Fully five hundred and fifty miles of that journey was made without seeing a house, or a white woman or child. There were many Indians and their ranches, but the savages gave us no particular trouble. We pressed forward till August 26, when we came to the American River, two miles above Sutter's Fort and about a mile and a half from the Sacramento River, at the point where the city of Sacramento now stands. The locality was then a forest of cottonwood timber and undergrowth.
When we reached the vicinity of Sutter's Fort a consultation was held, at which it was decided that most of the party would remain until next year, and obtain employment where they could. Captain John A. Sutter and James Marshall contemplated building a gristmill and also a sawmill, but had no skilled workmen to perform the task. Accordingly, a committee was appointed from our number, who informed Captain Sutter that we had among us carpenters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, millwrights, farmers and common laborers; that we were in need of horses, cattle, and a general outfit for crossing the mountains early the next summer, and that if we could not get all money for our pay we would take part in supplies for our journey; the committee also inquired what the prospect for employment was. Captain Sutter gave the committee encouragement, and asked them to call on him again in two or three days.
The result was, that between August 29 and September 5, from forty to sixty of us called on Captain Sutter. Some were employed to work on the gristmill; others took contracts on the mill race. The race was seven or eight miles long, and was also intended for irrigation.
Between the 8th and the 11th of September, Alexander Stephens, James Berger and the writer started for the site that had been selected by Mr. Marshall for the sawmill; we were the first Mormons to arrive at the place. Peter L. Wimmer and family and William Scott had preceded us a few days, having two wagons loaded with tools and provisions; the teams were oxen, and were driven by two of Captain Sutter's civilized Indians. Some weeks after we went up, Henry W. Bigler, Azariah Smith, William Johnston, and Israel Evans, members of the Mormon Battalion, came to the camp.
Upon our arrival at the millsite, work was begun in earnest. The cabin was finished, a second room being put on in true frontier style. While some worked on the cabin, others were getting out timbers and preparing for the erection of the sawmill. The site was at a point where the river made considerable of a bend, just in the bank of what appeared to be an old river bed, which was lowered to carry the water from the mill.
Between January 15th and 20th, 1848, the mill was started up. It was found that it had been set too low, and the tail race would not carry off the water, which would drown or kill the flutter wheel. To remedy this defect, several new pieces of timber were needed, and all hands were put to work within ten or fifteen rods of the tail race, getting out the timbers.
Part of the time I was engaged in directing the labors of a gang of Digger Indians, as I had picked up sufficient of their dialect to make them understand me clearly. It had been customary to hoist the gates of the forebay when we quit work in the evening, letting the water through the race to wash away the loosened sand and gravel, then close them down in the morning. The Indians were employed to dig and cast out the cable rock that was not moved by the water.
On January 23, I had turned away from the Indians and was with the white men. Mr. Marshall came along to look over the work in general, and went to where the tail race entered the river. There he discovered a bed of rock that had been exposed by the water the night before, the portion in view in the bottom of the race being three to six feet wide and fifteen to twenty feet long. Mr. Marshall called me to him as he examined the bed of the race, and said: "This is a curious rock; I am afraid it will give us trouble." Then he probed a little further, and added: "I believe it contains minerals of some kind, and I believe there is gold in these hills."
At this statement I inquired, "What makes you think so?" He answered that he had seen blossom of gold, and upon my asking where, he said it was the white quartz scattered over the hills; on my inquiring further as to what quartz was, he told me it was the white, flint-like rock so plentiful on the hills. I said it was flint rock, but he said no, it was called quartz in some book he had read, and was an indication of gold. He sent me to the cabin for a pan to wash the sand and gravel, and see what we could find. I went to a cabin which had been built near the millsite by Alexander Stephens, Henry W. Bigler, James Berger, Azariah Smith, William Johnston and myself, and in which we were doing our own cooking. I brought the pan and we washed some of the bedrock that we had scaled up with a pick. As we had no idea of the appearance of gold in its natural state, our search was unsuccessful.
Mr. Marshall was determined to investigate further, but it was no use that night. He rose and said: "We will hoist the gates and turn in all the water that we can tonight, and tomorrow morning we will shut it off and come down here, and I believe we will find gold or some other mineral here."