Staking Your Claim to Household Gold

That's Gold on them There Shelves!

"Quick and easy"is seldom quick and never easy.

"I have found it," announced James Marshall to the workers building a sawmill near Sacramento, California, on a near November day in 1847.

"What is it?" asked a perplexed laborer named William Scott.

"Gold," replied Marshall.

"Oh, that can't be," said Scott.

"I know it to be nothing else," replied Marshall.

Who could have guessed that this calm conversation between a handful of hard scrabble, poorly educated men struggling to survive in a sparsely populated territory 2,000 miles west of St. Louis, the western-most outpost of American civilization, would be the seed that sprouted the California Gold Rush, the greatest land migration of humans since the Crusades in the Middle Ages?

Lured by visions of easy riches, thousands of hopefuls spilled into the San Francisco area each week. They came on horseback. On sailing ships. On steam ships. On horse-drawn wagons. On ox-drawn carts. On mules. And, as last resort, on foot.

By 1853, more than a quarter of million people had migrated to San Francisco as a Gold Fever swept across the globe like a wind-blown virus. Tent cities sprung up overnight. And within months, the small, little-known port city of San Francisco exploded into a bustling, world-famous boom town.