Week 7: Gold Rush

If I were to pick a time period to go back to it would go back to the year

1848, specifically January 24.  I was out helping James W. Marshall build a sawmill for John Sutter, when we saw a gold nugget go floating by in the American River. We decided to quit for the day and do a little bit of investigating before telling the public about the gold nugget. We were unlucky the first day, so we came back again. We did not find anything the next day, so James decided to go into town and tell the local appraiser, to see what we could get out of that tiny nugget. When we got there, he saw the piece of gold and started to ask many questions. We kept on giving very general descriptions on the location that we found it, so he would not hunt for it. He never told us how much it was worth, but he got a mysterious smile on his face. I thought that he figured out, so after we left we waited outside to see what he was going to go do. He stopped at his home to change clothes before heading out. Then he went and found where we found the piece of gold.   A few weeks later there were over a thousand people creeping around in the river and everywhere around it. They were all looking for the gold. What had happened was that we told Greg (the appraiser), who told his wife Bitsy. Once one person knew they began to spread it, and before you knew people in the east part of the nation were heading into our direction. I knew that we should not have told the appraiser, but it was too late to do anything else.