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82 Sierra foothills who would then have turned their back on Mammon for the service of any other god.

After this the world came flocking in. The region round Marshall's mill soon swarmed with gold-seekers. Two thousand diggers were at work there, with knives, picks, shovels, sticks, tin pans, wooden bowls, willow baskets, and cradles, picking crevices, scraping rocky beds, riddling gravelly sand, and washing dirt for the metal. Shortly after there were some four thousand upon the ground, if we include natives, who were mostly employed by white men. It was then discovered that all about in the vicinity of Marshall's mill gold abounded. Virgin placers were found on Feather river, on Deer creek, on Yuba river. New discoveries followed in quick succession, each adding fuel to the flame. Every gulch and ravine was prospected, and there was scarcely a spot where gold was not, though not always in paying quantities. Finally the fact became apparent that all along the base of the Sierra, on every affluent of the Sacramento and San Joaquin, from one end of the great valley of California to the other, almost every rivulet, gulch, and canon was rich in gold.

"Some fifty thousand persons," writes one who deals largely in exaggeration, on the 8th of November, 1848: "are drifting up and down the slopes of the great Sierra, of every hue, language, and clime, tumultuous and confused as a flock of wild geese taking wing at the crack of a gun, or autumnal leaves strewn on the atmospheric tide by the breath of the whirlwind. All are in search of gold; and, with eyes diluted to the circle of the moon, rush this way and that as some new discovery, or fictitious tale of success may suggest." Says another in a letter to the New York Journal of Commerce, from Monterey under date of August 29, 1848, "At present the people are running over the country and picking it out of the earth here and there, just as a thousand hogs let