Sutter was sorry at the discovery, foreseeing that it threatened an interruption to all his established enterprises. Sutter, in fact, never realized any gain from the gold thus found by his own employes upon his own premises. All the current and direction of his life was suddenly broken and he lacked the foresight or alertness to adjust himself to new conditions. His employes everywhere deserted him in order to enter the mines. Titles to his lands, then in dispute, were lost through adverse decisions and he was finally reduced to want. His old age was at last made comfortable through a pension of $250 a month granted by the State of California.
[105] Samuel Brannon was a native of Maine. In his youth he had edited Mormon journals and became an elder of that church. In 1846 he went to California with a shipload of Mormons, mostly converts made in the East, intending to found a colony. But his plans were interfered with. The country had already been proclaimed United States territory. San Francisco became, however, for a time very largely a Mormon town. Brannon founded a newspaper in San Francisco and preached Mormonism on Sundays. With the finding of gold his community was disbanded. He had quarreled with Brigham Young and other Utah Mormons and was denounced as an apostate from the faith. Becoming the owner of large tracts of land in San Francisco and Sacramento he exerted an influence in the development of those towns and acquired large wealth. When the Civil War broke out he was rated the richest man in California, but his wife sued him for divorce and obtained a verdict which deprived him of one-half of his estate. From this blow he never recovered. During the struggle of Mexico against Maximillian, he aided that country with money and supplies for which he afterwards received a grant of land in the Province of Sonora. He attempted to colonize the province but the scheme failed and eventually he lost all his property. Brannon was born in 1819 and died in 1889 at Mazatlan, in abject poverty.
[106] In August, 1849, the rents of single building in Sacramento reached $5,000 a month, and certain lots were valued at $30,000 each.
[107] Mr. Gillespie, the writer of an article in the Century California series says: “Men pocketed their pride in California in those days. I met in the mines lawyers and physicians in good standing at home who were acting as barkeepers, waiters, hostlers and teamsters. An ex-Judge of Oyer and Terminer was driving an ox-team from Colona to Sacramento. One man who had been a State senator and Secretary of State in one of our Western commonwealths was doing a profitable business at manufacturing “cradles,” while an ex-Governor of one of our Southwestern states played the fiddle in a gambling saloon. These things were hardly remarked.”
[108] Sutter’s Mill was torn down in 1856.
[109] Wagons and teams used for transportation often involved large outlays. A wagon cost from $800 to $1,500—a capacious affair with boxes six feet deep and seventeen feet long. For a double harness from $300 to $600 were paid. Mules were in common use and a pair was valued at from $500 to $1,000. On mountain roads six pairs were needed for each wagon. A complete outfit, therefore, represented a cost of between $4,000 and $8,000.
[110] Of the exact location, Dr. Halsey, in a letter to his wife written from “Big Bar on the Middle Fork of the American River” on August 5th, 1849, says: “We were about fifteen miles (in a straight line; thirty by the road) north of Sutter’s Mill where gold was first found.” Bancroft refers to the richness of diggings in that locality and mentions the Big Bar as one place of note. He says the Middle Fork was esteemed the richest river for a regular yield in California with more bars of gold than any other, several of which were said to have produced from $1,000,000 to $3,000,000 each. In the summer of 1848, “one Hudson obtained some $20,000 in six weeks from a canyon between Coloma and the American Middle Fork, while a boy named Davenport found in the same place seventy-seven ounces of pure gold one day and ninety ounces the next.” John Sinclair, at the junction of the North and Middle branches, “displayed fourteen pounds of gold as the result of one week’s work with fifty Indians, using closely woven willow baskets.” He secured $16,000 in five weeks. One bar alone on the Middle Fork yielded over $1,000,000, and yet in spite of these figures “the unfortunate far outnumbered the successful.”
[111] “Last Saturday,” wrote Dr. Halsey to his wife from the Big Bar on September 18th, “we divided what we had dug and my share was a fraction over fifty-one ounces, which at $20 per the ounce amounts to $1,020. This gives me just $11.50 for every day I have been in the mines, clear of all expenses, and I know we have worked as hard as any other company.”
[112] In a letter written during his last illness, in reply to inquiries from me, Dr. Halsey said: “There was a place below us, and as I supposed near the confluence of the stream with the other branch called Spanish Bar. I am inclined to think the place now known as Murderer’s Bar is the same. Where we were, on the Big Bar of the Middle Fork, was supposed to be about ten miles above the junction with the North Fork.”
[113] Of the first steamer on this river, Bancroft says: “On the 15th of August, 1849, a scow was launched and two days later the George Washington, the first river steamboat of California arrived from Benecia. In September the Sacramento was launched a mile above the town, and shortly after arrived another of the same name, of scow build, which sold for $40,000.”