It was 150 years ago this January that Jim Marshall, the boss carpenter of a crew of Maidu Indians and transient Mormon settlers who were building a sawmill in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, glimpsed a metallic twinkle in a freshly dug tailrace. Marshall took it to be the glint of gold, and he was right. From that moment—celebrated and debunked, distorted but unforgettable—Marshall’s life and that of his patron, John Sutter, were effectively ruined; the state of California was prematurely delivered; the current of American history, which had been trickling leisurely westward for a couple of hundred years, surged abruptly across the continent to the Pacific Coast; a hundred thousand men and women left home and went to California to seek a pocketful of gold; and the world was changed.

At the village of Coloma on the south fork of the American River, there are picnic grounds and a replica of John Sutter’s mill to mark the spot where Marshall’s exclamation (customarily rendered “Boys, I believe I’ve found a gold mine!”) set off the greatest of all gold rushes. Busloads of schoolchildren swarm the site. Teachers dredge up everything they know about that chilly afternoon in 1848 and retell the story in all its debatable details: how Marshall took his chips of gleaming yellow gravel to the cabin of his foreman, Peter Wimmer, where Wimmer’s wife, Jane (or was her name Jennie?), boiled them in a pot of homemade soap to see if lye would dim their color; how Marshall carried his treasure in a knotted cloth to Suffer, an ambitious immigrant from Switzerland who had obtained a Mexican land grant and was building and fortifying a private empire he called New Helvetia; how Sutter, having bitten and hammered the grains and doused them in nitric acid, concluded that they really were gold and then attempted (or possibly did not attempt] to keep the secret from the myriad outsiders who were certain to overrun his empire; and how, almost four months later, an enterprising Mormon colonist named Sam Brannan, having figured out what the fuss was all about, quickly built several supply stores to accommodate the anticipated invasion and then rambled through the streets of the village of San Francisco waving a little quinine bottle and shouting, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!”

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