By a remarkable freak of fortune, about forty of the members of the
Mormon Battalion discharged at Los Angeles, were on hand at the time of
the discovery of gold in California. Divided into companies, they had
made their way northward, expecting to pass the Sierras before the
coming of snow. They found work at Sutter's Fort and nearby in the
building of a sawmill and a grist-mill and six of them (out of nine
employees) actually participated in the historic picking up of chunks of
gold from the tailrace they had dug under the direction of J. W.
Marshall. Sutter in after years wrote: "The Mormons did not leave my mill
unfinished, but they got the gold fever like everybody else." They mined
especially on what, to this day, is known as Mormon Island, on the
American River, and undoubtedly the wealth they later took across the
mountains did much toward laying a substantial foundation for the Zion
established in the wilderness.
Henry W. Bigler, of the gold discovery party, kept a careful journal of
his California experiences, a journal from which Bancroft makes many
excerpts. An odd error is in the indexing of the Bancroft volumes on
California, Henry W. Bigler being confused with John Bigler. The latter
was governor of California in 1852-55. A truckling California legislature
unsuccessfully tried to fasten his name upon Lake Tahoe. But the Mormon
pioneer turned his back upon the golden sands after only a few months of
digging, and later, for years, was connected with the Mormon temple at
St. George, Utah.
January 24, 1898, four of the six returned to San Francisco, guests of
the State of California in its celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of
the discovery of gold. They were Henry W. Bigler, Jas. S. Brown, Wm. J.
Johnston and Azariah Smith. A group photograph, then taken, is reproduced
in this volume. The others of the Mormon gold discoverers, Alexander
Stephens and James Barger, had died before that date.