The growth of San Francisco was very rapid after the discovery of
gold. The population immediately leaped into the thousands. California
was the goal of the gold-seeker, the El Dorado of his quest. Men in
search of fortune came from all parts of the world to the Golden West.
It was on the 19th of January, 1848, that gold was discovered. The
story reads like a romance. Captain John Augustus Sutter, who was born
in Baden, Germany, February 15th, 1803, after many adventures in New
York, Missouri, New Mexico, the Sandwich Islands, and Sitka, at last
found himself in San Francisco. From this spot he crossed the bay and
went up the Sacramento River, where he built a stockade, known as
Sutter's Fort, and erected a saw mill at a cost of $10,000, and a
flour mill at an outlay of $25,000. Here in 1847 he was joined by
James Wilson Marshall, born in New Jersey in 1812. Marshall was sent
up to the North Fork of the American River, where at Coloma he built a
saw mill. This was near the center of El Dorado county, and in a line
northeast from San Francisco. The mill, in the midst of a lumber
region, was finished on January 15th, 1848, and everything was in
readiness for the sawing of timber, which was in great demand in all
the coast towns and brought a high price. The mill-race, when the
water was let into it, was found too shallow, and in order to deepen
it Marshall opened the flood gates and allowed a strong, steady
volume of water to flow through it all night. Nature, aided by human
sagacity, having done her work well, the flood gates were closed, and
there in the gravel beneath the shallow stream lay several yellow
objects like pebbles. They aroused curiosity. The miller took one and
hammered it on a stone. He found it was gold. He then gave one of
the "yellow pebbles" to a Mrs. Wimmer, of his camp, to be boiled in
saleratus water. She threw it into a kettle of boiling soap, and after
several hours it came out bright and shining. It is yellow gold,