Henry Bigler’s Journal Settles the Gold Discovery Date — And Six Mormon Battalion Veterans Were There (January 24, 1848)

For decades after the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill, historians debated the exact date it occurred. The dispute was settled by the diary of a Mormon Battalion veteran.

Henry W. Bigler's entry for January 24, 1848 reads: 'Monday 24th this day some kind of mettle was found in the tail race that looks like goald.'

That misspelled entry — unpretentious, unrevised, written in the hand of a plain-spoken soldier who had just finished a 2,000-mile march — became the definitive primary source for one of the most consequential events in American history.

Bigler was not alone. Positively identified as present at the discovery were at least five other Latter-day Saints: James S. Brown, William James Johnston, Alexander Stephen, Azariah Smith, and possibly William W. Barger. The Wimmer family, also Latter-day Saints, was employed at the site. Elizabeth Jane 'Jenny' Wimmer — who had grown up near gold mines in Georgia — had told the men for weeks that the sediment in the water looked like gold dust. They had laughed at her.

After the discovery, Marshall asked all present to keep the gold secret until the mill was completed. John Sutter later wrote that when his other workers deserted him with projects unfinished and crops rotting in the fields, 'only the Mormons behaved decently at first. They were sorry for the difficulties in which I found myself, and some of them remained on to finish their jobs.'

The Battalion members — men who had already sacrificed a year of their lives on a march that asked everything of them — honored their word to a non-member employer even while gold glittered under the water at their feet.