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46 fornia about the year 1840. Silver was then the attraction, rather than gold. Men, women, and children talked about their ores very much as in later years stocks were discussed. Copper was about that time discovered at Soledad pass, some ninety miles north of Los Angeles.

The Quarterly Review of 1850 states that the English botanist, Douglas, was blamed for not having discovered gold on this coast after having travelled over so much of it, and that, too, when "the roots of some of the pines sent home to England were found to have small flakes of gold held together in the clotted earth still attached to them!"

Juan B. Alvarado says that the rings which he used at his wedding, in August 1839, were of California gold, and that his eldest daughter has still in her possession a golden ring fashioned in 1840 at Monterey from metal procured at San Fernando.

In his manuscript dictation, California 1841–8, John Bidwell remarks: "Among our party of 1841, the general opinion was that there was gold in the Rocky Mountains. Some trapper in the Black Hills had picked up a stone, and carried it with him for a whetstone, and in the pocket in which he carried the stone he found a piece of gold. My comrade, James John, before mentioned, actually proposed to me, while we were crossing the plains, to remain behind the company in the Bocky Mountains to hunt for gold and silver. It was almost a daily occurrence to see men picking up shining particles, and believing them to be something precious."

When James D. Dana, of the United States' exploring expedition entered California from Oregon, in 1841,—it is remarkable how many authors copy each other's errors, and write this date 1842,—he noticed that "the talcose and allied rocks of the Umpqua and Shasty districts resemble in many parts the goldbearing rocks of other regions, but the gold, if any there be, remains to be discovered." And on his re-