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Literary supplementTo be continued

The Paydirt Gazette.

The Story.Many stories are waiting to be told.Yours among them.

I. The Discovery

From a plaque in a museum.

It was January 24th, 1848, when a man by the name of James W. Marshall first set eyes on a shiny yellow piece of metal on the bottom of the tailrace at Sutter’s Mill in California.

“I reached my hand down and picked it up; it made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold. The piece was about half the size and shape of a pea. Then I saw another.”

— James W. Marshall

Marshall’s discovery set off a rush to the California gold fields by land and sea, and an unprecedented mass migration which forever changed the American frontier.

Paydirt concept image: James W. Marshall kneeling at the tailrace below Sutter’s Mill, gold flakes in his cupped hands
The tailrace at Sutter’s Mill.

More than a century later…

II. The Museum

From a visitor’s review.

It was like stepping into a time capsule. The museum’s artifacts looked a little too pristine for how old they were. And the curators appeared and acted as if they were themselves from the 1800s.

One exhibit drew me in: The 1849 Experience. The room was empty, and so quiet I could hear my own heartbeat.

Then, faintly, I heard hammering. A saw working through green timber. Somewhere a bell on a mule’s collar, a fiddle, and men’s voices calling out prices in more languages than I could count. It all seemed to come from a doorway at the far end of the room, lit as if by the afternoon sun.

Paydirt concept image: a museum gallery of glass cases, with sunlight pouring through an open doorway onto the wooden floor and a busy street visible beyond
The doorway.

I stepped through, into the light, and the warmth of that sun closed over me.

Paydirt concept image: a crowded gold rush square in the afternoon sun, with tents, mule trains, a flag over an adobe building and ships in the cove
On the other side.

I was standing at the top of a sloping square of trampled dirt. On every side, tents and half-built frame houses were going up as fast as men could nail them, their canvas walls snapping in the wind off the bay. A flag stood over a low adobe building on the corner. Mule trains pushed through the crowd, loaded with picks, pans and sacks of flour. A man weighed out a pinch of yellow dust on a set of scales to pay for a shovel. And below it all, past the rooftops, the cove was thick with the masts of ships, many with no crew left to sail them.

To be continued in a later edition.

Read The Discovery