had reached the fort and found Mr. Sutter, the two locked
themselves in a room and examined the yellow flakes Marshall had
brought. They were gold! But to keep the secret was impossible. A Mormon
laborer, watching their excited actions at the mill race, discerned the
secret, and then the news spread fast, and the whole population went
wild. Every kind of business stopped. The stores were shut. Sailors left
the ships. Soldiers defiantly left their barracks, and by the middle of
the summer men came rushing to the gold fields from every part of the
Pacific coast. Later in the year reports reached the East, but so slowly
did news travel in those days that it was not till Polk in his annual
message confirmed it, that people really believed there were gold fields
in California. Then the rush from the East began. Some went overland,
some crossed by the Isthmus of Panama, some went around South America,
filling California with a population of strong, adventurous, and daring
men. These were the "forty-niners."

[Illustration: %San Francisco in 1847%]

%378. The Californians make a Free-State Constitution.%--When Taylor
heard that gold hunters were hurrying to California from all parts of
the world, he was very anxious to have some permanent government in
California; and encouraged by him the pioneers, the "forty-niners," made
a free-state constitution in 1849 and applied for admission into
the Union.[1]

[Footnote 1: For an account of this movement to make California a state,
see Rhodes's _History of the United States_, Vol. I., pp. 111-116.]

%379. Clay proposes a Compromise.%--When Congress met in 1849 there
were therefore a great many things connected with slavery to be settled:

1. Southern men complained that the existing fugitive-slave law was not
enforced in the free states and that runaway slaves were not returned.

2. The Northern men insisted that slavery should be abolished in the
District of Columbia.

3. Southern men demanded the right to go into any territory of the
United States, as New Mexico or Utah or even California, and take their
slaves with them.

4. The Free-soilers demanded that there should be no more slave states,
no more slave territories.

5. The North wanted California admitted as a free-soil state. The South
would not consent.

So violent and bitter was the feeling aroused by these questions, that
it seemed in 1850 as if the Union was about to be broken up, and that
there were to be two