history nugget of the day:

In 1839, an opportunistic Swiss merchant named John Sutter successfully petitioned the Mexican governor of San Francisco for a land grant of nearly 50,000 acres in the San Joachin Valley at the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers. His intention was to found a colony based on farming and trade, and, for nearly a decade, he was successful. Sutter's luck ran out, however, on January 24, 1848, when John Marshall, a contractor building a mill for Sutter, pulled a few nuggets out of the stream, turned to his workers, and said: "Boys, I believe I've found a gold mine."

More interested in farming and in running his colony than in gold, Sutter was at first put out by the find. He anticipated trouble if the word got out, but gradually warmed to the idea of having wealth that wasn't counted as land or goods. Sutter and Marshall became partners in a mining operation and asked their men to keep the gold a secret. For the better part of a year, they did. Even the few newspapers that got the story in 1848 dismissed it at first as the propaganda of speculators.

But by the end of 1848, the word of California gold had spread across the country. Newspapers in the east were trumpeting the story, and even President James K. Polk acknowledged the discovery in an address to Congress. The year 1849 quickly became synonymous with gold fever, and before it was over, more than 80,000 "'49ers" had arrived in California in search of gold, swelling the territory's population to 100,000.

Sutter eventually was overwhelmed by the tide he had released. Workers consumed by "gold fever" abandoned his fields in droves, leaving his crops to rot. Newcomers trampled his land and stole his cattle and timber. Sutter petitioned the American government for restitution, but received very little money because his original land grant had come through the Mexican government. His plans and his farming colony ruined, Sutter moved east, ending his days in a small town in Pennsylvania.