For four months these men worked at Coloma, seeing no visitors, and rarely communicating with the fort. The mill had been nearly completed, the dam was made, the race had been dug, the gates had been put in place, the water had been turned into the race to carry away some of the loose dirt and gravel, and then had been turned off again. On the afternoon of Monday the 24th of January Marshall was walking in the tail-race, when on its rotten granite bed-rock he saw some yellow particles and picked up several of them. The largest were about the size of grains of wheat. They were smooth, bright, and in color much like brass. He thought they were gold, and went to the mill, where he told the men that he had found a gold mine. At the time little importance was attached to his statement. It was regarded as a proper subject for ridicule. Marshall hammered his new metal, and found it malleable; he put it into the kitchen fire, and observed that it did not readily melt or become discolored; he compared its color with gold coin; and the more he examined it, the more he was convinced that it was gold. The next morning he paid another visit to the tail-race, where he picked up other specimens; and putting all he had collected, about a spoonful, on the crown of his slouch hat, he went to the mill, where he showed them to the men as proof of his discovery of a gold mine. The scantiness in the provision supply gave Marshall an excuse for going to the fort, though he would probably not have gone at this time if he had not been anxious to know Sutter's opinion of the metal. He rode away, and, according to Sutter's diary, arrived at the fort on Friday the 28th. Sutter had an encyclopedia, sulphuric acid, and scales, and with the help of these, after weighing the specimens in and out of water, he declared that they were undoubtedly gold. [Illustration: Sutter's Mill, the scene of the gold discovery.] The first record of the discovery, and the only one made on the day of its occurrence, was in the diary of Henry W. Bigler, one of the Mormon laborers at the mill. He was an American by birth, then a young man, and afterwards a citizen of St. George, Utah. He was in the habit of keeping a regular record of his notable observations and experiences, selecting topics for remark with creditable judgment. His journal kept during his service in the Mormon battalion and his subsequent stay in California is one of the valuable historical documents of the State. On the 24th of January, in the evening, Bigler wrote in his diary, "This day some kind of mettle was found in the tail-race that looks like goald." The artless arrangement of ideas, and the ungrammatical phraseology, accompanied by the regular mental habits that demanded a diary, and the perception that enabled him to catch with his pen the main facts of life as they passed, add much to the interest as well as to the authority of his diary.