Discovery of Gold in California
James Marshall, after traveling to Oregon by wagon train in early 1840s, wandered down the coast to California and started working for John Sutter. Sutter was building a farming empire, which became known as Sutter’s Fort. In August 1847, Marshall became Sutter’s partner and agreed to build a sawmill to support many of Sutter’s activities. In January 1848, Marshall discovered gold in the raceway of the sawmill in a valley called “Coloma” by the local Native Americans on the south fork of the American River. When Marshall and Sutter realized they had found gold, they attempted to keep the discovery a secret for fear the farming lands would be overrun by gold seekers.
Sam Brannan had come to Sutter’s Fort earlier and opened a general store there. Brannan was one of the first to hear the news of gold as it leaked out. He also was first to see an opportunity to make his fortune by supplying shovels, picks and other simple mining supplies to the gold seekers. Brannan purchased enough gold dust to fill a jar and traveled to San Francisco and walked the streets shouting and showing the gold.
These events started the gold fever and the race for gold began in California in early 1848. But back east, people were not sure that this was the real thing until President Polk verified the gold discovery on December 5, 1848, when he made his official annual message to Congress. He reported that gold was being found daily in California, worth large sums of money, and displayed a small box filled with gold dust that had been sent to him by courier from California.
Americans came from the east, both north and south and from everywhere in between. They came by the thousands in sailing ships, steamships, by horse, mules, ox and wagons and on foot. Some were ordinary workingmen, farmers, professionals and many were deserting soldiers and sailors. They had one thing in common—they sought gold, which was free to anyone. When they stuck it rich, they would return home. Many died, many went back empty handed and many stayed to work for years in poverty, but some did strike it very rich. They were the lucky ones. Placer gold mining reached its peak in 1852. Soon the easy placer gold was gone and they had to join forces and use new technology to extract the gold. By the end of the 1850s some estimates put the total amount of gold yield at about 600 million dollars. The future of mining now belonged to people who were willing to pay for the building of commercial water and flumes for hydraulic mining and stamp mills, equipment needed to extract gold from quartz deposits recovered deep below the earth’s surface.
The Gold Rush changed the Native American cultures that had been in existence for hundreds of years. In the 1840s, the Native American population was estimated at 150,000. By 1880, the population was reduced to only 16,000. Virtually every Native American village on the coast of California was destroyed, during or shortly after the Gold Rush. Besides outright murder and displacement, settlers and miners brought diseases to the Native Americans that often proved fatal. Some of these diseases were cholera, typhoid, measles, malaria, small pox, whooping cough and tuberculosis. In just three years, the Gold Rush created a major population expansion consisting of over twenty different nationalities and accelerating California into statehood at the expense of the Native American cultures. By 1870 there were fewer than fifty thousand. It was the worst injustice to fall onto to the Native Americans in the United States history. The Gold Rush made major changes to the people who lived in California and impacted the entire Western cultural development.
Gold in Tuolumne County
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This map of our county’s gold mines was created by the Tuolumne County History Research Center. The (*) next to the mine indicates that it was mapped during 1879 according the the J.P Dart map. Another source for this map was the Illustrated Historical Brochure of Tuolumne County California which shows the mines up to 1901. Locations of these mines may not be exact. They are however within the general area to which the marker was placed. Some markers indicated by the yellow shows groupings of mines around the area that may be even less accurate. Perhaps with time and useful input from those that know more about the area will give us a clearer and more holistic view of the the mining operations that is responsible for one of the most significant human migrations in U.S. history. Hope this information helps! If you have information regarding any of these mines and you would like it to be added to our map information, please go to our contact page and send us the information.
After gold was first discovered in January 1848 by James Marshall, that summer gold was found in streams and rivers draining the Sierra Nevada and the foothills in what is now called Tuolumne County. An Oregon prospector, Benjamin Wood, and his party which included James Savage, found gold on the banks of a branch of the Tuolumne River. They called their camp Wood’s Crossing and the creek, Wood’s Creek. By summer’s end 1848, Colonel George James from San Francisco started a mining camp above Wood’s Crossing and named it after himself—Jamestown. About the same time, a Judge Tuttle had found a rich site of gold on Mormon Creek and set up a log cabin and a camp known as Tuttletown. Other camps were springing up at Melones, Don Pedro’s Bar and Shaws Flat. Things slowed down when the winter cold set in.
In March 1849, Mexican and some Chilean’s were working claims a short distance upstream on Wood’s Creek at a camp known as Santiago. They secretly moved about four miles further up Wood’s Creek in the area of today’s Columbia Way in the northern portion of Sonora. The new gold diggings became know as Sonoranian Camp, named after the Mexican miners from the State of Sonora, Mexico. Shortly thereafter, waves of immigrants began arriving in Tuolumne County from the east and all parts of the world. Gold strikes were popping up again at places like Curtis Creek, Sullivan’s Creek and Savage Diggings. The town of Jacksonville sprung up where Wood’s Creek met Tuolumne River. Texas Bar and Indian Bar, and near Melones, Robinson’s Ferry and Soldier’s Gulch overnight became pockets of gold seeking miners. South of the River in Big Oak Flat, gold was discovered on Rattlesnake Creek. Chinese Camp was established with a rapid growth of up to 5000 Chinese immigrants living and working the gold diggings there.
The Tuolumne County foothills became covered with miners, gamblers and all sorts of people. Crime became a problem and the original friendly atmosphere changed dramatically. There was no California law or system of courts for settling disputes. Each settlement made up rules of their own, about claims, how to stake one and how to hold on to it. They used the old Mexican Alcalde system (similar to sheriffs and mayors), many times selecting men who were veterans of the Mexican War. Justice was questionable at best.
Originating out of the Hildreth Diggings, Columbia found major new rich gold strikes in 1850. Miners moved in from all the surrounding diggings and things grew and became more complicated. In Columbia, as was the case with most of the southern mines, the camp was comprised of an overwhelming number of foreigners. As mines played out, anti-foreign sentiment began to be voiced among American miners and they wanted help from the new legislature that was developing at the state level.
The population in the mining camps of Tuolumne County continued to grow rapidly. Conflict between miners over claims and lawlessness broke out, changing the earlier relationship between the people of various nationalities. In the spring of 1850, the Foreign Miners Act was made law, requiring all foreigners to pay $20 per month tax for the privilege of mining in California. At first many foreign miners left and many businesses fell on hard times. Some foreign miners struck back with violence and the gold mining fields became dangerous as robberies and killings became frequent. Vigilante groups formed to stop the crime. However, they exercised their own law and punished many by hanging suspected criminals without legal trials. Even after the repeal of the Foreign Miner’s Tax law, things were never the same and some trouble persisted up until 1858.
In 1853, other gold mining areas (the East Belt) above the Mother Lode mining camps were discovered up in hills near Soulsbyville and beyond. The Confidence, Independence, Mary Ellen, Payboy and Little Jessie mines sprung up. About 1855 Cherokee and Arastraville mines began just north of Tuolumne area and placer gold was found in Turnback Creek in 1856. That same year, Cornish men, creating many more mining sites in this area, discovered the Eureka Quartz Mine in Soulsbyville.
By 1853, estimates of gold seekers had passed the quarter million mark. Mining techniques changed from simple knives and panning to using special sluicing devices like rockers and long toms. It graduated to diverting of waterways, damming, re-routing complete segments of rivers, and dredging using a floating barge to scoop up the ore. The use of hydraulics’ mining started with simple washing down of small hillsides and graduated to the use of nozzles and monitors at extremely high pressures that could wash down portions of mountains. Hard rock mining where the gold was integral to the quartz and devices like arrastras and stamping machines were used to crush ore and separate the gold with water, mercury and cyanide. Each new concept increased the efficiency of mining and extracting the gold. However, large investments in lumber, machinery and access to commercial water required men to work together and become part of larger corporations. The era of the lone prospector was over; only corporations could afford the higher cost of extracting gold. Depending on the value of gold, the cost of mining became a major consideration, which was never a factor in early days of 1848. Major damage to the environment resulted from the mining and logging activities during the Gold Rush era. New environmental laws increased the cost of mining and logging by the turn of the century.