On the 12th of June a straggler wandered into the town with a nugget weighing an ounce, and a few days later a man who had worked for Cotton as a body servant, after being absent for a short time, returned with $2,000 worth of native gold. A rough-looking man who did not appear to have enough about him to buy a loaf of bread, came to Monterey with a sack on his shoulder, from which he shook $15,000 worth of gold-dust. Four citizens of Monterey who had employed some Indians on the Feather River, collected $76,844 worth of gold in seven weeks and three days; a man who had worked sixty-four days on the Yuba River brought back $5,356 in gold; another resident of Monterey, who worked fifty-seven days on the North Fork of the American River, brought back $4,534; a party of fourteen who worked fifty-four days on the Mokelumne River, had $3,467; a woman who had worked with pan and shovel in dry diggings forty-six days cleaned up $2,125. All these incidents did not seem to satisfy either the Governor or the Alcalde, and in order that absolute proof of the truth of the whole matter might be had, it was decided in September that the Alcalde should visit the mines in person, a party of responsible citizens accompanying him. Let us take the trip with them and note what they saw.
As they neared the mines, they met returning gold-hunters, of whom Cotton wrote: “A more forlorn looking group never knocked at the gate of a pauper asylum. Most of them were on foot, with rags tied on their blistered feet.” They asked for bread and meat; Cotton’s party gave them some, supposing that they were giving in charity, and were surprised when one of the party passed out a pound or two of nuggets in payment. Cotton afterwards learned that the ragged travelers had with them over a hundred thousand dollars in virgin gold. On arrival at the mines, the eager Alcalde borrowed a pick, and in five minutes found enough gold to make a seal ring. He found seventy people at work in a small ravine, each of them getting an ounce a day. A sailor whom he had known when he was chaplain on the Savannah had found a nugget that weighed three ounces. He found another man picking at a spot on the canyon side who presently uncovered a pocket from which he took nearly two pounds of nuggets, all shaped like water-melon seeds, and near to this spot, on the following day, he uncovered a pound and a half.
A Welshman whom the Alcalde had a short time before fined for being drunk, and disturbing the peace, met him with a hearty greeting, assuring him that he held no grudge against him, and turning to resume his work, uncovered a nugget that weighed an ounce or more; picking it up, he handed it to Mr. Cotton, saying: “Señor Alcalde, accept that, and when you reach home, have a bracelet made of it for your good lady.” A German picked up a piece weighing three ounces, from the ground in front of Cotton’s tent, and later in the same day Cotton himself took half an ounce from a crevice in a rock. A little girl playing in a ravine near her mother’s tent, picked up a curious-looking stone that proved to be nearly pure gold; it weighed over six pounds. A much larger lump, twenty-three pounds in weight, was later found near by.
Two men invited Cotton to come and see their claim. He found them working in a hole up to their waists in water; they were getting from fifteen to twenty dollars out of every pan they washed, and the day that he was with them they took $1,000 for their day’s work. He found at a place about three miles from his camp a woman working alone. He had known her in San José; she was washing gravel in a wooden bowl, and had averaged an ounce a day for three weeks.
Just before leaving the mines at the end of his stay of six weeks, he found seated on a stone under a tree, in rather a dejected condition, an old man, who bewailed the fact that he had worked for many days and gotten little or nothing, and that he would move to another place. Cotton said to him, “Why not turn over the stone you are sitting on?” He replied, “It ain’t worth while, but I will do it if you say so.” He turned it over, and clearing away a little dirt, found a lot of nuggets that weighed nearly a half a pound.
On the way home, his party overtook another old man with his grandson; they had been in the mines and collected twenty pounds of nuggets, of which they had been robbed, and were poorer than when they began.
Governor Mason also visited the mines, and made a report of his trip to the Adjutant-General of the United States. The report was dated August 17, 1848. With his report he sent two hundred and twenty-eight ounces of nuggets as specimens of the product of the mines. He had visited mines on all the rivers in the gold-bearing territory; his report relates many interesting incidents, among them the following: He was shown a trench about a hundred yards long, four feet wide and three feet deep, from which there had been taken in one week $17,000; a small ravine near to it had yielded $12,000; men were picking gold out of the crevices of the rocks with butcher knives, in pieces weighing from one to six ounces. At Weber’s store in Helvetta, a man had given an ounce and a half of gold worth $24 for a box of seidlitz powders; another man had paid one dollar for a drop of laudanum.
He estimated the whole output of the mines at that time from thirty to fifty thousand dollars a day, and stated that he thought that the mines in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys would easily repay the cost of the late war with Mexico, together with all that the Government had paid for lands ceded. All this gold was being taken from land which now belonged to the Government, and he thought something should be paid for the privilege of mining, but he saw no way to collect it, having but few soldiers, not enough to cover the large territory that was being worked over. He had considerable trouble holding enlisted men to the performance of their duties, so concluded not to make any rules that he could not enforce. The gold-bearing region known at that time was about two hundred miles long, averaging about thirty miles wide.
This report he despatched by special messenger by way of Panama; it reached Washington in time for President Polk to mention the discovery in his message to Congress in December, thus transmitting it to the people. It attracted wide attention, creating great interest everywhere, so that every newspaper in the country, nay, in the world, was daily scanned for news from the California gold diggings.
Enough has been said, and the many instances related will give readers a fair idea of the magnitude and importance of Marshall’s discovery. It will be of interest to add further that from the time of the discovery in 1848 to January 1st, 1903, California had produced $1,379,275,408 in gold. There were two periods of intense excitement, the first ending in 1854. From 1850 to 1853, the greatest yield from washings was probably not less than $65,000,000 a year. The average production per year for the years 1851 to 1854, inclusive, was $75,570,087, reaching $81,294,270 in 1852; this was the banner year, and from 1850 to 1862 the average production was $55,882,861, never falling below $50,000,000.