"I believe it's gold!"
"I wonder if that's possible," said Marshall, beginning to think his companion was right; "how can we find out?"
"My wife can tell; she has made some lye from wood-ashes and will test it."
GOLD WASHING—THE CRADLE.
The man took the fragment to his wife, who was busy washing, and, at his request, she boiled it for several hours with the lye. Had it been brass—the only other metal it possibly could have been—it would have turned a greenish-black. When examined again, however, its beautiful bright lustre was undiminished. There was scarcely a doubt that it was pure gold.
The two men returned to the mill-race with pans, and washed out probably fifty dollars' worth of gold. Despite the certainty of his friend, Marshall was troubled by a fear that the fragment was neither brass nor gold, but some worthless metal of which he knew nothing. He carefully tied up all that had been gathered, mounted a fleet horse, and rode to Sutter's store, thirty miles down the American River.
Here he took Colonel Sutter into a private room and showed him what he had found, saying that he believed it to be gold. Sutter read up the account of gold in an encyclopedia, tested the substance with aqua fortis, weighed it, and decided that Marshall was right, and that the material he had found was undoubtedly gold.
It was a momentous discovery, repeated nearly a half-century later, when the same metal was found in enormous quantities in the Klondike region. Colonel Sutter and his companions tried to keep the matter a secret, but it was impossible. Marshall, being first on the ground, enriched himself, but by bad management lost all he had gained and died a poor man. Colonel Sutter tried to keep intruders off his property, but they came like the swarms of locusts that plagued Egypt. They literally overran him, and when he died, in 1880, he was without any means whatever; but California has since erected a handsome statue to his memory.