YOUR ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO THE GOLD RUSH
They say that all that glitters isn’t gold. But the tiny pieces of metal that a carpenter named James Marshall spotted glistening in the sun on 24 January 1848 certainly were gold - and their discovery would change the course of American history.
Marshall wasn’t searching for precious metal on that winter’s day. He was working on a new sawmill in the small Californian town of Coloma. Yet he instantly knew what he had found. “It made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold,” he later reported. It’s little wonder that Marshall’s heart skipped a beat, for the flakes that he spotted in a streambed adjacent to the American River would spark one of the most extraordinary events of the mid-19th century. It was an episode that would make some people fantastically rich, inflict misery on others, and transform life on America’s western seaboard for good. We
