In 1838 a gay, mercurial Switzer, Captain Sutter, had made his way with a band of trappers across the plains to Oregon, and thence had gone to California. A dashing adventurer, without money, but with boundless _sang-froid_ and _bonhommie_, Sutter had marvellously interested all whom he met and in some inexplicable manner had got money and credit sufficient to build a fort and start an immense ranch on the Sacramento, almost on the site of the present capital of the Golden State. "Sutter's fort" became one of the most notable places in California. In 1844 James W. Marshall went to the Columbia, but after only a year's stay made his way to California. In 1847 he entered into partnership with Sutter in a sawmill enterprise at Coloma on the south fork of the American River. There, while at work in the mill-race on the 19th of January, 1848, Marshall discovered shining particles. Gold! The discovery was made, and soon the secret was out. And then--! There never was anything quite comparable to what followed. The first and greatest of the great stampedes for gold took place. When the tidings reached Oregon it was as though a prairie fire were running over the country. Men went fairly mad. Throngs, hardly stopping to take their ploughs from the furrow, mounted their horses, galloped off up the Willamette, through the lonely valleys of the Umpqua and the Rogue River, over the Siskiyou, and down the Sacramento, where a fortune could be had for the digging. All the stress and strain of American life and history reached the utmost intensity in the fever strife for gold on the Sacramento. The Willamette and Columbia were almost equally stirred. During the first two years of the gold excitement homes on the Columbia were well-nigh deserted. Then the Oregonians began to drift back again. Some came with gold-bricks in their pockets and sacks of gold-dust in their packs. Some came broken in health and spirits, sick with disappointment. Some did not come at all, and their bones found unmarked graves in the pestilential ditches of the Sacramento. But the shrewder Oregonians perceived that they had better than a gold mine in the trade with California. Grain, fruit, eggs, lumber,--these were in such demand that frequently twenty ships at a time were moored by the dense forests of the lower Willamette waiting for cargoes. Gold-dust was the universal medium, and it seemed to be cheaper than anything else. Four bushels of Oregon apples brought five hundred dollars in gold-dust in San Francisco. Tons of eggs were sold for a dollar apiece in the gold mines. Portland, the lonely little village on the Willamette, with just enough of a foothold by the edge of the forest to keep from rolling into the River, sprang at a bound into the rank of a city. The huge firs were dug out, and wharves went in. The face of nature, even, as well as that of industry and politics, was transformed by that gold-dust in Marshall's mill-race on the Sacramento.