crowbar and went to splitting the slate rocks which project into the ravine. I found between the layers, which were not perfectly closed, particles of gold, resembling in shape the small and delicate scales of a fish. These were easily scraped from the slate by a hunter's knife, and readily separated in the washbowl from all foreign substances. . . . There are about seventy persons at work in this ravine, and all within a few yards of each other. They average about one ounce [worth about $20] per diem each. They who get less are discontented, and they who get more are not satisfied. Every day brings in some fresh report of richer discoveries in some quarter not far remote, and the diggers are consequently kept in a state of feverish excitement. . . . Such is human nature; and a miserable thing it is, too, especially when touched with the gold fever. . . .

Monday, Oct. 16. I encountered this morning in the person of a Welshman, a pretty marked specimen of the gold-digger. He stood some six feet eight in his shoes, with giant limbs and frame. A leather strap fastened his coarse trousers above his hips, and confined the flowing bunt of his flannel shirt. A broad-rimmed hat sheltered his brawny features, while his unshorn beard and hair flowed in tangled confusion to his waist. To his back was lashed a blanket and a bag of provisions; on one shoulder rested a huge crowbar, to which were hung a goldwasher and a skillet; on the other rested a rifle, a spade, a pick, from which dangled a cup and a pair of heavy shoes. He recognized me as the magistrate who had once arrested him for a breach of the peace. Well, Señor Alcalde," said he, "I am glad to see you in these diggings. You had some trouble with me in Monterey; I was on a burster [drunk]; you did your duty, and I respect you for it; and now let me settle the difference between us with a bit of gold: it shall be the first I strike under this bog."... He struck a layer of clay: "Here she comes," he ejaculated, and turned out a piece of gold that would weigh an ounce or more. There," said he, "Señor Alcalde, accept that; and when you reach home . . . have a bracelet made of it for your good lady." He continued to dig around the same place, but during the hour I remained with him, found no other piece of gold-not a particle.

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The story of the discovery of the first particles of gold by James A. Marshall, a native of New Jersey, who was in the employ of a wealthy Swiss-American named Sutter, who had lumber mills near the present site of Sacramento City, is thus told by Sutter himself :

I was sitting one afternoon, just after my siesta, engaged bye-the-bye in writing a letter to a relation of mine at Lucerne, when I was interrupted by Mr. Marshall—a gentleman with whom I had frequent business relations - bursting hurriedly into the room. From the unusual agitation in his manner I imagined that something serious had occurred, and, as we involuntarily do in this part of the world, I at once glanced to see if my rifle was in its proper place. You must know that the mere appearance of Mr. Marshall at that moment in the fort was quite enough to surprise me, as he had, but two days before, left the place to make some alterations in a mill for sawing pine planks, which he had just run up for me, some miles higher up the Americanos [American Fork]. When he had recovered himself a little, he told me that however great my surprise might be at his unexpected reappearance, it would be much greater when I heard the intelligence he had come to bring me. "Intelligence," he added, "which, if properly profited by, would put both of us in possession of unheard-of wealth millions and millions of dollars, in fact." I frankly own, when I heard this I thought something had touched Marshall's brain, when suddenly all my misgivings were put an end to by his flinging on the table a handful of scales of pure virgin gold. I was fairly thunderstruck and asked him to explain what all this meant, when he went on to say, that according to my instructions, he had thrown the mill-wheel out of gear, to let the whole body of the water in the dam find a passage through the tail-race, which was previously too narrow for the water to run off in sufficient quantity. . . . By this alteration the narrow channel was considerably enlarged, and a mass of sand and gravel carried off by the force of the torrent. Early in the morning after this took place, he - Mr. Marshall — was walking along the left bank of

the stream, when he perceived something which he at first took for a piece of opal a clear, transparent stone, very common here glittering on one of the spots laid bare by the sudden crumbling away of the bank. He paid no attention to this; but while he was giving directions to the workmen, having observed several similar glittering fragments, his curiosity was so far excited, that he stooped down and picked one of them up. "Do you know," said Marshall to me, "I positively debated within myself two or three times, whether I should take the trouble to bend my back to pick up one of the pieces, and had decided on not doing so, when, further on, another glittering morsel caught my eye- the largest of the pieces now before you. . . ." He then gathered some twenty or thirty similar pieces. . . . He mounted his horse and rode down to me as fast as it would carry him, with the news. ... I eagerly inquired if he had shown the gold to the work-people at the mill, and was glad to hear that he had not spoken to a single person about it. "We agreed,” said the captain smiling, "not to mention the circumstance to anyone, and arranged to set off early the next day for the mill. On our arrival, just before sun-down, we poked the sand about in various places, and before long succeeded in collecting between us more than an ounce of gold, mixed up with a good deal of sand. . . . On our return to the mill we were astonished by the work-people coming up to us in a body, and showing us small flakes of gold.... Marshall tried to laugh the matter off with them, and to persuade them that what they had found was only some shining mineral of trifling value; but one of the Indians, who had worked at the gold mine in the neighborhood of La Paz, in Lower California, cried out oro! oro! We were disappointed enough, and supposed the work-people had been watching our movements, although we had taken every precaution against being observed by them."

THE OMNIBUS BILL

Probably no other speech ever delivered in the halls of Congress has stirred the moral feelings of our country more deeply or contributed more effectively to the passage

1

March 7,

of a great piece of legislation 1 than the famous seventh-of- 80. Ichabod (" where March speech of Daniel Webster on the compromise is the measures of 1850. The corridors, galleries, antechambers, glory?"), and even the floor of the Senate were packed with a throng 1850 eager to hear the foremost American orator on the foremost issue in American politics, when Webster began:

MR. PRESIDENT, — I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American, and a member of the Senate of the United States. . . . The imprisoned winds are let loose. The East, the North, and the stormy South combine to throw the whole sea into commotion, to toss its billows to the skies, and disclose its profoundest depths. I do not affect to regard myself, Mr. President, as holding or as fit to hold the helm in this combat with the political elements, but I have a duty to perform, and I mean to perform it with fidelity, not without a sense of existing dangers, but not without hope. I have a part to act, not for my own security and safety, for I am looking out for no fragment upon which to float away from the wreck, if wreck there must be, but for the good of the whole and the preservation of all. I speak today for the preservation of the Union. "Hear me for my cause.

" 2

1 "Henry Clay had thrown himself into the breach [with his compromise measures] but he was powerless without some efficient aid from the North. The leading Southern Whigs, such as Magnum and Badger and Dawson, rallied upon Mr. Webster, seized upon him, stuck to him, and finally brought him up to the mark. His speech on the seventh of March gave a new impulse to the compromise movement, and the whole country felt that the danger was substantially past."- New York Herald, April 13, 1852.

2 Webster realized that his plea for the compromise would cause him unpopularity. In the dedication of his speech to the people of Massachusetts he wrote: His ego gratiora dictu alia esse scio; sed me vera pro gratis loqui, etsi meum ingenium non moneret, necessitas cogit. Vellem equidem vobis placere; sed multo malo vos salvos esse, qualicumque erga me animo futuri estis ["I am aware that sentiments different from these would please you better; but the crisis compels me to prefer truth to complaisance, and thereto wins the consent of my whole nature. I confess that I should prefer to please you; but much more do I desire to see you saved, let it cost me what it will in your good opinion "].

[360]

Now as to California and New Mexico, I hold slavery to be excluded from those territories by a law even superior to that which admits and sanctions it in Texas. I mean the law of nature, of physical geography, the law of the formation of the earth. That law settles forever, with a strength beyond all terms of human enactment, that slavery cannot exist in California or New Mexico. . . . They are composed of vast ridges of mountains, of great height, with broken ridges and deep valleys. The sides of these mountains are entirely barren; their tops capped by perennial snow. . . . There are some narrow strips of tillable land on the borders of the rivers; but the rivers themselves dry up before the midsummer is gone. All that the people can do in that region is to raise some little articles, some little wheat for their tortillas [flour cakes], and that by irrigation. And who expects to see a hundred black men cultivating tobacco, corn, cotton, rice, or anything else, on lands in New Mexico, made fertile only by irrigation?

I look upon it, therefore, as a fixed fact . . . that both California and New Mexico are destined to be free, so far as they are settled at all, which, I believe, in regard to New Mexico, will be but partially for a great length of time; free by the arrangement of things ordained by the Power above us. .. And I will say further, that if a resolution or bill were now before us to provide a territorial government for New Mexico, I would not vote to put any prohibition into it whatever . . . I would not take pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance of nature, nor to reënact the will of God. I would put in no Wilmot Proviso for the mere purpose of a taunt or a reproach. I would put into it no evidence of the votes of a superior [stronger] power, exercised for no purpose but to wound the pride, whether a just and rational pride, or an irrational pride, of the citizens of the Southern States. . . .

Sir, wherever there is a substantive good to be done, wherever there is a foot of land to be prevented from becoming slave territory, I am ready to assert the principle of the exclusion of slavery. I am pledged to it from the year 1837; I have been pledged to it again and again1; and I will perform those pledges;

1 For Webster's position in 1837 see Muzzey, An American History, P. 337. In a speech in the Senate, August 12, 1848, on the exclusion of