We continue exploring the gold country this week, because—as we’re now learning—even though women were few among the miners, they had plenty to say about the 1849 gold rush and the onrushing chaos it created.
Take Coloma, for example. As every California fourth-grader knows, James Marshall started the gold rush when he discovered gold there. He had traveled from John Sutter’s ranch in New Helvetia, today’s Sacramento, up the American River to build a sawmill, to produce much-needed lumber.
By July 1848, 4,000 feverish miners worked the river above and below Sutter & Mill in Coloma. That winter, shiploads of would-be prospectors came looking for the “one thousand millions” in gold—in 1850 dollars, mind you—said to be waiting for them in the Mother Lode. They set sail from the eastern U.S.; stories of
disasters at sea, disease, Indian attacks, and starvation did nothing to slow the flow.
By the summer of 1849, some 10,000 populated Coloma, transforming the tranquil little valley into a gold-seeking ghetto. Just two years later, however, Coloma was “gold-dry” and all but abandoned. Most of Coloma is now part of the 240-acre Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, perfect for enjoying spring wildflowers and fall leaf-peeping. Wandering the abandoned town is worthwhile any time.
As is so often the case, the history of Marshall’s gold find gets complicated. The remembrances of English immigrant Eliza Marshall Gregson, a millworker who was in Coloma at the time with her blacksmith husband, make that clear. Shortly after the Gregsons arrived at the mill, for example, seeking female company Eliza visited Mrs. Wimmer in nearby Diamond Springs, where her new friend showed her “a nugget of pure gold nearly as large as my thumb,” though “there was no gold excitement at that time.” The Wimmers would later claim the nugget was Marshall’s initial find, but historians now say that Mrs. Wimmer herself tested Marshall’s gold find—a flake, not a nugget—by boiling it in her soap kettle; that historic gold is now at the Smithsonian.
Anyway, back to Eliza: “The exact date on which gold was really discovered [at the mill] I am unable to state as it was some time before we could believe that it was real gold,” she later recalled. But it was James Marshall and Mr. Pete Wimmer who spotted those fateful flecks of gold in the mill’s tailrace, though it wasn’t until a mineralogist arrived that the gold find was official. So when “the weather opned (sic) out people began to come into the mines.” Eliza Gregson’s blacksmith husband forged the first prospecting pick, “and afterwards made a good many picks & drills for the miners.”
In no time at all, of course, men halted all work on the mill. “Every thing was gold crazy. [R]un away sailors and solders came into the mines. [M]y mother & two brothers & my sister came to hunt for gold. [M]y sister’s husband had deserated (sic) & she did not know where he was at that time.”
The rest is history—the history of the greatest mass movement of people in the Western Hemisphere, and of California’s instant stature as golden child among the fractured family of American states. Nothing quite like flashing $50 billion in gold, in today’s dollars, to buy some popularity.
Given even Eliza Gregson’s confusion about exactly where and when gold was discovered, it needs to be said that native people knew all about California’s gold.They just didn’t have much use for it, except as decorative doo-dads for this and that. Imagine how shocking it was to witness their Cullumah (“beautiful valley”) and, soon, the entire region, overrun overnight by crazy gold seekers.
