Gordon Young

“ Marshall himself not only discovered gold at Coloma, but at Placerville, one of the richest of all the diggings; and he was, or claimed to be, responsible for the discovery of gold in Australia. A man named Hargraves came to Marshall's sawmill one day for lumber, and being down on his luck, cursed California bitterly.
"See here, my friend, " said Marshall, half amused, "if you don't like this country, why do you come here? Nobody invited you. Nobody will cry if you take yourself off. Go home and dig for gold. ”

“ The emigrants piled up in a restless, gambling, quarreling mob at Panama, with every man eager for the steamers that came infrequently, and which when they did come could not begin to carry all the passengers that held tickets. Many, impatient to reach California before all the nuggets were picked over, put to sea in small boats. Others turned back, disgusted and homesick, toward the States. Great numbers, their money exhausted by the expenses and pleasures of Panama, were stranded and could neither go on nor turn back. Like flies in winter, men died ”

“ A small boy washed out fourteen pounds of gold in two days.
"What surprises me, " said Captain Sutter, "is that this country should have been visited by so many scientific men, and that not one of them should ever have stumbled upon these treasures, that tribes of Indians have dwelt in it for centuries, and yet this gold should never have been discovered. I myself have passed the very spot above a hundred times during the last ten years, but was just as blind as the rest of them." ”

“ Women, beautiful and wanton, opened houses of carnival. Women, pretty as the proprietors could hire, whatever the wage, tended bar and lured men into the throbbing uncertain ties of monte.
In a city where lonely men trampled one another's feet for standing room, a woman was a woman ”

“ Indians, Germans, Englishmen, Jews. Every type and creed and race and caste and class: lawyers, merchants, teamsters, soldiers, sailors, judges, men who had served in Congress, preachers—some of whom turned card gamblers and bartenders while others worked as laborers or preached like prophets in the very door ways of gambling houses.
There were men who knew their classics as a gambler knows his cards that shined the boots of other men. In this topsy-turvy land where each scrambled for what he could get, scholars turned laborers and ditch-diggers became capitalists. ”

“ It came at a time when farm hands in the Eastern States thought themselves well paid with $12 a month for work from daylight to dark; when $1 a day was a good wage for a laborer; when $2, 000, a year was a fine salary or business profit; when the man worth $10, 000 was well off, the man with $30, 000 rich. The news, confirmed by official reports and letters, told of a land, free to all comers, where any man, with only pick, shovel and pan, could gather gold, pure gold, by the handful. ”

“ Property often changed hands twice a day, and in three years the city was burned five times.
Each time thousands of men were ruined, but the smoldering wreckage was trampled out by other men busily rebuilding their city, larger and more splendidly. ”

“ The real wealth of California was unsuspected; the United States made hardly more than a trivial show of force and won the territory. From one small part of this territory during the next fifteen years a billion dollars worth of gold was taken, and into it emigrants came by the thousands and hundreds of thousands.
Captain Sutter and Marshall had planned with their men to keep the discovery a secret. ”

“ But mostly all men were in moods of rollicking good nature. A lucky miner would shake the last dust from his pouch to hire a band to play while he called up a crowd around a barrel of whisky set out in the street for all comers to drink his health. ”

“ Marshall was twice nearly lynched by miners who thought he knew where more gold could be found and would not tell them, for he pretended to knowledge he did not have. He found gold hard to get for himself and heavy to hold. He lived poorly and, forty years later, died in poverty alone in a cabin at Coloma ”

“ Flour was sometimes a dollar a pound, and at other times flour, two hundred-pound sacks of it, was dumped into the mudholes to improve the street, along with kitchen stoves, and bales of tea, or whatever else happened to be heavy on the market. A sidewalk was made from Montgomery street to the mail steamer office with boxes of first-class Virginia tobacco, containing one hundred pounds each, that was soon worth seventy-five cents a pound. Tobacco was at one time found to be the cheapest material for the foundation of small buildings. ”

“ Every class and caste from every nationality, almost from every locality, was represented in the pell-mell rush that came trampling across the plains, and in the ships where people were jammed and crammed, often on short rations, usually sleeping on planks for berths, or the deck itself. ”

“ There were no hotels en route; there was little food, ex cepting such as emigrants carried with them. Men slept in wet blankets on the wet ground and died like sick dogs. Those that lived did not always pause to bury the dead. ”

“ Men abandoned farms, stores, families, and started for the mines. Long emigrant trains, heading for Oregon where great tracts were offered to settlers, abruptly turned southward, The famed exodus of '49 almost depopulated many towns and counties from Missouri eastward. ”