In December 1848, US President James K. Polk made a dramatic announcement, “the accounts of abundance of gold are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service,” officially acknowledging for the first time the presence of gold in California.
What followed this announcement was a frenzy unleashed by thousands of men not only from other parts of US but from all across the globe to rush to California and seek their fortune in digging gold. People left their families, borrowed money, mortgaged their homes, scooped every penny of their life’s savings so that they could go to California seeking the proverbial pot of gold, only that the pot lay hidden deep within the earth and was often elusive.
The famous gold rush had begun in right earnest by January, 1849. They were thus known as the ‘Forty-Niners’, hopeful American speculators joined by competitors from Mexico, Chile, Peru and China. By the end of 1849, the non-native population of California was estimated at 100,000, as compared to about 800 in March of the previous year.
President Polk had invoked a report by California’s military governor in his official acceptance of the positive discovery of gold. The causes for its Presidential acknowledgment is its own story. But what about the man who actually saw Californian gold for the first time? Was he an altruist, happy to offer a share in his spoils for the greater good? Or was he part of a secret operation kept under wraps by some interested entrepreneurs?
James Wilson Marshall was born in New Jersey in 1810. Inheriting being a carpenter and wheelwright, he was a restless lad. By 18, he was away from home, spending time in Kansas and Indiana. In 1844, he joined a wagon train going to California. Arriving in Nueva Helvetia (later to become Sacramento) in 1845, Marshall became an employee and later a partner at a sawmill along the American River at Coloma.
On January 24, 1848, Marshall was routinely checking the course of the mill for any dregs, debris or silt. As he peered through the turgid water, he was intrigued by what he thought to be a shiny, sparkling golden shard. He dismissed the incident initially but better sense prevailed over time. It was to be gold indeed! He was to recall: “It made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold.”
Marshall was by all accounts, an honest man. He took his partner into confidence and together they decided to further the enterprise with as little noise as possible. And then the gold discovery began. Loose tongues, idle boasts and an observable increase in spending proved to be the secret’s undoing. Word got out and newspapers were soon reporting that large quantities of the precious metal had been found at Sutter’s Mill.
An early trickle of get-rich-quick hopefuls turned into a flood and by August, 1848, an estimated four thousand had converged on the area. Three-quarters of the male population of San Francisco had left home to join the hunt for gold.
In a decade since Marshall’s discovery, there were several new millionaires, and the world had changed inalterably and irrevocably. But for Marshall, the man who sighted the first gold, things took a sour turn. Due to some niceties in the agreement, he failed to win legal recognition of his discovered gold claim. His own sawmill failed as his workers and companions abandoned him to chase their own pot of gold. He tried his luck elsewhere, but despite being the first to know, he was tragically too late to exploit, the presence of gold.
He wandered around California, a dejected man, forsaken by a cruel destiny, eventually to settle in a non-descript small cabin where he died in 1885 at the age of 75.
The fabled Gold Rush was almost over by 1858. In its wake, it rewrote the economic history of the United States, and partly the globe. It impacted the social, cultural and political landscape of the country as few other activities had done in the past. A whole new culture, way of life, technology and vocabulary was invented, ingested and integrated in the American life. An additional glorious contribution was to be the richly produced ‘Westerns’ in Hollywood that not only churned money at the box office but set new milestones in cinema entertainment.
But to the man who started it all, who could have had his name written in gold in the history of America, but who ended up dying a pauper in a log cabin somewhere in California, his memory and even grave unmarked and unnoticed, the only legacy the Gold Rush was to leave was a broken heart.
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