The Age of Gold Read Online Free Page B

skepticism erased any residual inclination in Marshall to keep the discovery quiet. Several of the other men working in the vicinity were called over to examine the specimens and render judgment. Charles Bennett, at Marshall’s direction, took a hammer and pounded one of the flakes into a thin sheet—strong evidence that this was the genuine article. PeterWimmer carried a flake to the cabin where his wife was making soap; she threw it into the boiling lye solution, and it emerged shinier than ever. A similar result followed an assay by saleratus (baking powder). Although less telling than the malleability test, these experiments added weight to the gold hypothesis.
    Had anyone at Coloma known what everyone in the world knew later, Marshall’s men would have dropped their tools at once and gone looking for more of what he had found. But at the time it appeared a curiosity, a fluke. After all, they had moved thousands of cubic yards of dirt and sand and gravel in that same location during the previous several months, and this was the first sign that those thousands of yards contained anything but dirt and sand and gravel. Marshall reminded them that they had come to Coloma to build a sawmill. If they didn’t work on the mill, they wouldn’t get paid. Perhaps he did not remind them—although they doubtless realized—that
he
wouldn’t start getting paid until the mill started sawing wood.
    Yet, bowing to reality, Marshall told the men that if they continued to work on the mill during regular hours, they might search for gold during “odd spells and Sundays” (as Azariah Smith recorded). At some point either then or later they agreed, in exchange for this privilege, to split their findings with Marshall.
    The fact that Marshall was more concerned with lumber than with gold was underscored by the fact that he waited four days after his remarkable discovery to travel to Sutter’s Fort. Perhaps he failed to appreciate how that discovery changed everything. Perhaps he
did
appreciate it, and affected nonchalance for the benefit of the men.
    S UTTER WAS CONCERNED with lumber, too, but with larger issues as well. In January 1848 the United States and Mexico remained formally at war, yet the shape of the American victory was evident. The United States would acquire California, among other spoils of the conflict. While Marshall and most Americans in California cheered the change of sovereignty, Sutter shuddered. As an official of the Mexican government, hehad lately been an enemy of the region’s new rulers; more unnerving, everything he had built and achieved at New Helvetia—the fort, the farms, the herds, the authority he wielded, the respect he commanded— were based on his good relations with Mexico. Mexico’s defeat canceled all that. Perhaps he could make himself as valuable to the Americans as he had been to the Mexicans; flexibility and the capacity to ingratiate had long been his stock-in-trade. But the process would take time—a luxury he wasn’t sure he would be allowed.
    Such was Sutter’s thinking when, to his surprise, Marshall arrived back from Coloma. Because Marshall had left the fort only two weeks earlier, with the intention of finishing the construction, Sutter assumed something was amiss. Marshall’s demeanor added to this impression. “From the unusual agitation in his manner I imagined that something serious had occurred,” Sutter said afterward. He added, “As we involuntarily do in this part of the world, I at once glanced to see if my rifle was in its proper place.”
    When Marshall explained the cause of his excitement, the two men retired to Sutter’s office on the second floor of the building at the center of the fort. They consulted Sutter’s
Encyclopaedia Americana
, which had a long article describing the properties of gold. The apothecary shop at the fort possessed some aqua fortis—nitric acid—which Sutter sent a servant to fetch. Marshall’s samples withstood the acid—a