Collection: Directories and Documents > Historical Clippings

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Title: Historical Clippings Book (HC-20) Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Historical Clippings Catalog #: HC-20 # of Pages: 169 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Printed or handwritten: All printed text Date Scanned: 2025-03-18 14:05:04 Scanned By: Jim Moore Scanning Equipment: CZUR Book Scanner OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.5.0 Item Sourced From: JPGs First Created: 2025-03-26 01:20:17 Last Updated: 2025-03-26 01:20:17

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

Page: of 169  

OUR AMERICAN HERITAGE IN THE CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH Civitizea people have not lived on our Pacific Coast very long. Among all desirable homelands of the world, it was the will of Providence to hold this best one to the last, for Americans. Of this, the record of history speaks plainly. However, ahead of the coming of people to these shores, Nature was inspired at work through ages past, to prepare this region for their coming. It was ready with fertile valleys, under blue skies, pleasant rivers, a quiet coast line, timbered hills, all to the equal of any place in the world, and then for California—Gold was added in abundance. Many of the “ages old” records of Natural History showing this preparation, have been closely available to the people of Auburn in Central California. Just over the American River, at Hawver Cave, one of these records was interpreted by the faculty of the Department of Geology, University of California, during 1907 to 1909. From these discoveries, we know this Gold Rush region in prehistoric times, was a place where plain and forest met. It was inland, as now, from the Pacific Ocean, which ages earlier had beat against the ramparts of the Sierra Foothills ten miles to the west. Bison, deer, elk, camels, and herds of the little prehistoric three toed horse, roamed the open, fertile, grassy plains and Mastodons (the hairy mammoth) frequented the shaded forest borderland. Giant sloths were present in great numbers, where hills and caverns afforded them protection. From the forest, emerged the great carniverous beasts of prey, saber toothed tigers, dire wolves, cave bears and others. This cave record of the Auburn country goes back only a million years, during which a procession of centuries by the thousands with tremendous precipitation armed the present rivers with flooded gorges to cut their system of canyons and valleys as we know them today. The comparatively recent Ice Age cut and flooded a little more, but made lesser changes. This Auburn Cave Record says little about Man. He found his way there for the record, but only back to 10,000 years ago, and by then this specimen was similar to our American Indians. During the geologic eras, required for the erosion and breakup of a great land mass to form the gravel, sand, silt, and soil of California’s coast lands and central valleys; a provision of Providence for Americans, left behind a concentration of some of the particles of heaviest weight, including gold in the bottoms of both the ancient and modern stream and river channels. To this point, and with infinite detail, do the records here of nal a history, speak for California before the dawn of recorded _ To the good fortune of Americans, and can w i wise than by the care of the Almighty, Pedal ane Pacific Coast was slow to start. You can add together your memories of the historical events of this great region between the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Mountains, and the Pacific Ocean, and see if we do not travel along together with the conclusion, that of all areas in the great spaces of this world this one has been most preserved for mankind by this same Providence, with the blessing of Peace. There is no item of consequence in recorded or unrecorded history of this region, indicating sanguine and bloody conflict of races, the clash of arms, the maneuvering of armies, or of destruction by war. And of no other inhabitable portion of the globe is this. equally true. In more ways than one, to date, ours has been truly the Pacific Coast. : There are few countries in which the origin of a name is involved in as much mystery as California. There is nothing similar in any existing language in the world. It would be natural and expected for the name of this land to be Spanish and in the language of the discoverer; but instead historians tell us it is a compounded word manufactured of Greek and Latin syllables. It is unknown by whom the word was originated. Our first knowledge finds it in an almost forgotten historical romance published in Sevilla, Spain in 1510 when it was applied to a fictional island near to a terrestrial Paradise and peopled by Amazons. This old romance was very popular in its time and the name perhaps was a welcome one to Hernando Grixalva, one of Cortez’s officers of the Conquistadores, who first landed in Lower California after sailing northerly up the Gulf along the western Mexican Coast. Perhaps his use of the name California was intended to secure additional interest in his discovery for the attraction already created for fictional California by this popular romance. Certainly, we can agree four and a half centuries later that the attraction he sought has not lessened. At the very beginning California acquired a beautiful name. On mankind’s stage, fifty centuries passed with nothing of California history to bring any of the Heavenly Host, who might look this way, to the edge of their stadium seats on High. They could have leaned forward with mild interest in 1542, at the northward course of the little caravel of Don Juan Cabrillo, 2 Portuguese navigator, who first sailed up the coast of California carrying the banner of Spain. On September 28, 1542, he entered San’ Diego Bay and north from there he explored the Santa Barbara Channel Island and Monterey Bay. Still northward, he stayed out from the grip of the tide at the Golden Gate, or.