was very anxious to see that mail. It contained the Eastern
papers, and these probably would add to the tidings printed in the St.
Louis papers, from the marvelous gold fields of California.

Since January, when President Polk's annual message to Congress had
been read in St. Louis, in the papers, St. Louis people, like the whole
population of the United States, had been crazy over the California
gold. It was claimed that as far back as January, 1848, a man named
Marshall, while digging a mill-race somewhere in interior Upper
California, for a Captain Sutter of Sutter's Fort ranch, on the
emigrant trail over the Sierra Nevada mountain-range down to
Sacramento, had washed into plain sight an unlimited supply of gold
flakes.

However, when the news first had reached Washington and New York and
had filtered back to St. Louis, it was several months old and seemed
scarcely worth attention, California being such a long way off. But
now the President himself was authority for the fact that gold actually
was lying around loose, for anybody to pick up, in this fair new land
of California, and that thousands of people already were gathering it!

The President offered as proof letters from Colonel Richard B. Mason,
the military governor of California, and from the Honorable Thomas O.
Larkin, who had been the United States consul in California. The
letters said not only that gold had been found, as before stated, but
that 10,000 people (nearly all the able-bodied population of
California) were out looking for more, and finding it, too! Sailors
were deserting the ships and soldiers the ranks; servants were leaving
the houses and merchants the stores, and the whole territory was wild.
Congressmen at Washington asserted so much gold would be put on the
market that gold money would lose its value, it would be so common.

These reports sounded like fairy-tales come true. Think of it! Gold,
lying around on the surface of the ground, to be pocketed by the first
finders! In spite of the fact that California had been a part of the
United States only two years, or since the war with Mexico, and was
distant 2000 miles across uninhabited desert and mountains, as soon as
the word about gold was guaranteed to be really the truth a tremendous
number of people here in the "States" set about dropping everything
else and starting right away, to seek their fortunes.

Hundreds of St. Louis people had left, in parties large and small, a
f