He arrived at Coloma on the 7th of March, and found the work at the mill going on as if no gold existed in the neighborhood. The next day he took a pan and spade, and washed some of the dirt in the bottom of the mill-race in places where Marshall had found his specimens, and, in a few hours, Humphrey declared that these mines were far richer than any in Georgia. He now made a rocker and went to work washing gold industriously, and every day yielded to him an ounce or two of metal. The men at the mill made rockers for themselves, and all were soon busy in search of the yellow metal. Everything else was abandoned; the rumor of the discovery spread slowly. In the middle of March Pearson B. Reading, the owner of a large ranch at the head of the Sacramento valley, happened to visit Sutter’s Fort, and hearing of the mining at Coloma, he went thither to see it. He said that if similarity of formation could be taken as a proof, there must be gold-mines near his ranch; so, after observing the method of washing, he posted off, and in a few weeks he was at work on the bars of Clear Creek, nearly two hundred miles north-westward from Coloma. A few days after Reading had left, John Bidwell, now representative of the northern district of the State in the lower House of Congress, came to Coloma, and the result of his visit was that, in less than a month, he had a party of Indians from his ranch washing gold on the bars of Feather River, twenty-five miles north-westward from Coloma. Thus the mines were opened at far distant points. The first printed notice of the discovery of gold, was given in the California newspaper published in San Francisco on the 15th of March. On the 29th of May the same paper, announcing that its publication would be suspended, says:--“The whole country, from San Francisco to Los Angelos, and from the sea-shore to the base of the Sierra Nevada, resound with the sordid cry of _gold! gold! gold!_ while the field is left half planted, the house half built, and everything neglected but the manufacture of picks and shovels, and the means of transportation to the spot where one man obtained one hundred and twenty-eight dollars’ worth of the real stuff in one day’s washing; and the average for all concerned, is twenty dollars per diem.” The first to commence quartz mining in California were Capt. Wm. Jackson and Mr. Eliason, both Virginians, and the first machine used was a Chilian mill. The Reid Mine, in North Carolina, was the first gold mine discovered and worked in the United States, and the only one in North America from which, up to 1825, gold was sent to the Mint. CHAPTER IX. DISCOVERY OF SILVER IN NEVADA, AND UNITED STATES GOLD AND SILVER STATISTICS.