A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
In honor of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, our series America In Pursuit explores culture, history and objects in American life. Next up, NPR's Clare Lombardo takes us back to Sutter's Mill in 1848.
CLARE LOMBARDO, BYLINE: California is not even a state yet. And in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains outside of Sacramento, a man named James Marshall is constructing a water-powered mill when he sees something shiny.
ANTHEA HARTIG: The lore is that he picks it up, bites on it - because, of course, gold is soft - and is convinced that it is gold.
LOMBARDO: He was right. Anthea Hartig is the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. The next question - can the U.S. even claim that gold?
HARTIG: The United States just received the territory. The ink is barely dry in the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
LOMBARDO: Ending the Mexican-American War and annexing much of Mexico for the U.S. But the answer, apparently, was yes, and the gold rush was on.
HARTIG: It will completely change the trajectory of United States history. It eradicates the landscapes and the native peoples of that part of California. It turns San Francisco into a boomtown.
LOMBARDO: It pushed forward California statehood.
HARTIG: President Lincoln, you know, 15 years later would credit California's gold with winning the Civil War 'cause it literally funded the Union Army.
LOMBARDO: That first flake of gold was already at the Smithsonian by then, sent to the still-new institution in 1861.
HARTIG: I think in part because of the impending Civil War. They wanted to try and keep specimens, geological specimens and especially this speck of gold safe.
LOMBARDO: This summer, that tiny speck is sitting on a tiny black pillow like a ring inside of the Smithsonian Castle in Washington, D.C., in a special exhibit called "American Aspirations." But it didn't transform the life of the man who found it.
HARTIG: Marshall, in particular, kind of slipped a bit into obscurity.
LOMBARDO: A flake of gold found by a man who never profited from it on soil that had just been taken from Mexico - a quintessentially American story.
Clare Lombardo, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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