It was in the first part of January 1848 [January 24], when the gold was discovered at Coloma, where I was then building a sawmill. The contractor and builder of this mill was James W. Marshall, from New Jersey. In the fall of 1847, after the mill seat had been located, I sent up to this place Mr. P. L. Wimmer with his family, and a number of laborers, from the disbanded Mormon Battalion; and a little later I engaged Mr. Bennet from Oregon to assist Mr. Marshall in the mechanical labors of the mill. Mr. Wimmer had the team in charge, assisted by his young sons, to do the necessary teaming, and Mrs. Wimmer did the cooking for all hands.
There used to be a nice statue of John Sutter outside of the Sutter Health Medical Building in downtown Sacramento. It got removed after the Cancel Culture crowd splashed yellow paint on it.
ReplyDeleteApparently John Sutter was a bad man because he employed indigenous people at his Rancho New Helvetia.
The only contemporaneous account of the discovery was by two of Marshall's workers in their journals, Henry Bigler and Azariah Smith. It's from them that we know the exact date of the discovery. Both had been in Company B of the Mexican War Mormon Battalion that marched from Kansas to San Diego before being discharged in Los Angeles. They were working for Sutter to earn some money before heading to Utah. Sam Brannan, who initially made a killing selling supplies to miners and embezzling money from other Mormons died in poverty in Escondido, far from the gold fields.
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