Gold River Gunman — Robert M. Johnson

1850. It was the beginning of something that would define America for 100 years. Gold had been discovered in California and word spread like wildfire across the United Colonies of America. The treaty that had acquired California into the American Union was signed two years earlier when no one yet knew the importance of the gold discovered at Sutter's Mill in January 1849. From Sacramento all the way down to Mariposa and Monterey, the territory of California seemed to be one long Gold field. California in 1850 was a boiling, seething, frontier mass of humanity. People had come by the tens of thousands from all over the world, mostly from the Eastern American Colonies, to seek their fortune in the Goldfields. Three Rivers held the secrets of the gold rush, the American, the Sacramento, and the Merced Rivers. They were the RIVERS OF GOLD. John Charles Fremont had taken advantage of the fragile land situation in California during the transition from Mexican rule to American management. The Mexican government had wanted desperately to entice nobles from Mexico City to take over large land grants in the California territory and begin to establish the feudal model they hoped would bring stability to the area. When the transition occurred between the Mexican rule and the American, it was the most natural thing in the world to respect these subdivisions, especially in more remote territories. Along the Merced River in Mariposa County in Southern California, it seemed right therefore to put these large land grants up for sale to the first American bidders. One such parcel was bought by John Charles Fremont and his partner Thomas Larkin for a small amount of money. They gained a large land-grant, a tract of land that was seventy miles square, along the Merced River and at the foothills of the Yosemite Mountains. Time would prove this to be one of the great real estate acquisitions the new state of California would ever see. Historically, it would make John Fremont a millionaire many times over. John Charles Fremont and his partners had purchased an enormous land-grant along the southern end on the East of the Merced River. Bordered by the Sierra Mountains to the east, the vast property of what had come to be known as Fremont Enterprises, posed a problem of significant legality. In 1850, California territory became the state of California, the thirty-first state in the Union and John Charles Fremont, owner of this considerable land-grant along the Merced, became the first senator representing California in Washington. Fremont was a man who had become a thorn in the side of Washington politicians because of the issue of slavery, which he opposed vehemently. While he was preoccupied in this way, setting the course for California in American history, his land-grant was being managed by men he had come to trust. Two men in particular helped to manage the rich gold deposits of his property: Jeremiah Warner, his field manager, and Alex Godey, who managed the actual mining itself. The story you are about to read is a snapshot of what happened on the rough-and-tumble frontier of the Goldfields. It is the Seventeenth volume of the Mountain Man Series, the excitement of the frontier continues in Gold River Gunman.