Gold Rush

The California Gold Rush: An era remembered

COLOMA -- If you are a Californian, part of you was born here.

Perhaps it's the adventurous part, or the inventive; the inquisitive -- or the acquisitive.

If you are a Californian, part of you knows this serene valley, cut by a branch of the American River, where oak gives way to pine and the foothills bow to the Sierra.

Because this is where California was born.

Its father was James Marshall, a dour, paranoid carpenter from New Jersey. Its mother was the natural happenstance of geological and hydrological forces that placed a pea-shaped dollop of gold in a sawmill ditch here on the chilly morning of Jan. 24, 1848.

"Boys," Marshall told the group of laborers who were helping him build the sawmill, "By God, I believe I have found a gold mine."

What he had really found was the ignition switch for one of the most massive migrations in human history: the California Gold Rush.