When military governor R.B. Mason visited the gold fields around Coloma in the late spring of 1848, he witnessed an estimated four thousand white and Indian miners in the gold fields extracting as much as thirty to fifty thousand dollars of gold per day. After his return to Monterey in June, he dispatched an officer to Washington with a report of the phenomenon. Accompanying the dispatch was a tea chest filled with samples.

It would be August before the news arrived on the East Coast. However, this and other early reports of the gold find were initially treated with skepticism by most major news papers; a small aside printed in theNew York Sun in October 1848 reported the gold discoveries, but somewhat skeptically included the aphorism "all is not gold that glitters." The readership was likewise hesitant. In his bookAmerican Alchemy: The California Gold Rush...