As I have told you, gold was mined spasmodically in California much more than two centuries ago, and steadily mined for more than a decade before the “great discovery” which was to change the face of an empire and bring about what was in many ways the most remarkable migration in the whole history of the human race. But these early diggings of the precious metal made little stir. The swarthy miners delved away quietly, exchanged their glittering “dust” for rough food and other rude necessaries, and made no noise. They were very much out of the world. The telegraph, the railroad and the printing press were far from touch with them. There were a few “Americans” in California, and even one or two newspapers, but neither paid attention to the occasional rumors of gold, save to ridicule them.

But on the ninth day of February, 1848, a little girl held in her unknowing hand the key of the West—the wee yellow seed which was to spring into one of the most wondrous plants in history. On the American fork of the Sacramento river, in what is now El Dorado county, Cal., stood a shabby little mill, owned by an American named Sutter. (Californians, by the way, pronounce the name “Soo´-ter.”) The mill race became broken, and three men were hired to repair it. Two were Mormons, and the third, the overseer, was named Marshall. As the men worked, Marshall’s little daughter played about them—dreaming as little as did her elders that she was to upset a continent.

A yellow pebble in an angle of the sluice caught her eye, and picking the pretty trifle from the wet sand, she ran to her father with, “Papa! see the pitty stone.” It was indeed a pretty stone, and Marshall at once suspected its value. Tests proved that he was right, and gold was really found. The discovery made some little noise among the few Americans in that lonely, far land, but nothing was known of it to the world until Rev. C. S. Lyman, who saw some of the nuggets which further search yielded, wrote a letter to the American Journal of Science, in March, 1848. As soon as the news was in type, it spread swiftly to the four ends of the earth, and already by August of the same year four thousand excited men were tearing up the sands of the American Fork, and coaxing them to yield their golden secrets. And well they succeeded, for every day saw from $30,000 to $50,000 worth of gold washed out and transferred to rude safes of bottles or buckskin sacks. How long and high that gold fever raged; how it patted the fearful intervening desert with the weary footprints of tens of thousands of modern Jasons; how it brought around the Horn a thousand heavy ships for every one that sailed before; how it overturned and created anew the money markets of the world; how it turned a vast wilderness into the garden of the world, and pulled the Union a thousand miles over to the West, and caused the building of such enormous railway lines as mankind had never faintly dreamed of, and did a thousand other wonders, you already know—for it has made literature as well as history. Our national history is crowded with great achievements, but its chief romance was—

“The days of old,

The days of gold,

The days of ’49.”

California produced $5,000,000 gold in 1848, and crazed the civilized world. The output grew to $60,000,000 by 1852. To-day the state yields between eleven and twelve million dollars’ worth of gold a year, and it creates no excitement whatever; for its people are more occupied with mining the safer gold of agriculture.

Of late years South Africa has entered the field as one of the great gold countries. Its annual “crop” is over forty millions. There is a possibility that hereafter Alaska will have to be added to the list. This summer of 1897 between $3,000,000 and $4,000,000 in “dust” and small nuggets came out of the region generally and loosely called “The Klondike.” I saw in the San Francisco mint 152,000 ounces the returning miners poured out from their buckskin bags. Over 3,000 people left California under the excitement caused by the exhibition of these treasures, in a “gold-rush” which recalled the old days, by its fever and its follies; but the Klondike rush will probably be remembered, whatever its results in gold, as the most disastrous in history. Instead of the mild climates of California, Australia and South Africa (and thousands lost health and life even there) the gold seekers upon the Klondike will have to do with the cruel winters and inhospitable wildernesses of a land almost under the Arctic Circle.

Of the various methods of liberating our Yellow Slave from the hard clutches of the earth it would be too long to speak in detail here; but they are broadly divided into two classes, according to the surroundings of the gold itself. Free or “placer” gold—which was for centuries the first known to mankind, and which was the sort that started the great “fever” in California and Australia—is found in beds of sand and gravel, generally the present or former bed of a stream. It is extracted—this precious needle from an enormous and worthless haystack—by means of its own weight; water being applied in various manners to give that weight a chance to assert itself. The mixed gravel is given up to the mercies of running water, which wets it through, and causes its heaviest parts to sink to the bottom, where they are held by artificial obstacles, while the lighter particles of sand are swept away by the natural or artificial current. In this manner the vast mass of soil is water-sifted until but little is left; and from that little it is easy to hunt out the coy yellow grains.

The placer gold was not formed in the gravel banks where it is found, but came there by the death of its mother rock. All gold began in “veins” in the earth’s rocky ribs; but Time, with his patient hammers of wind and rain and frost, has pounded vast areas of these rocks to sand; and the gold, broken from great bands to lumps, has drifted with the bones of the mountains into the later heaps of gravel.