History
On January 24, 1848, Marshall found several flakes of gold that began the transformation of California from a sleepy outpost to a bustling center of activity. Sutter and Marshall tried to keep the discovery secret, but eventually the word got out. During the next seven years, approximately 300,000 people came to California (half by land and half by sea) to seek their fortunes mining for gold or selling supplies like picks and shovels to the gold prospectors.
The first documentation of the Sutter's Mill discovery were by Henry Bigler and Azariah Smith, in their respective diaries. Like several other people working at the mill, these two workers were discharged veterans of the Mormon Battalion. After this discovery at the mill, the "gold rush" era began and many people came from the east to find fortune. The era helped to transform people like Levi Strauss and Luzena Wilson.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It would be naive to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems.... However, with faith and perseverance,... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace. They can be resolved in the future, provided, of course, that we can think of five new ways to measure the height of a tall building by using a barometer.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)