I wonder if that's possible," said Marshall, beginning to think his
companion was right; "how can we find out?"

"My wife can tell; she has made some lye from wood-ashes and will test
it."

[Illustration: GOLD WASHING--THE CRADLE.]

The man took the fragment to his wife, who was busy washing, and, at his
request, she boiled it for several hours with the lye. Had it been
brass--the only other metal it possibly could have been--it would have
turned a greenish-black. When examined again, however, its beautiful
bright lustre was undiminished. There was scarcely a doubt that it was
pure gold.

The two men returned to the mill-race with pans, and washed out probably
fifty dollars' worth of gold. Despite the certainty of his friend,
Marshall was troubled by a fear that the fragment was neither brass nor
gold, but some worthless metal of which he knew nothing. He carefully
tied up all that had been gathered, mounted a fleet horse, and rode to
Sutter's store, thirty miles down the American River.

Here he took Colonel Sutter into a private room and showed him what he
had found, saying that he believed it to be gold. Sutter read up the
account of gold in an encyclopedia, tested the substance with aqua
fortis, weighed it, and decided that Marshall was right, and that the
material he had found was undoubtedly gold.

It was a momentous discovery, repeated nearly a half-century later, when
the same metal was found in enormous quantities in the Klondike region.
Colonel Sutter and his companions tried to keep the matter a secret, but
it was impossible. Marshall, being first on the ground, enriched
himself, but by bad management lost all he had gained and died a poor
man. Colonel Sutter tried to keep intruders off his property, but they
came like the swarms of locusts that plagued Egypt. They literally
overran him, and when he died, in 1880, he was without any means
whatever; but California has since erected a handsome statue to his
memory.

For the following ten or twenty years, it may be said, the eyes of the
civilized world were upon California, and men rushed thither from every
quarter of the globe. There was an endless procession of emigrant trains
across the plains; the ships that fought the storms on their way around
Cape Horn were crowded almost to gunwales, while thousands halved the
voyage by trudging, across the Isthmus of Panama to the waiting ships on
the other side. California became a mining camp and millions upon