Graveyard Field Trips: A Memoir

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

 Before my parents came out to visit in August 1999, my mother told me that, instead of counting sheep one night when she couldn't sleep, she'd made a mental list of all the places in California I'd taken them. I'd lived in California for eleven years at that point, which was a lot of parental vacations. Because of that, this vacation presented a challenge.

The solution, as it turned out, was easy. 1999 was the 150th year since the California Gold Rush, so it was an excellent time to drive up to the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park to see the place where it all began.

I hauled out the guidebooks. Coloma, the ghost town at the heart of the park, is little more now than a handful of rebuilt buildings along Highway 49. 49, which turns off the main highway at Auburn, traces the original trail between the gold camps of the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode. The Complete Gold Country Guidebook listing for Coloma mentioned "two splendid churches" inside the park. I hoped that where there were churches, there would be churchyards. The question was: should I ditch my folks to go poke around the old graves?

The drive to Coloma was spectacular, winding high above the American River gorge, where a jogger was eaten by a mountain lion only a couple of years earlier. This continues to be wild country, despite the well-maintained highway and the canyon-leaping bridges. I tried to imagine what it would've been like one hundred and fifty years ago, when you had to ford the foaming river rapids to reach the relative civilization of Sacramento.

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When we stepped out of the air-conditioned car outside the State Park's Visitor Center, sunlight glanced off the parking lot as if it were a mirror. Mom pointed out where the asphalt was melting in the sun. No surprise then that after we'd finished exploring the little museum, I loitered in the gift shop, trying to soak up enough of the air conditioning to brave the blast furnace heat outside.

"Did you see this?" Mom wondered, handing me a paperbound booklet titled Coloma Cemeteries. So there were graveyards here! I paid the ranger for the book without even glancing through it.

Our exploration of the dead buried in California's first state park began a short drive up a hill to the Marshall monument. Towering above the valley, the monument was erected in 1890 to the memory of the man responsible for changing the territory to a state.

James Marshall made history when he picked a golden nugget out of the tailrace of Sutter's Mill on January 24, 1848. Sutter, perhaps foreseeing what would happen to his land once word got out, asked Marshall to keep quiet about the find. Of course, Sutter himself couldn't help mentioning it to Sam Brannan, a local Mormon shopkeeper, who collected a golden tithe from all the Mormon workers at the mill, then ran through the streets of San Francisco, flashing the vial and shouting, "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!"

A year passed before the rush became a torrent of immigrants. Sutter lost his land, his mill, and even his cattle to the gold seekers. Marshall, a spiritualist who believed that gold had vibrations that could speak to him, was hounded by men hoping he'd lead them to their fortunes. Both men died embittered and penniless.

Five years after Marshall's death in 1885, California decided to show its gratitude to the man who'd made the state's fortune. Tens of thousands of people came to the ceremony to dedicate Marshall's monument, including the Governor. It must have been the biggest day that Coloma had ever seen.

The monument towered over our heads, an obelisk of white marble and gray granite. A relief of the Amazon queen Califia, for whom California is named, and her grizzly bear decorated the side of the monument facing the river. Above them hung a bronze placer pan, pick, and shovel. On the monument's opposite side hung a bronze two-handed saw, a log scythe, and a plane: the carpentry tools with which Marshall had built the fateful mill. Below the tools was carved a relief of Marshall's rough wooden cabin, the buildings of Coloma, and Sutter's mill.