The first wave
The first wave of gold seekers came from nearby
towns. On April 1st, Isaac Humphrey
traveled to the mill from San Francisco with the first piece of mining
equipment, a rocker. The gold seekers
were nicknamed Squatters, because of the position they had to assume while
panning for gold. The first squatters
settled in brush shelters in Sutter’s fields. Colonel Richard B. Mason, the
military governor of California came to visit for a Fourth of July celebration
with John Sutter. He gathered
information and estimated that about 4,000 people were out searching and
panning for gold. The majority were Indian, and an estimated $30,000 to $50,000
worth of gold was being mined daily (Kanazawa,2005). Mason toured the area and saw large
quantities of gold, fourteen pound bags full of gold nuggets. When July came,
word about gold discoveries had reached Hawaii.
In August the news had reached Oregon, the first group of Americans to
arrive came by the Siskiyou Trail (Roberts, 2000). Colonel Mason reported what he had witnessed.
He even went to visit President James Polk with a tea caddy full of gold. President Polk sent a message about the
findings of gold on the West coast to Congress on December 5th. “The accounts of the abundance of gold in
that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command
belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the
public service” (Kanazawa,2005). Practically overnight, California became the
land of riches and unheard-of opportunity (Starr,1998). At the end of the year,
high water ended the first mining season, but approximately 5,000 miners stayed
and worked. New gold strikes were being
made daily. These early miners were
called the “forty-eighters”