One day in the spring of 1848, two American men arrived at Governor Richard Barnes Mason’s office in Monterey, saying they had come from Captain John Sutter on “special business.” William T. Sherman led them into Mason’s office and closed the door.
After some time, Mason called Sherman in. He pointed to some papers that the men had unwrapped on his desk.
"What is that?" Mason asked. “Is it gold?”
“It could be easily tested,” said Sherman, putting a piece in his mouth. The metallic luster was perfect. Sherman then beat the largest piece flat with an ax and a hatchet. There was no doubt about it — pure metal.
Gold.
At the time, Sherman and Mason attached little importance to the find. Small amounts of the precious metal had also been found in the San Fernando Valley. Far more promising were the mercury mines at New Almaden (in today’s San José.)
Along with the gold flakes, the men brought a letter from the Swiss colonizer, explaining that he had “incurred considerable expense” having a sawmill constructed on the South Fork of the American River. Sutter asked “preemption” to prospect for gold there, on land legally occupied by the American government.
The answer was no. Mason dictated a letter back to Sutter, which Sherman wrote. “California was yet a Mexican province,” Sherman remembered him saying, “simply held by us as a conquest [and] no laws of the United States yet applied to it, much less the land laws or preemption laws, which could only apply after a public survey.” Mason signed the letter, handed it to Sutter’s men, and they departed.
Of course, we all know what happened next.
“That gold was the first discovered in the Sierra Nevada, which soon revolutionized the whole country, and actually moved the whole civilized world,” Sherman wrote.
Welcome back to Reading San Francisco, my Substack dedicated to reading one book written every year in or about San Francisco from 1840 to the present. Today, it’s 1848, and we’ve finally arrived at the Gold Rush, and the section of General Sherman’s Memoirs dedicated to it.
Thanks so much for reading. Thanks for subscribing. And thanks for sharing this with your friends. I really appreciate it.
“As the spring and summer of 1848 advanced, the reports came faster and faster from the gold-mines at Sutter's saw-mill,” said Sherman. “Stories reached us of fabulous discoveries, and spread throughout the land. Everybody was talking of ‘Gold! gold!’ until it assumed the character of a fever. Some of our soldiers began to desert; citizens were fitting out trains of wagons and pack mules to go to the mines. We heard of men earning fifty, five hundred, and thousands of dollars per day, and for a time it seemed as though somebody would reach solid gold.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Reading San Francisco to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.