RON HENGGELER

September 23, 2007
Autumnal Equinox in the Marin Headlands

Excerpt from ELDORADO The California Gold Rush by Dale Walker. . .Published 2003

Walter Colton had heard of the gold discovery in May, regarding it then as “a flash of a firefly at night”, but on September 20, gathered some friends and pushed north to the mines, where, he wrote, “I jumped from my horse, took a pick, and in five minutes found a piece of gold large enough to make a signet-ring.” The next day he said he was “tearing up the bogs” with the other diggers, standing up to his knees in mud, splitting ledges apart and finding “particles of gold, resembling in shape the small and delicate scales of a fish.”
The successful miner he wrote, was “like the leader of hounds in the chase—the whole pack comes sweeping after, and are sure to be in at the death.” He estimated there were fifty-thousand people ”drifting up and down these slopes of the great Sierra, of every hue, language, and clime, tumultuous and confused.”
He became poetic: “I have walked on the roaring verge of Niagara, through the grumbling parks of London, among the majestic ruins of Rome, in the torch-lit galleries of Herculaneum, around the flaming crater of Vesuvius, through the wave-reflected palaces of Venice, among the barbaric splendors of Constantinople, but none of these, not all combined, have left in my memory a page graven with more significant and indelible than the gold ‘diggins’ of California.”

Photos by Ron Henggeler were taken from in the Marin Headlands on September 23. 2007, the Autumnal Equinox.

 

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