California Gold Rush In the cold morning hours of January 24, 1848,
James Marshall, a construction foreman at Sutter’s Mill, was inspecting the water flow through the mill’s tail race. The sawmill, on the banks of the American River in
Coloma,
California, was owned by
John A. Sutter, who desperately needed lumber for the building of a large flour mill. On that particular morning,
Marshall not only found the water to be flowing adequately through the mill, but also spied a shiny object twinkling in the frigid stream. Stooping to pick it up, he looked with awe at a pea-sized gold nugget lying within his hand.
He immediately went to visit Elizabeth Jane "Jennie" Wimmer, the camp cook and laundress, who had grown up in a prospecting family.
Ms. Wimmer used a lye soap solution overnight to verify that the 1/3 ounce nugget
Marshall had found was true gold. Dubbing it the Wimmer Nugget, which was later appraised at $5.12,
Marshall gave it to her on a necklace. It would later be displayed at the Columbian Exposition of 1893.
