176 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



January, 1848. Americans had begun coming into California several 

 years previously and a colony was already established near where Sac- 

 ramento now stands. Marshall was constructing a saw mill some forty 

 miles distant on the west slope of the Sierra Nevada and on the south 

 fork of the American Eiver, which is a tributary of the Sacramento 

 Eiver. He observed some glistening particles in the gravel washed by 

 the waters of the mill, and at once identified them as gold. A few days 

 later he went down to the settlement on the Sacramento Eiver to tell 

 of his discovery to Colonel Sutter, with whom he was associated in the 

 erection of the mill. 



In spite of all efforts to keep the discovery from public notice the 

 news spread ; the people in the neighborhood made further search, and 

 soon found gold to be abundant in many other places. The excitement 

 rapidly increased, and by the summer of 1848 several thousand people 

 were already mining in the neighborhood. San Francisco, then a small 

 village, was almost depopulated in the sudden eiodus for the gold 

 fields. By autumn the news had reached the eastern states and foreign 

 countries, and history has never before or since recorded such a mad 

 rush of different races of people to a common center, overcoming diffi- 

 culties that would have been considered almost insurmountable had it 

 not been for the idea of gold, limitless gold, lying there in the ground 

 to be dug up by the first who came. Among the earliest to arrive from 

 the outside were Mexicans, Peruvians, Chileans and Chinese, as they 

 could reach the region quickly by sea; but the great tide of immigra- 

 tion that soon came from the eastern states, around Cape Horn, across 

 the Isthmus of Panama and over the emigrant trail, soon placed the 

 Americans in the majority, and by the end of 1849, there were nearly 

 100,000 miners on the ground. Thousands of others died on the way, 

 from exposure and starvation, from heat and thirst in the desert, from 

 attacks by the Indians and from cholera, which killed many along the 

 trail in 1849. 



In the meantime one discovery of gold rapidly followed another in 

 the gravels of the many rivers and creeks that run down the west slope 

 of the Sierra Nevada, and miners were soon working for over 150 miles 

 along the mountains. Since then the range of the gold discoveries has 

 spread over wider limits, reaching from the northern to the southern 

 boundary of the state, but the larger part has come from the region 

 worked in the early days, extending from Mariposa County on the 

 south to the Feather Eiver on the north. Fortunes were made quickly 

 and lost with equal facility, but in the meantime a new region was 

 being developed with wonderful rapidity and the western progress of 

 the United States had, as if by a single jump, been advanced over 

 fifteen hundred miles, from the Missouri Eiver to the Pacific Ocean. 

 Throughout the world, the discoveries in California stimulated interest 



