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| Gold!! |
The California Gold
Rush saw tens of thousands of people descending into the Sierra Foothills (AKA Gold Country, and the Mother Lode) to make their fortune on
gold and silver, or to provide lodging, services (legal and otherwise), and virtually
anything as long as it made money. In fact it was these business people who did
significantly better financially than any prospectors. Of necessity, certain
key figures emerged during this time, allowing for Mother Lode history to be
entertaining and always interesting.
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| Charles Bolton, AKA Black Bart |
One of the key personalities was Black Bart the gentleman robber. His real name was Charles E. Bolton, a respected San Francisco citizen who
committed 28 robberies against Wells Fargo stagecoaches before he was finally
arrested. At first he mined for gold like so many others on the American River
but that never amounted to much. There were easier ways to make money. His
first hold up was in 1875 and he kept up his spree until 1883 when, during his
last robbery near Copperopolis, just
outside of Murphys, he was wounded,
then finally arrested. He never took the personal belongings of the stagecoach
passengers only the Wells Fargo loot, occasionally left poetry at the scene of
his crimes, and was so scared of horses he committed his robberies on foot. It
was said he was personable, even polite, when committing his crimes. He was known
to have stayed at the Murphys Historic
Hotel and you can stay in the room he once occupied. After his arrest he
was sent to San Quentin and served just
four years, but by 1888, the 59 year old, in poor health, vanished and no one
knows whatever happened to him.
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| John Sutter |
The name John Sutter
will always be linked with the discovery of gold, though Sutter himself did not
discover it; his partner John Marshall
did in January of 1848. Prospectors were known as the 49ers, because by 1849 the “rush” to the Foothills was on and word
about gold had spread to all parts of the globe. The gold was found at Sutter’s Mill, a sawmill on the banks
of the American River in the tiny
town of Coloma, north of Placerville not Sutter Creek. Originally from Switzerland,
Sutter was never a good businessman and he racked up debts throughout most of
his life. Generous and kind, he was often taken advantage of by the
unscrupulous people he hired. He was granted 50,000 acres of land where the
American River and the Sacramento River meet and set up his sawmill operations.
He crafted a town nearby he called New
Helvetia, what we now know as Sacramento.
He fought for California statehood, worked with Russia to secure Fort Ross on the California coast, gave
aid to immigrants in the area and his name is nearly everywhere in the
Foothills. But the gold discovery did not make him rich.
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| The exact spot where gold was discovered in 1848 |
Word got out and
squatters came quickly, as early as March 1848 from San Francisco, and Sutter
could not get them off his land. “By this sudden discovery of the gold, all my
great plans were destroyed,” he wrote in 1857. “Had I succeeded for a few years
before the gold was discovered, I would have been the richest citizen on the
Pacific shore; but it had to be different. Instead of being rich, I am ruined,
and the cause of it is the long delay of the United States Land Commission of
the United States Courts, through the great influence of the squatter lawyers.”
He was broke when he died in 1880. Today you can stand on the banks of the
American River on the exact spot where the mill once was, and, at least for a
moment or two, imagine what transpired that day in January of 1848 – a pivotal
day which changed the face of California forever.
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| The One and Only Mark Twain |
The most singularly well known person of the gold rush
however was Mark Twain (Samuel Longhorn Clemens is his real
name; Mark Twain is actually a nautical term he adopted) who migrated from San
Francisco to the Foothills in the early 1860s, writing about the arduous mining
life. While visiting friends in Angels
Camp he heard a story about a frog jumping contest and how one frog lost
because someone had fed the frog buckshot to weigh it down. No doubt amused by
the absurdity of the situation Twain penned “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” which was published
by the New York Saturday Press in November, 1865, and Twain became a media
sensation and eventually an American icon. Even today the frog jumping contest
is alive and well and as you walk along the stuck-in-time town of Angels Camp,
just like the Hollywood walk of fame, there is the Angels Camp Frog Walk, with
the various winners immortalized in bronze in the sidewalk. Twain published 13
novels in total (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn are the most well known) as well as short stories, travel writing
and his autobiography, published in 2010, 100 years after his death became a
bestseller!
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| The Frog Walk of Fame in Angels Camp |
For a look at the gold & silver mines in Southern California head over to my other travel blog: CALICO GHOST TOWN
