"The first was in North Carolina. A young chap, Conrad Reed, was shootin' fish with a bow and arrow in Meadow Creek. He saw in the water a good-sized stone with a yellow gleam. Pickin' it up, he found it heavy—seventeen pounds it weighed—an' he reckoned it was some kind o' metal, but he didn't think o' gold. That was in 1799. The stone was used to prop open a stable door for a couple o' years.
"One day, runnin' short o' groceries an' bein' shy o' ready cash, Reed thought he'd go into Fayetteville an' see if, maybe, he could raise a few dollars on the stone, as a curiosity. He took it to a jeweler, who said he thought there might be gold in it, an' told the young fellow to come back in the afternoon.
"When Reed came back, the jeweler showed him a thin wire o' gold, about as long as a lead pencil, an' said that was all the gold in the chunk. He offered Reed $3.50 for the gold an' Reed took it. How much the jeweler kept for himself, no one can't say.
"That started a little local talk, an' one or two men begun prospectin' in a shiftless sort o' way. They found nothin'. In 1813, some placers were found an' there was a mild rush, but it died right out. There was gold there, sure enough, but scattered so's a man didn't earn more'n a day's wages at washin'. Jest the same, all the gold in the United States came from North Carolina for twenty years after that, more'n a hundred thousand dollars' worth bein' sent to the Mint. But that's durn little, when you come to look at it, less'n fourteen dollars a day. An' that's not much for a bunch o' men!"
"No," admitted Owens, "you couldn't start a gold rush on that. And the second strike, Jim?"
"That was the Georgia deposits, at Dahlonega, where Humphrey came from. They're workin' yet, though small potatoes beside Californy an' Colorado.
"Californy was jest about uninhabited, then. There was only fifteen thousand folks in the whole durn State in 1848. Over a hundred thousand more came in the two years followin'. O' that lot, ninety per cent. was prospectors an' the rest was sharks, livin' off 'em. At the time o' the strike, 'Frisco didn't boast a hundred houses wi' white folks in them, an' they didn't know nothin' about Georgia an' Carolina gold.
"On May 8th, though, one o' the mill-hands come down from Sutter's Mill. He'd quit work to try gold-findin' on his own, an' takin' a tip from Humphrey, he'd washed out 23 ounces in four days. A 'Frisco man paid him $500 for his dust, cash down. That was good earnin's for four days.
"Sudden, the fever hit! The news got over the little town like a prairie fire durin' a dry spell. By night, half the town was talkin' gold; next mornin', the other half. Nine out o' every ten men quit work. A pick an' shovel an' a tin pan was worth a hundred dollars before night. One man paid a thousand dollars for an outfit, includin' a tent an' a month's grub. He was found dead half-way to the diggings, murdered for his outfit.
"The more excited ones an' those with the least money an' sense, started right off on foot, though it was all of a hundred an' fifty miles to Sutter's Mill, an' no trail, sixty o' these miles across a desert without water. No one ever did know how many o' that bunch ended up by feedin' the turkey buzzards.