This was the last battle in the territory. The Californians retreated across the hills to the present site of Pasadena. Here, at the little adobe house on the banks of the Arroyo Seco, they separated. General Flores, their commander, was to ride with his staff through the stormy night, down El Camino Real toward Mexico. General Andres Pico, upon whom devolved the duty of surrender, was to ride with his associates to the old Cahuenga ranch house, the first station on the highway from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. There he met Captain Fremont, and the treaty was signed which closed hostilities. The terms proposed by Fremont were favorable for the Californians and did much to make way for a peaceful settlement of all difficulties.
Chapter VII. — At the Touch of King Midas
It was by chance that gold was discovered in both northern and southern California, and by chance that many great fortunes were made.
Juan Lopez, foreman of the little ranch of St. Francis in Los Angeles County, one morning in March, 1842, while idly digging up a wild onion, or brodecia, discovered what he thought lumps of gold clinging to its roots. Taking samples of the metal, he rode down to Los Angeles to the office of Don Abel Stearns, who recognized it as gold.
Soon Juan and his companions were busy digging and washing the earth and sands in the region where the little wild flowers grew. These mines were called “placer,” from a Spanish word meaning loose or moving about, because the metal was loosely mixed with sand and gravel, generally in the bed of a stream or in a ravine where there had once been a flow of water which had brought the gold down from its home in the mountains.
From these mines Don Abel Stearns sent, in a sailing vessel round Cape Horn, the first parcel of California gold dust ever received at the United States mint, and it proved to be of very good quality.
The San Fernando mines, as they were called, because they were on a ranch that had once belonged to San Fernando mission, yielded many thousand dollars’ worth of gold dust. It is on record that one firm in Los Angeles, which handled most of the gold from these and other mines of southern California, paid out in the course of twenty years over two million dollars for southern gold.
The true golden touch, however, was to come in a different part of the territory among people of another race and tongue. It was to transform California from an almost unknown land with slight and scattered population to a community so rich as to disturb the money markets of the world; a community sheltering a great host of people, all young, all striving eagerly for the fortunes they had traveled thousands of miles to find.