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.
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