Gold! by Fred Rosen

it best to keep it as quiet as possible till we should have finished our mill. But there was a great number of disbanded Mormon soldiers in and about the fort, and when they came to hear of it, why it just spread like wildfire! Soon, the whole country was in a bustle,” said Marshall.
    Sutter thought a great deal during the night about the consequences that might follow such a discovery. Yet all he wrote in diary entry for the day was, “Mr. Marshall arrived from the mountains on very important business.” No one had ever accused Sutter of understatement, but that charge could certainly be leveled at him now. Or more likely, he was so scared of the secret coming out prematurely; he didn’t even want to refer to it by name in writing. Sutter ruminated on the matter.
    The next morning, Sutter gave the necessary orders tohis laborers and left at seven o’clock, accompanied by an Indian soldier and a vaquero, in a heavy rain, for Coloma. Halfway down the road, Sutter saw at a distance a human being crawling out from the brush.
    â€œWho is that?” Sutter asked the Indian.
    â€œThe same man who was with you last evening,” the Indian replied.
    When they came abreast, they found that the man was indeed a very wet and disheveled Marshall.
    â€œYou would have done better to remain with me at the fort than to pass such an ugly night here,” said Sutter dryly.
    Marshall explained that he had ridden the 54 miles back to Coloma, took his other horse, and came halfway back to meet them. Together, they all rode up to Coloma, which they reached in the afternoon, by which time the weather was clearing up. The next morning, Sutter accompanied Marshall to the tailrace of the mill. Like before, water had been running during the night to clean out the gravel that had been made loose to widen the race. After the water level went down, they waded out.
    â€œSmall pieces of gold could be seen remaining on the bottom of the clean washed bed rock,” Sutter later wrote. “I went in the race and picked up several pieces of this gold, several of the laborers gave me some which they had picked up, and from Marshall I received a part. I told them that I would get a ring made of this gold as soon as it could be done in California.”
    Sutter later did. He had a heavy ring made, with his family’s coat of arms engraved on the outside, and onthe inside of the ring was engraved, “The first gold, discovered in January, 1848.”
    The next day, Marshall and Sutter went on a prospecting tour in the Coloma vicinity. The following morning, Sutter was scheduled to go back to his fort. Before his departure, “I had a conversation with all hands. I told them that I would consider it as a great favor if they would keep this discovery secret only for six weeks, so that I could finish my large flour mill at Brighton, which had cost me already about from 24 to 25,000 dollars.”
    Everyone promised to keep the secret. But on his way home, Sutter did not feel happy and contented. Rather, he was surprised to find that he felt uneasy, and the more he thought about it, the more his emotions made sense. In his heart of hearts, he knew that such a secret, despite his men’s best efforts, would not remain secret for long.
    Two weeks after his return to his fort, he sent up “several teams in charge of a white man, as the teamsters were Indian boys. This man was acquainted with all hands up there, and Mrs. Wimmer (the cook) told him the whole secret; likewise the young sons of Mr. Wimmer told him that they had gold and that they would let him have some too; and so he obtained a few dollars’ worth of it as a present.
    â€œAs soon as this man arrived at the fort, he went to a small store in one of my outside buildings, kept by Jed Smith, a partner of Sam Brannan, a Mormon merchant in Francisco, and asked for a bottle of brandy, for whichhe would pay the cash; after having the bottle, he paid [instead]