In a second letter from Monterey of June 28, Larkin wrote that he had visited the mines and found them all and more than he had anticipated. Miners were scattered over one hundred miles of country from the Sacramento to the San Joaquin, between which the placers extended. According to the best estimates, there were then 2,000 people at the mines, nine-tenths of them foreigners. Larkin believed that a few "thousand people in one hundred miles square of the Sacramento would yearly turn out the price that the United States was to pay for the new territory." Three-fourths of the houses in San Francisco were then empty, and were being sold for the cost price of the land. Even Monterey, sleeping the sleep of a Rip Van Winkle, had caught the infection.
The gold discovery had been made during the governorship of Colonel Mason, who on June 17, from Monterey, accompanied by Lieutenant Sherman, visited the mines, finding en route San Francisco almost deserted and everything going to waste and idle until arrival at Sutter's Fort on July 2, where there was life and business bustle. Mason visited the Lower mines at Mormon Diggings on the American River, where 200 men were at work. At Coloma, little more than three months after the discovery, upwards of 4,000 were mining. Gold dust was abundant in everybody's hands. He estimated that the yield from the mines was from $30,000 to $50,000 daily, and as they were on public land he seriously debated whether or not to secure a reasonable fee for mining. He resolved not to interfere unless broils and crime demanded. Crime was infrequent though in the mines, and theft and robbery unknown in the early period, despite the insecure deposit places for treasure.
Mason was carried away by the excitement, and while acknowledging in an official letter to the adjutant general that he could not earlier bring himself to believe the reports concerning the wealth of the gold district he wrote:
"I have no hesitation now in saying that there is more gold in the country drained by the Sacramento and the San Joaquin Rivers than will pay the cost of the present war with Mexico a hundred times over."
No capital was required to obtain gold, as the laboring man required nothing but pick and shovel and tin pan with which to dig and wash the gravel, and many frequently picked gold in pieces of from one to six ounces out of the crevices of the rocks with butcher knives.
Mason's letter was published with President Polk's congressional message of December, 1848, and with the exhibited gold and cinnabar specimens from New Almaden, sent on by special messenger, the news was spread in official and authoritative form. The gold assayed over eighteen dollars an ounce.
In a letter to Commodore Jones at Mazatlan. Mason wrote that, treaty or no treaty, the gold discovery had decided California's destiny, and he raised his estimate that the yield would pay the war cost 500 times over. The war appropriation was $10,000,000, with $15,000,000 as the consideration for the land cession and $3,000,000 assumed as a damage debt due Americans, a total of $28,000,000, saving nothing of other expenses of the war, 100 times $28,000,000 equals $2,800,000,000. 500 times $28,000,000 equals $14,000,000,000. Mason was a little off on his figures: so was Larkin.
Many foreigners were at work at the mines, so many that certain localities were named after nationalities. The collection of the foreign miner's tax, afterward repealed, caused not a little friction, but the reported race hostility against the foreigner was exaggerated. Until the government should act in the matter, which it never did. General Riley upon his later visit said he would not disturb anyone in mining, nor would he countenance one class attempting to monopolize the workings of a mine or drive out any other.
The earliest important notice of the discovery was published in the Baltimore Sun of September 20, 1848, by which time private letters were arriving telling of the wonderful story. Soon all the newspapers were full of the subject and consignments of gold confirmed the tidings. Everybody talked California. The adventurous prepared for a general grand rush by land and sea, by latter route long before the great overland tide of '49 began. The Pacific Mail Steamship Company organized in April, 1848, and its first steamer on the semi-monthly route between Panama and Astoria via San Francisco was the California, which arrived at San Francisco on February 18, 1849.
The early influx in the emigration flood to the gold placers was of Mexicans from Sonora, then Chileans and some Chinese. These assembled principally in the Southern Mines, which included the San Joaquin and its tributaries at the lower extremity of the Mother Lode originating in Mariposa County. Colonel Mason so much feared wholesale desertion of the garrisons that in contemplation of the thought that the laborer earned in the mines in a day more than double a soldier's pay and allowances for a month he added in a report: "I really think some extraordinary mark of favor should be given to those soldiers who remain faithful to their flag through this tempting crisis."
During the latter nine months in 1849, 233 vessels arrived in San Francisco from United States ports, besides 316 from foreign ports — a total of 549, averaging two daily and many unseaworthy, veritable "floating coffins." The overland caravans started in spring began to arrive in a continuous stream almost across the continent, and crossing the Sierras landed for a few years their human freight in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys to scatter over the country. A great and unparalleled spectacle was this immigration of 1849.
NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN MINES
In July, 1849, General Riley visited the mining regions by way of San Juan Bautista, crossing the San Joaquin near the mouth of the Merced and examining the principal camps on the Tuolumne and Stanislaus and their tributaries, then those on the Calaveras, Mokelumne, Cosumnes and American, returning to Monterey by way of Stockton. The mining country had by this time been divided in two sections, commonly known as the Northern and the Southern Mines. Sutter's Fort, or Sacramento, was the interior point from which the Northern Mines were reached, and Stockton, the new settlement on Mormon Slough of the San Joaquin, for the Southern, being also the distributing points for the districts and both accessible from San Francisco by water. The traffic was enormous. The rivers, naturally clear streams, had already commenced to become turbid, but they had deep, well-defined channels and navigation for vessels of considerable draught was as yet easy.
Many of the mining camps in the Sierra foothills became little towns, some to be abandoned with the impoverishment of the placers, others to advance from tent aggregations to villages of rough boarded houses, and yet others to permanency as towns. Not a few as in the San Joaquin Valley that had arisen to the dignity of county seats lost in time even that distinction with the advent of the railroad and the removal of the seat and were abandoned as in Merced, Fresno, Tulare and Kern Counties.
In 1856 Dr. Trask, the state geologist, reported that mining was successfully prosecuted in twenty-three counties. The aggregate area in which gold was known to exist was estimated at from 11,000 to 15,000 square miles, adding that "when this is compared with the area actually occupied (probably not exceeding 400 square miles and one-fourth of these old placers") the latter will be found to comprise a mere mite of our available resources. With our present population of the mining districts and the broad expanse of territory over which they are spread, they appear like mere specks dotting the surface of an inland sea, so indistinct as scarcely to be appreciable on the broad expanse by which they are surrounded." Trask described the gold region as extending from the Oregon line north to the Kern River south — 460 miles long by from ten to 150 in width, and he classified the region into three distinct ranges — the Upper or Eastern, the Middle Placers and the Valley mines. It was in the second range that the greater proportion of the mining community was located, more particularly in the central and eastern portions. The third range comprised the districts among the foothills extending westward into the eastern edge of the plains of the San Joaquin and Sacramento three to five miles and having a linear distance of about 250 miles.
The valley mines were on what constituted the high terraces of the plains composed mostly of alluvial drift. They were the most shallow of any of the discovered