It is sure cold up here in Coloma in this part of Northern California.

It's the 24th of January in 1848, and we've been tasked with repairing the sawmill for

Sutter's fort.

His ragged crew of local natives, plus a couple Mormons from the battalion come up from the Mexican

War.

Our foreman, James Marshall, he also volunteered in the war,

but he is here now making his daily inspection.

As we toil away on the structure,

I watch him pace the tail race of the mill, checking the flow.

But suddenly he stops, noticing something in the stream of water.

Bends over, reaches down, and fishes out something small, holding it up in the sunlight.

Even from where I stand, I could see the glimmer of a thing in Mr. Marshall's hand,

and an utterly dumbfounded look on his face. Seems impossible. Unthinkable. But there

it is. Mr. Marshall just discovered gold. Hello and welcome to American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman and we are happy you're listening.

Back when the Earth was young and forming, say about 2 billion years ago, meteors plummeting

to the planet's still soft surface carried within them heavy metals forged by distant

super high energy astronomical phenomena.

Dying stars exploding, supernovas, neutron star collisions, kilonovas, all this outer space

mayhem, the theorized source of the elements so greedily desired here

on Earth, especially gold. It's really rather magical to think about it. At first buried deep within the Earth's crust, eons later,

magma from volcanic eruptions furry the material back to the surface,

depositing nuggets of the stuff across the earth in places where one day humans would

...