Coloma, where nothing of note occurred till Sunday, the 11th of March, when Marshall started the sawmill running. The following weck was spent in deepening the fall in the tail-race; but on Sunday all went gold-digging, when Bigler secured two ounces. About this time Bigler took charge of the Indians, teaching them to saw and chop wood. Though anxious enough to learn, they were extremely awkward, and were continually hurting or cutting themselves. He worked in this manner until Friday, the 7th of April, when he, Stevens, and Brown, started for the fort to have a settlement with Sutter, and to tell him. that they wished to leave for Salt Lake. On the evening of the next day they arrived at the flouringmill, and found the place well-nigh deserted. They were told that Willis and Hudson, with others, were up the river getting gold. Bigler stayed over Sunday at the flouring-mill to make arrangements as to what they should buy of Sutter for their intended journey. Those present agreed to send in advance a few men to pioneer a route across the Sierra, the main body to be in readiness to start in the beginning of June, with the exception of eight men who were to leave the following Saturday with an express for the States. Next day Bigler and his friends started for the fort with Browett who was to act as spokesman, but were unable to see Sutter, or buy the seeds, cattle, horses, and two brass cannon' they wished. On Tuesday they left the fort for home, intending to turn their attention for the rest of their stay to gold-digging. As they could not make the journey in a day, they cncamped for the night at a creek fifteen miles from the flouring-mill, and next morning Bigler, whose mind was running in one direction, began to look for gold; and he and his four companions soon found about ten dollars. As Willis and Hudson were not far away, they determined to look them up and see what success had attended them; so keeping close to the river they soon came across them, at what afterward was called

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81

Mormon island. Five persons, Ira Willis, Jesse B. Martin, Ephraim Green, Israel Evans, together with Hudson and Sidney Willis, were at work, and had, on that day, obtained two hundred and fifty dollars. Bigler here noticed an improvement in mining, for one cr two of the Mormons had Indian baskets, and were able in a short time to wash out from twenty-five cents to two dollars.

Bigler arrived at Coloma on the 13th, and from that date he and his friends began mining. It was hard work, for the only tools they had were their knives. He tried to get an Indian basket, but none were available; and so had to use a tray on which he kneeded dough to serve as a washer, while Alick Stevens did good service with his wooden wash-bowl. There was only one tin pan, about the size of an eight quart basin, among all the miners; so they had to carry the dirt in sacks from the dry gulches, a mile below the mill, to the river, some five to six hundred yards distant, and there wash and separate the gold. In less than three weeks after Bigler's arrival at the saw-mill the great rush to the mines took place, and soon the little gulches were thronged with eager gold-seekers, who disputed Marshall's claim to the land, and dug where they pleased. Among the strangers was an old Sonoran who was evidently a miner. He dug a hole and filled it with water. Then he fitted into it a cotton sheet, into which he shovelled dirt, which the water dissolved, leaving the gold sticking to the cloth. Bigler and Brown then tried the same method, but with partial success.

It was at this juncture, the middle of June 1848, that Bigler, and many others of the Mormon battalion, turned their faces toward the new city of the saints. None tell us how hard it was for them to leave the fascinations of the gold-fields for the distant desert, or whether it was hard at all. But it is very certain that there were few in the

CAL. INT. Poc. 6

cañons of the

Sierra foothills who would then have turned their back on Mammon for the service of any other god.

After this the world came flocking in. The region round Marshall's mill soon swarmed with gold-seekers. Two thousand diggers were at work there, with knives, picks, shovels, sticks, tin pans, wooden bowls, willow baskets, and cradles, picking crevices, scraping rocký beds, riddling gravelly sand, and washing dirt for the metal. Shortly after there were some four thousand upon the ground, if we include natives, who were mostly employed by white men. It was then discovered that all about in the vicinity of Marshall's mill gold abounded. Virgin placers were found on Feather river, on Deer creek, on Yuba river. New discoveries followed in quick succession, each adding fuel to the flame. Every gulch and ravine was prospected, and there was scarcely a spot where gold was not, though not always in paying quantities. Finally the fact became apparent that all along the base of the Sierra, on every affluent of the Sacramento and San Joaquin, from one end of the great valley of California to the other, almost every rivulet, gulch, and cañon was rich in gold.

"Some fifty thousand persons," writes one who deals largely in exaggeration, on the 8th of November, 1848: "are drifting up and down the slopes of the great Sierra, of every hue, language, and clime, tumultuous and confused as a flock of wild geese taking wing at the crack of a gun, or autumnal leaves strewn on the atmospheric tide by the breath of the whirlwind. All are in search of gold; and, with eyes diluted to the circle of the moon, rush this way and that as some new discovery, or fictitious tale of success may suggest." Says another in a letter to the New York Journal of Commerce, from Monterey under date of August 29, 1848, "At present the people are running over the country and picking it out of the earth here and there, just as a thousand hogs let

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loose in a forest would root up ground nuts. Some get eight or ten ounces a day, and the least active one or two. They make most who employ the wild Indians to hunt it for them. There is one man who has sixty Indians in his employ; his profits are a dollar a minute. The wild Indians know nothing of its value, and wonder what the pale faces want to do with it; and they will give an ounce of it for the same weight of coined silver, or a thimbleful of glass beads, or a glass of grog. And white men themselves often give an ounce of it, which is worth at our mint eighteen dollars or more, for a bottle of brandy, a bottle of soda powders, or a plug of tobacco."

Then streams began to form in every quarter; inland streams and ocean currents, social tricklings and oozings from scattered and far distant homes, gathering into rivulets, and expanding into human rivers, increasing in strength and volume as they neared that worshipful gold. Bands of devotees were organized for pilgrimages, in which christendom and pagandom might join alike, in which all the sons of men might join and bow before one common shrine.

In vain we search the annals of mankind for a similar flocking. The nearest akin to it were the Christian crusades made in the ninth century, and subsequently, for the recovery from profane hands of the tomb of Christ-wild fanaticism, folly incredible, yet under providence working out for civilization the grandest results, bringing together antagonistic societies, forcing oppugnant elements to coalesce, and melting and moulding humanity into more useful and comelier forms. But the world was smaller then than now, and although the numbers were large they comprised comparatively few nationalities, and the distance travelled was less. In the nineteenth century there were cosmopolitan crusades for gold wherewith to make rich the finder, and add volume to the world's circulating medium. Was the gold sought in these modern pilgrimages essential to human well-being,

as appeared to be the quasi possession of Christ's sepulchre? The central idea of the Christian crusades was fanaticism; that of the Plutonic crusades was avarice. Which is better or worse, which has done the more for or against human progress, is not here a point of discussion. The question is, whether gold is more valuable than religion, or avarice a nobler passion than fanaticism? Has the world then grown no wiser nor more sober in ten centuries? Yet as in the medieval crusades great benefits from great evils came, so in the latter-day crusades for gold, good will come of them; but the great good God therefrom designed for man, California has yet to tell.

First those nearest at hand felt the subtle influence. The ox-team of the emigrant turned toward Coloma; the trapper left his peltries, and the ranchero his herds, curious to see what this thing should mean. The excitement was felt by the devoted Mormons, some of whom attempted a small settlement on the Stanislaus, which they called New Hope, and immediately they were reconciled to digging gold as if by general agreement. Sutter was nearly ruined by the discovery. On the instant his laborers deserted him almost to a man, leaving a mill unfinished, and all his property exposed to the depredations of the rabble, which were more serious than those of the natives had ever been. They drove off his cattle, squatted on his land, and then combined and beat him in the courts, when courts were established. Marshall was swept away by the tide.

Immediately following the discovery, most of the provisions for the mines were obtained at Sutter's fort; then traders went to Sonoma for supplies. One would think that these early settlers, with leagues of land and thousands of horses and cattle, and of native laborers, should have reaped a harvest from the gold crop. And so they did, most of them, at first, but so strange and unprecedented was it all to them that they became bewildered; gold poured in upon them