resembled this—sulphuret of iron, very bright and brittle; and gold, bright yet malleable. I then tried it between two rocks, and found that it could be beaten into a different shape, but not broken. I then collected four or five more pieces.”

A more devious, or even more thoughtful, man than Marshall might have pocketed the gold and kept the discovery to himself. But a more devious or more thoughtful man might not have found himself digging ditches that January morning in a gravel bar so far from home and kin and civilization. As it was, he hastened to the mill and shared his surprising intelligence with the men there. William Scott was at the carpenter’s bench, working on the mill wheel.

“I have found it,” Marshall said. At least this was what he remembered saying; the words have an odd ring. The phrasing sounds as though Marshall was looking for gold, and perhaps that Scott knew he was doing so. Yet when some question arose as to Marshall’s primacy in discovery, when it would have served his purpose to say he had gone looking for the precious metal, he claimed nothing of the sort. Quite possibly, in remembering things as he did, Marshall unthinkingly translated the mania of the aftermath of his discovery—when “it” was on everyone’s mind—to the very moment when the new age dawned.

On the other hand, maybe he said just what he later remembered. According to that memory, Scott replied, “What is it?”

“Gold,” answered Marshall.

“Oh, no!” said Scott in disbelief. “That can’t be.”

“I know it to be nothing else.”

Scott’s skepticism erased any residual inclination in Marshall to keep the discovery quiet. Several of the other men working in the vicinity were called over to examine the specimens and render judgment. Charles Bennett, at Marshall’s direction, took a hammer and pounded one of the flakes into a thin sheet—strong evidence that this was the genuine article. Peter
Wimmer carried a flake to the cabin where his wife was making soap; she threw it into the boiling lye solution, and it emerged shinier than ever. A similar result followed an assay by saleratus (baking powder). Although less telling than the malleability test, these experiments added weight to the gold hypothesis.

Had anyone at Coloma known what everyone in the world knew later, Marshall’s men would have dropped their tools at once and gone looking for more of what he had found. But at the time it appeared a curiosity, a fluke. After all, they had moved thousands of cubic yards of dirt and sand and gravel in that same location during the previous several months, and this was the first sign that those thousands of yards contained anything but dirt and sand and gravel. Marshall reminded them that they had come to Coloma to build a sawmill. If they didn’t work on the mill, they wouldn’t get paid. Perhaps he did not remind them—although they doubtless realized—that
he
wouldn’t start getting paid until the mill started sawing wood.

Yet, bowing to reality, Marshall told the men that if they continued to work on the mill during regular hours, they might search for gold during “odd spells and Sundays” (as Azariah Smith recorded). At some point either then or later they agreed, in exchange for this privilege, to split their findings with Marshall.

The fact that Marshall was more concerned with lumber than with gold was underscored by the fact that he waited four days after his remarkable discovery to travel to Sutter’s Fort. Perhaps he failed to appreciate how that discovery changed everything. Perhaps he
did
appreciate it, and affected nonchalance for the benefit of the men.

S
UTTER WAS CONCERNED
with lumber, too, but with larger issues as well. In January 1848 the United States and Mexico remained formally at war, yet the shape of the American victory was evident. The United States would acquire California, among other spoils of the conflict. While Marshall and most Americans in California cheered the change of sovereignty, Sutter shuddered. As an official of the Mexican government, he
had lately been an enemy of the region’s new rulers; more unnerving, everything he had built and achieved at New Helvetia—the fort, the farms, the herds, the authority he wielded, the respect he commanded— were based on his good relations with Mexico. Mexico’s defeat canceled all that. Perhaps he could make himself as valuable to the Americans as he had been to the Mexicans; flexibility and the capacity to ingratiate had long been his stock-in-trade. But the process would take time—a luxury he wasn’t sure he would be allowed.

Such was Sutter’s thinking when, to his surprise, Marshall arrived back from Coloma. Because Marshall had left the fort only two weeks earlier, with the intention of finishing the construction, Sutter assumed something was amiss. Marshall’s demeanor added to this impression. “From the unusual agitation in his manner I imagined that something serious had occurred,” Sutter said afterward. He added, “As we involuntarily do in this part of the world, I at once glanced to see if my rifle was in its proper place.”

When Marshall explained the cause of his excitement, the two men retired to Sutter’s office on the second floor of the building at the center of the fort. They consulted Sutter’s
Encyclopaedia Americana
, which had a long article describing the properties of gold. The apothecary shop at the fort possessed some aqua fortis—nitric acid—which Sutter sent a servant to fetch. Marshall’s samples withstood the acid—a strong indication of gold. To determine the density of the metal, they reproduced Archimedes’ famous experiment. They placed in one pan of a scales a quantity of Marshall’s sample sufficient to balance three silver dollars in the other pan; then they immersed the scales in water, whereupon the pan with the sample sank, revealing the greater density of the sample—again, as expected of gold.

Sutter concluded what Marshall already had. “I declared this to be gold,” he remembered. He told Marshall that it was “of the finest quality, of at least 23 carats.”

Marshall thought the two of them should leave for Coloma at once. Sutter was reluctant. He cited the lateness of the afternoon and the inclemency of the weather—it had begun raining again, hard.

Sutter had another reason for delay. He needed time to think. A sleep
less night got him started. By his own testimony, he “thought a great deal during the night about the consequences which might follow such a discovery.” He considered himself as resourceful as the next man; his whole career, culminating in New Helvetia, was evidence of his ability to adapt to changing circumstances. But he had never encountered anything like this.

James Marshall’s discovery of gold at Coloma turned out to be a seminal event in history, one of those rare moments that divide human existence into before and after. When news of the discovery floated down the Sacramento to the more populated regions of California, it sucked nearly every free hand and available arm to the gold mines, leaving children to ask where their fathers had gone and wives wondering when their husbands would return. As the golden news spread beyond California to
the outside world, it triggered the most astonishing mass movement of peoples since the Crusades. From all over the planet they came—from Mexico and Peru and Chile and Argentina, from Oregon and Hawaii and Australia and New Zealand and China, from the American North and the American South, from Britain and France and Germany and Italy and Greece and Russia. They came by the tens and hundreds and thousands, then by the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. They came by sailing ship and steamship, by horse and mule and ox and wagon and foot. They came in companies and alone, with money and without, knowing and naïve. They tore themselves from warm hearths and good homes, promising to return; they fled from cold hearts and bad debts, vowing never to return. They were farmers and merchants and sailors and slaves and abolitionists and soldiers of fortune and ladies of the night. They jumped bail to start their journey, and jumped ship at journey’s end. They were pillars of their communities, and their communities’ dregs.

Their journey, taken collectively, was the epic of the age, a saga of world history, an adventure on the largest scale. But their collective enterprise was the sum of hundreds of thousands of individual journeys, hundreds of thousands of small stories that changed the world by changing the lives of the men and women who traveled to California in pursuit of their common dream. For nearly all of them, the journey was the most difficult thing they had ever done, and far more difficult than they imagined on setting out. Not all survived the journey; those who did would never forget the trials they endured, the challenges they met, the companions they lost. They would tell the story of the journey to their children and their children’s children.

None of those who traveled to California in search of gold had any inkling, before January 24, 1848, of what was in store for them. Their lives, about to become threads in a grand—a golden—tapestry, were still distinct, wound on spindles separated by oceans and continents and gulfs of culture and mountain ranges of history. And they would have remained distinct, in nearly all cases, if not for James Marshall’s discovery. But starting on that day, a powerful engine—the engine of fate, or perhaps merely of human nature—began winding them all in.