The secret of the discovery of gold at John Sutter's fledgling sawmill near Coloma was a hard one to keep. In the end, an unopened bottle of brandy let the news escape.

James Marshall rode back to the fort to confer with Sutter about the gold Marshall had found at the American River site of an under construction a sawmill. Sutter said the gold must be kept secret until the sawmill was completed. Before leaving Marshall had pledged his workers to silence and urged them to keep working on the sawmill that was planned to provide lumber for a flour mill to be built at Sutter's Fort on the Sacramento River.

That was the way it was supposed to go.

"They continued with their tasks," Irving Stone writes in his monumental book "Men to Match My Mountains." All, that is, except young Henry Bigler."

Taking his rifle and saying he was going hunting, Bigler set off to look for gold. He dug up a full ounce in one day. Bigler was Mormon and he wrote to fellow Mormons at Sutter's Fort about the gold.

The secret was starting to leak out.

Jacob Wittmer drove freight wagons for Sutter. The teamster arrived at Coloma to hear a small boy tell an improbable tale: "We have found gold up here." Wittmer scoffed until the boy's mother gave him a sizeable nugget to prove the lad's tale.

Wittmer returned to Sutter's Fort after making his delivery of supplies to Coloma and stepped into a general store, where he ordered a bottle of brandy to wash away the harsh road dust. To pay he put the gift nugget on the counter. The proprietors refused to believe the nugget was genuine. Captain John Sutter was summoned to the store to settle the question.

"Sutter could not lie with the nugget staring back at him from the counter," Stone writes. "He confirmed the discovery."

One of the store's partners, who had doubted the authenticity of the nugget, was Sam Brannan. He would soon run through the streets of San Francisco shouting, "Gold! Gold on the American River!"

Two months after the discovery planks were coming off the line at the completed sawmill, but neither lumber nor flour held much interest for anyone any more. The crew Sutter had assembled to grind flour in his new mill quit and set out for the gold fields. Thousands of untanned hides at Sutter's Fort rotted as the tanners left to become gold miners. Sailors abandoned ships in San Francisco Bay to go look for gold and every menial laborer in that town fancied himself a soon-to-be millionaire as the Great California Gold Rush got underway.

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Copyright Don Baumgart, 2009