Prospecting Quotes
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Note the perception of Davis, typical of Southerners at the time, that Southerners were being excluded from California. The logic was this: California had many opportunities in land, gold, and other natural resources. Since California had a Constitutional provision against slavery, no Southerner could enter the new state with his slaves without fear of their being set free. If Southerners bought land or wanted to hunt for gold, they could not bring their slaves to do the heavy work. Therefore, they were excluded from the economic growth of the state. The idea of the whites doing the heavy work themselves of traveling without their family slaves was so foreign to the aristocratic planter class, that it was never considered by them as a possibility. Therefore, they were excluded. However, many of the lower class Southerners of all races saw great opportunities in California where they could compete on an equal footing even though they had no slaves or land.
Sherman then was a young officer assigned to the military command in California.
It was on his land that the first California Gold was discovered. In one of the great ironies, the California Star stopped publishing 4 days later. The staff had all run off to try and find gold.
The discovery started a white frenzy to prospect the Black Hills. The trouble was that the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie had guaranteed the Black Hills to the Lakota Sioux. The Army tried to keep the white gold seekers out, but it was too difficult and there was not great public support for honoring the treaty. So the army decided to buy the Black Hills from the Indians and open it to legal prospecting. But the Sioux refused to sell not wanting to trade their sacred land for money and having no interest in gold. So the whites broke the treaty and took the gold anyway. This led to the hostilities and the greatest Indian victory wiping out Custer and his men at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.