California's Shortest Highway: CA 153

Because of its small length and obscurity, relatively little is known of its history. It was given an Legislative Route Number (LRN 92) in 1933, but it wasn't signed then, and no one is sure when it first started to be (probably post-1964). This is a shame, because CA 153 goes through a part of California with a rich history, and I do mean rich, for it runs up to the monument to James Marshall, the man who discovered gold in nearby Coloma in 1848 -- the beginning of the California gold rush.

Since we don't have a great deal of road to talk about, let's talk about the man, since his biography is unusual and striking. James Wilson Marshall was born in Lambertville, New Jersey in 1810 (his childhood home is now a local landmark). Leaving New Jersey as a young man after the death of his father, he settled in Missouri but contracted what appeared to be malaria and left for parts further west on the suggestion of his physician. Falling in with an emigrant band, he eventually reached John Sutter's fort in the summer of 1845.

Sutter, for his part, had a similarly interesting past and we will dovetail our stories of the two men. John Sutter was born Johann Augustus Sutter in Baden, Germany in 1803. Abandoning his native land after an accumulation of debt, he emigrated to the United States in 1834 and through a circuitous route of travels ended up in the poor Mexican outpost of Yerba Buena (today's San Francisco) in 1839. Still part of Mexico in those days, Sutter petitioned Californian governor Juan Bautista Alvarado for a land grant, and following his conversion to Mexican citizenship, Alvarado allowed him to settle on a 48,000+ acre holding near what is now Sacramento. Sutter's settlement (which he christened "Nuevo Helvetia" [New Switzerland]), became a major regional focus and served as the destination for many frontier-bound settlers and explorations (including the ill-fated Donner Party, and John C. Fremont's expeditions in the West; see US 395 Part 2).

When Marshall arrived in 1845, Sutter hired him on as a carpenter and workman and in return also provided him with livestock for his own holdings that Sutter helped him purchase. This idyll didn't last long, as the Mexican-American War raged in earnest by 1846; Marshall volunteered for service, and served under (now) Captain Fremont, but came back home in 1847 to find his livestock gone and livelihood ruined. Sutter hired him back and gave him an assignment to scout for an appropriate location for a sawmill. Marshall settled on a site about 40 miles away along the south fork of the American River, in a valley referred to by the local Nisenan Indians as cullumah ("beautiful"). Sutter gave him the job of building it as well, but because the mill's tailrace was too shallow for the volume of water needed to drive the saw, Marshall put the river itself to work and every night used the river's water current to do further excavation. In the mornings, Marshall would examine the results, block further flow, and call for further work by his labourers (a motley collection of various Indians, Mormons, Mexicans and others); at night, with the workers out of harm's way, the river would again be released. In this way, Marshall continued to supervise the work on the mill until January of 1848.

On or around the 24th, Marshall found some strange glittering flecks in the channel bed. Not merely specks of metal, they were large enough to be flattened between rocks, and only one substance had that malleable property and shiny yellow hue: gold. Marshall found the initial yield to be underwhelming but allowed his men to prospect in their free time, dutifully reporting the find to Sutter who assayed the gold and found it of superior quality.

Naturally, Sutter had no intention of releasing this information, for two reasons: first, the gold itself, and second, doing so might jeopardize their investment in the mill as small gold finds had already occurred several times before. There seemed no reason to Sutter to cause a stampede believing this was the "big one." However, more kept cropping up and a Mormon elder named Samuel Brannan was able to get some of it as a tithe from the Mormons working on the project. For whatever his reasons, Brannan chose to literally walk down the streets of San Francisco waving his gold around in a quinine bottle while shouting "Gold! Gold from the American River!" to anyone in earshot. Tens of thousands of people descended en masse on the territory, trampling Sutter's hard-won local utopia in a avalanche of squatters, prospectors and ne'er-do-wells; as for the mill, it eventually sat idle as those who would have operated it dropped everything to try their luck. In all, the 1848 gold rush yielded 125 million ounces of gold by 1900.

Both Sutter and Marshall ended their lives cursed by the glittering metal. In danger of losing everything to the invading settlers, Sutter handed control to his son John Augustus, Jr., who founded the new city of Sacramento on the river of the same name (named for the Spanish word for the holy sacrament [specifically the Eucharist] by explorer Gabriel Moraga). Unfortunately, the elder Sutter was insulted that the town was not placed closer to New Helvetia, even more so that it was not named for him, and most of all that the town was a rapid success (chartered in 1849 and named capital of California in 1854). Injury was added to insult when Sutter's original grant was challenged by the Squatter's Association and eventually ruled invalid by the United States Supreme Court in 1858. Sutter never got his land back, and from his new home in Pennsylvania continued to petition the government for redress for his losses. He was finally granted reimbursement in 1880, but he never lived to receive much of it, for he died that same year.

Marshall did no better and his behaviour during the boom was incongruous, even to the point of publicly claiming that he had special powers to locate the gold himself. As one might expect, this wild claim instead caused him to be endlessly followed, then threatened when his avowed power predictably failed, and eventually forced from his land by the prospectors. He did not return to Coloma until 1857 when he purchased holdings and unsuccessfully tried his hand at running a vineyard. Eventually, he too went into mining and partnered in a quartz mine around present-day Kelsey (off modern CA 193 to the east) which later failed as well. The California legislature offered him a pension for several years due to the historical significance of his discovery, which Marshall used to open a blacksmith shop and pay off his debts, but this also lapsed after rumours circulated about his personal habits and voluminous alcohol intake; he eventually lived out the rest of his life virtually penniless in a small cabin near Kelsey. On his death in 1885, he was laid to rest near his vineyard and in 1890 a monument was erected on his grave with Marshall pointing to the location of his discovery. The modern state park was commissioned in 1942.

The mill does not survive today, but a replica still stands; because of the rich history of the region, we will not only look at CA 153, but also parts of CA 49 (which runs through the park), the modern mill replica, some of the local buildings, Marshall's monument, and what is left of his last living years. (Huell Howser? What are you doing here?)

Photographs taken March 2006.