The Lost Gold Lake (Stoddard)

Gold Lake rush of 1850 (California folklore)

The Gold Lakes region lies in the shadow of the Sierra Buttes, about 60 miles northeast of Nevada City and Grass Valley along Highway 49, a basin of small mountain lakes in what is now called the Lost Sierra. Its name is an insult, given in 1850 by a mob of disappointed miners.

It began with Thomas Robertson Stoddart, whose name was so often spelled Stoddard that it is misspelled even on his headstone. Most of what is known about him he told himself: soldier of fortune in the Greek war of independence, newspaper editor, schoolmaster. He reached California by a northern wagon route in the fall of 1849 and turned up, injured and exhausted, at a camp on the North Fork of the Feather River, separated from the party he had travelled with. He carried several large gold nuggets, worth eight to $25 apiece in 1850 money, and a story. He and his companions, he said, had found a lake of 10 to 15 acres high in the mountains, its shore and moss so rich in gold that nuggets shone up from the bottom, until Indians attacked and killed everyone but him.

The story ran through Northern California, and by late May 1850 Stoddart was leading an expedition into the mountains from Nevada City, followed by hundreds of men who had not been invited; more than a thousand would head for the hills in the end. He soon seemed lost, zigzagging from one small lake to the next and recognising none of them. At last he pointed at a lake many times the size of the one he had described and said it looked like the one. It held no gold. The furious party named it Gold Lake in derision, and the name stuck. Pushing on into a mountain valley, they gave Stoddart an ultimatum: find the lake within 24 hours or hang. That night he slipped away.

The fever only grew. Rumours spread down the mountain that the lake had been found, and thousands left Nevada City and Marysville. Businesses shut, miners left their families, Marysville emptied, and newspapers printed stories of Indians with fishhooks of solid gold and a sheet of gold floating on a lake. The lake was never found, but the searchers scattered through the streams and forks around it and made strike after strike, and the Lost Sierra became gold country for decades.

Stoddart went back to mining around Downieville, later wrote the Early Annals of Downieville and the Annals of Tuolumne County, and swore until his dying day that he had seen Gold Lake. His obituary called him its discoverer.