“To-morrow,” thought he, “we will commence sawing, and put things through as fast as possible. The men are waiting, we have plenty of trees down, there is nothing to hinder;” but at that moment as he walked beside the bed of the tail race he saw some glittering yellow particles among its sands. He stopped and picked one up. The golden touch had come.
The following is Marshall’s own description as published in the Century Magazine (Vol. 41). “It made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold. Yet it did not seem to be of the right color; all the gold coin I had seen was of a reddish tinge; this looked more like brass. I recalled to mind all the metals I had seen or heard of, but I could find none that resembled this. Suddenly the idea flashed across my mind that it might be iron pyrites. I trembled to think of it.”
Finally, to make sure, Marshall, like Juan Lopez, mounted his horse and rode away to find some one with more knowledge than himself. That some one was Captain Sutter, who looked in his encyclopedia, probably the only one in the territory at that time, and by comparing the weight of the metal with the weight of an equal bulk of water found its specific gravity, which proved it to be gold. Still Sutter thought that he should like better authority. General Sherman, in Memoirs, tells how the news came to Monterey, where, he was the governor’s gay young military secretary:—
“I remember one day, in the spring of 1848, that two men, Americans, came into the office and inquired for the Governor. I asked their business, and one answered that they had just come down from Captain Sutter on special business and they wanted to see Governor Mason in person. I took them in to the colonel and left them together. After some time the colonel came to his door and called to me. I went in and my attention was directed to a series of papers unfolded on his table, in which lay about half an ounce of placer gold.
“Mason said tome, ‘What is that?’ I touched it and examined one or two of the larger pieces and asked, ‘Is it gold?’ I said that if that were gold it could be easily tested, first by its malleability and next by acids. I took a piece in my teeth and the metallic lustre was perfect. I then called to the clerk, Baden, to bring in an ax and hatchet from the backyard. When these were brought, I took the largest piece and beat it out flat, and beyond doubt it was metal and a pure metal. Still we attached little importance to the fact, for gold was known to exist at San Fernando at the south and yet was not considered of much value.”
About this time some of the business men who had settled in the little town of Yerba Buena, finding that all ships that entered the harbor were sent by their owners not to Yerba Buena, of which they knew nothing, but to San Francisco, persuaded the town council to change the name of the settlement from Yerba Buena to San Francisco, which was already the name of the mission and presidio.
“Gold! Gold!! Gold!!! from the American River,” cried a horseman from the mines, riding down Market Street, waving his hat in one hand, a bottle of gold dust in the other.
When words like these dropped from the lips of a messenger in any of the little communities, the result was like a powerful explosion. Everybody scattered, not wounded and dying, however, but full of life, ready to endure anything, risk anything, for the sake of finding the precious metal which enables its owner to have for himself and those he loves the comfortable and beautiful things of the world.
The result at San Francisco is thus described in one of its newspapers of 1848: “Stores are closed, places of business vacated, a number of houses tenantless, mechanical labor suspended or given up entirely, nowhere the pleasant hum of industry salutes the ear as of late; but as if a curse had arrested our onward course of enterprise, everything wears a desolate, sombre look. All through the Sundays the little church on the plaza is silent. All through the week the door of the alcalde’s office remains locked. As for the shipping, it is left at anchor; first sailors, then officers departing for the mines.”
And how was it at the logging camp where Marshall made his great discovery? The new sawmill, built with such high hopes, was soon silent and deserted. No more logs were cut, and no lumber hauled down for the flour mill. There were no men to be found who were willing to cut and saw logs, build mills, or put in the spring wheat when they might be finding their fortunes at the mines.