Gold!

by Fred Rosen

  “Yes,” Sutter promised. When assured of his presence, Marshall took his leave.

  This wasn’t the first time in history that gold had been discovered in the United States. There was a gold rush when the ore was discovered in North Carolina and Georgia in the 1820s and 1830s, respectively. But now the question was what exactly the construction at Sutter’s Mill had brought to shining light. A significant discovery, or a flash in the pan?

  “We thought it best to keep it as quiet as possible till we should have finished our mill. But there was a great number of disbanded Mormon soldiers in and about the fort, and when they came to hear of it, why it just spread like wildfire! Soon, the whole country was in a bustle,” said Marshall.

  Sutter thought a great deal during the night about the consequences that might follow such a discovery. Yet all he wrote in diary entry for the day was, “Mr. Marshall arrived from the mountains on very important business.” No one had ever accused Sutter of understatement, but that charge could certainly be leveled at him now. Or more likely, he was so scared of the secret coming out prematurely; he didn’t even want to refer to it by name in writing. Sutter ruminated on the matter.

  The next morning, Sutter gave the necessary orders to his laborers and left at seven o’clock, accompanied by an Indian soldier and a vaquero, in a heavy rain, for Coloma. Halfway down the road, Sutter saw at a distance a human being crawling out from the brush.

  “Who is that?” Sutter asked the Indian.

  “The same man who was with you last evening,” the Indian replied.

  When they came abreast, they found that the man was indeed a very wet and disheveled Marshall.

  “You would have done better to remain with me at the fort than to pass such an ugly night here,” said Sutter dryly.

  Marshall explained that he had ridden the 54 miles back to Coloma, took his other horse, and came halfway back to meet them. Together, they all rode up to Coloma, which they reached in the afternoon, by which time the weather was clearing up. The next morning, Sutter accompanied Marshall to the tailrace of the mill. Like before, water had been running during the night to clean out the gravel that had been made loose to widen the race. After the water level went down, they waded out.

  “Small pieces of gold could be seen remaining on the bottom of the clean washed bed rock,” Sutter later wrote. “I went in the race and picked up several pieces of this gold, several of the laborers gave me some which they had picked up, and from Marshall I received a part. I told them that I would get a ring made of this gold as soon as it could be done in California.”

  Sutter later did. He had a heavy ring made, with his family’s coat of arms engraved on the outside, and on the inside of the ring was engraved, “The first gold, discovered in January, 1848.”

  The next day, Marshall and Sutter went on a prospecting tour in the Coloma vicinity. The following morning, Sutter was scheduled to go back to his fort. Before his departure, “I had a conversation with all hands. I told them that I would consider it as a great favor if they would keep this discovery secret only for six weeks, so that I could finish my large flour mill at Brighton, which had cost me already about from 24 to 25,000 dollars.”

  Everyone promised to keep the secret. But on his way home, Sutter did not feel happy and contented. Rather, he was surprised to find that he felt uneasy, and the more he thought about it, the more his emotions made sense. In his heart of hearts, he knew that such a secret, despite his men’s best efforts, would not remain secret for long.

  Two weeks after his return to his fort, he sent up “several teams in charge of a white man, as the teamsters were Indian boys. This man was acquainted with all hands up there, and Mrs. Wimmer (the cook) told him the whole secret; likewise the young sons of Mr. Wimmer told him that they had gold and that they would let him have some too; and so he obtained a few dollars’ worth of it as a present.

  “As soon as this man arrived at the fort, he went to a small store in one of my outside buildings, kept by Jed Smith, a partner of Sam Brannan, a Mormon merchant in Francisco, and asked for a bottle of brandy, for which he would pay the cash; after having the bottle, he paid [instead] with these small pieces of gold.

  “Smith was astonished and asked him if he intended to insult him. The teamster told him to go and ask me about it, Smith came in great haste to see me. I told him at once the truth.

  “What could I do? I had to tell him all about it.”

  4.

  “ALL I HAD HEARD …”

  Joseph Smith was about to take a hand in the next major event of the Gold Rush. That he was long dead made it that much more of an achievement.

  Smith had been born in 1805 in Sharon, Vermont. He was one of ten children, and the family moved frequently during his youth. The most significant years of Smith’s early childhood were spent in Palmyra, New York, where Protestant tent “revivals” were frequent and well attended. The family eventually moved to Illinois.

  There, on the family farm, the man who would later be called the Prophet claimed to have received his first divine revelation when he was fourteen years old. God came to Smith with the revelation that all religions since the death of the disciples of Christ had turned away from the true church of Christ. His job was to restore that church.

  Receiving subsequent visions of instruction that he obeyed, Smith claimed to have discovered, on a hillside, gold tablets written by ancient Indian inhabitants. A modern-day Moses, his translations of the tablets were published in 1830 as the Book of Mormon. Combined with the Old and New Testaments, plus some of Smith’s later revelations, the Book of Mormon became the foundation for a new religion, Mormonism.

  Smith’s new religion was empowering. His zealots believed in their heart and soul in God and Jesus Christ as real corporeal beings who actively intervened in human affairs. To a Mormon, human beings are innately filled with the divine essence. They can become Godlike through strict conduct. The Mormon Church, under Smith’s leadership as the divinely ordained Prophet, would provide the physical and emotional structures through which human beings could make this ascendancy.

  The Formal Church of Mormon was established by Smith in 1830 in New York. Friends and family comprised his first converts. He had such a charismatic personality, he had so much of what appeared to be a divine presence, that Mormonism quickly saw thousands of converts to its fold. Even sworn enemies of Mormonism from other religions were left stunned by the power of his presence and the authority with which he spoke.

  Feeling hostility to his growing power, Smith moved his people west, to Kirtland Mills, Ohio. There, he hoped the Mormons could thrive and erect their Kingdom of God on earth. The “saints,” as Smith’s converts referred to themselves, soon found themselves in 1837 in the middle of a nightmare. The banking collapse that year caused their settlement in Kirtland Mills to falter. Rumors had spread that all Mormons endorsed polygamy; some did. Once again, the endemic hostility of outsiders to what was different—and the saints were—forced Smith to move his flock westward yet again.

  This time they settled in Missouri for all of one year before Missouri’s governor, fearful of what he perceived as the saints’ barbarous religious and marital practices, condemned them by executive order to leave the state. At first, the Mormons hesitated but changed their minds rather hastily after armed men surrounded the Mormon stronghold in Far West, Missouri, and “demanded” they leave.

  The Mormons fled east and established the city of Nauvoo on the Mississippi River near Quincy, Illinois, in 1839. Five years later, in 1844, the city had grown to ten thousand inhabitants. Mormon missionaries had been sent out by Smith around the world, and they had made another twenty-five thousand converts.

  All this explosive growth in the religion was threatening to the Mormons’ Gentile neighbors. The latter, aware of the polygamy among the saints, detested them. It didn’t help when Smith announced that he was running for the presidency of the United States.

  In response, a newspaper in Carthage,
Illinois, ran an expose of the Mormons’ practice of polygamy. Incensed at the article, Smith attempted to destroy the newspaper’s office but was arrested and charged with incitement to riot. Before he could be tried, a mob overpowered his jailers, broke into his cell, and murdered him.

  Suddenly, the saints were at a crossroads. Should they stay, or flee once again?

  Most of them followed the banner of Brigham Young. As president of the church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, he claimed he was Smith’s successor. He became leader just in time to face the ire of the president of the United States, James Polk. Polk thought the Mormons aberrant and a threat to the westward expansion of the United States. If they tried to cross the Rocky Mountains, he intended to intercept them by force.

  Young was a much better politician than Smith. He sent letters to Senator Stephen A. Douglas—who would later lock up in a series of debates with an Illinois barrister named Lincoln—and other influential members of Congress. He tried to persuade them that the Mormons were peaceable, that they were not a threat in any way to the United States, and that they were good citizens. In fact, Young had already made the decision for the Mormons to journey farther west, beyond the Rockies, but he now knew he needed government sanction to do it.

  When the United States entered the Mexican-American War in 1846, President Polk made plans for an invasion of California. The overtures of Young with Douglas and the others now paid off. Ever mindful that his Army of the West was too undermanned to attempt an invasion of California, Polk chose to put his prejudices aside. He issued an executive order establishing that a military battalion of the U.S. Army be raised from the Mormons. Young saw this as a practical opportunity to expand west with the sanction of the U.S. government.

  “The enlistment of the Mormon Battalion in the service of the United States, though looked upon by many with astonishment and some with fear, has proved a great blessing to this community. It was indeed the temporal salvation of our camp,” he said.

  Thus was born the Mormon Battalion: five hundred men, thirty-four women, and fifty-one children. To assist General Stephen Watts Kearney in California’s conquest from the Mexicans, the Mormons’ job was to march through New Mexico, Arizona, and California, following the route taken by sixteenth-century explorers across the Chihuahuan, Sonoran, and California deserts. The intent was to rendezvous with General Kearney in San Diego.

  Before they left, Brigham Young told the Mormon Battalion:

  “Brethren, you will be blessed, if you will live for those blessings which you have been taught to live for. The Mormon Battalion will be held in honorable remembrance to the latest generation; and I will prophesy that the children of those who have been in the army, in defense of their country, will grow up and bless their fathers for what they did at that time. And men and nations will rise up and bless the men who went in that Battalion.

  “These are my feelings in brief respecting the company of men known as the Mormon Battalion. When you consider the blessings that are laid upon you, will you not live for them? As the Lord lives, if you will but live up to your privileges, you will never be forgotten, without end, but you will be held in honorable remembrance, for ever and ever.”

  Among the battalion that day listening to Young’s speech were many men destined to build Sutter’s Mill. The Mormon trek west began in July 1846 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, with twenty-five army wagons and twelve privately owned wagons. They literally blazed the southern trail that many of the subsequent argonauts bound for northern California’s gold fields would take.

  Six months later they reached San Diego, thus becoming the first group in American history to take wagons west across the desert. Melissa Burton Couray, a member of the Mormon Battalion, later described the battalion’s arrival at Palm Spring, just southeast of Vallecito in the Anza-Borrego region:

  “January 18, 1847. The men were so used up from thirst, fatigue, and hunger [after crossing the desert from the Colorado River at present-day Yuma] there was no talking. Some could not speak at all; tongues were swollen and dark. Sixteen more mules gave out.

  “Each man was down to his last four ounces of flour; there had been no sugar or coffee for weeks. Only five government wagons and three private wagons remained.… When they arrived at Vallecito Creek, they rested and washed clothes and cleaned their guns. An Indian from a nearby village brought a letter from the Alcalde in San Diego welcoming the Battalion to California. In the early evening there was singing and fiddling with a little dancing.”

  On January 29, 1847, the Mormon Battalion reached San Diego.

  “Traveling in sight of the ocean, the clear bright sunshine, with the mildness of the atmosphere, combined to increase the enjoyment of the scene before us.… The birds sang sweetly and all nature seemed to smile and join in praise to the Giver of all good; but the crowning satisfaction of all to us was that we had succeeded in making the great national highway across the American desert, nearly filled our mission, and hoped soon to join our families and the Saints, for whom, as well as our country, we were living martyrs,” wrote Daniel Tyler, a battalion member.

  Almost a year to the day before gold was discovered, Mormons discovered their El Dorado there on the California coast. Some members of the battalion were assigned to garrison duty in San Diego, San Luis Rey, and Los Angeles, but only temporarily. The members of the Mormon Battalion, who had enlisted for exactly one year, were mustered out of the U.S. Army on July 16, 1847. Eighty-one men reenlisted and served an additional eight months of military duty under Captain Daniel C. Davis in Company A of the Mormon Volunteers.

  The majority of the soldiers migrated to the Salt Lake Valley and were reunited with their pioneering families. Some of those who didn’t, found work in Sutter’s Fort. Marshall subsequently hired them to help him set up the sawmill. After his gold find, when Marshall traveled to Sutter’s Fort in late January 1847, the mill was still not in full operation. It wouldn’t be until the tailrace was deepened. With Marshall gone, the workers continued to work on the race, but still found time to do a little prospecting of their own.

  Since the tailrace was where Marshall had made his discovery, the workers concentrated their efforts in that vicinity. Pocketknives and butcher knives were used to extract the gold particles and separate them. During the first week after the discovery, Marshall’s men succeeded in picking up approximately $100 worth of gold.

  If gold was only limited to that one spot where Marshall had made his discovery, it really wouldn’t be much of a discovery at all. For there to be a “gold rush,” gold needed to be discovered in another location. The more the locations of the discovery of the precious metal, the more the opportunity to get rich. On Sunday, February 6, only thirteen days after Marshall’s discovery, his men Bigler and Barger decided to strike out to the other side of the river.

  Searching for gold in the seams and cracks of the granite outcrops that lined the riverbanks, they found what looked like a gold nugget. They jury-rigged a pair of wooden scales to assist them in estimating the value of their find. Using a 12-cent piece of silver as a counterweight, equal to $2.00 in gold, they estimated they had found $10 worth.

  An enterprising individual, Bigler had a hunch. Believing that gold might also be discovered farther downstream, he borrowed a gun and said he was going hunting for ducks. About half a mile below the mill and out of sight of his fellows, he noticed an outcropping on the other side of the river, similar to what had been found in the bottom of the tailrace. Wading across the rushing, cold water, he got to the outcropping and began scraping at a particularly bright yellow spot. What he took out was later estimated to be worth $1.50.

  So far, the actual yield of the “discoveries” was not even worth mentioning monetarily, except it was happening. Gold was being discovered by eye—that is how plentiful it appeared to be. Who knew what lay below the surface, what fortunes there were to be mined out of the rock and earth and water?

  Bigler returned without telling anyone what he was doin
g. On February 22, Washington’s birthday and a national holiday, Bigler, using his hunting excuse again, began his trip downstream to his “digs.” This time, though, the water level was up and with it the rapids; he had difficulty struggling against the current to cross. But he made it, barely, to the other side, and collapsed, exhausted.

  As night settled in, Bigler tried to build a fire to keep warm. He figured to use his gun’s primer to spark the fire to life. But the primer had gotten wet. He tried flint and steel to start the fire but that didn’t work either, because his hands were shaking so much from the cold, he couldn’t get a good strike of the steel on the flint.

  “Jumping up and down and dancing over rocks in my misery,” Bigler would later write, “I saw every now and then a yellow piece staring me in the face, but was too cold to stop and pick them up.” When he felt warmer, he went to work on the rocks with his pocketknife.

  Searching closely in the sand near the river, Bigler found a round nugget shaped like a bullet, which was worth about $6.00. This excited him so much that he crouched for several hours looking for more. He picked up several smaller pieces, but when he arose to his full length, he cried out from the pain caused by his cramped muscles, which made him feel as if his back were broken.

  After a few minutes of standing and stretching, the agony wore off. Night descended quickly and Bigler made his way back upriver to the dam, where the water was diverted to the sawmill. He called for Brown, who soon crossed the river on a log raft and thus ferried him across to the far bank. At Bigler’s cabin that night, his friends questioned him about his hunting and the “reason for his lateness.”

  He had been acting suspiciously, and they wanted to know what was up. Bigler’s answer was to ask for the wooden scales. Pulling up one corner of his shirt, which he had used to tie up his gold, he weighed his findings before the fixed stare of the others. In all, Bigler’s gold amounted to $33 worth. He had found it in a few hours. Bigler’s usual rate of pay was about one dollar per day. In one day he had found his month’s pay!