to guard their gold from the Russians. They were
not fierce at all, but rather as Sutter found them
- ' aux moeurs douces et faciles.'
Holinski tells of a laborer, a servant of the Rus- sian American Company in California, who one day went to the commandant with the story that he had seen gold in the bed of a stream, and advised that a party be sent to examine it. The man was told to mind his own business.
Add to the statement of Scala the testimony of Governor Alvarado, given in the first volume of his Historia de California, and it is almost certain that the Russians of Ross and Bodega were aware of the ex- istence of gold in the valley of California as early as 1814. During: the administration of Governor Ar- guello, Alvarado says that gold was found in the possession of a Russian, El Loco Alexis he was called. The man was in jail at Monterey at the time, impris- oned with three others, perhaps for drunkenness, or' for killing beaver, or, more likely, for being Russians. Alexis would not tell how or where he obtained the gold, and as he was shortly afterward sent to Sitka, nothing came of it. Alvarado does not hesitate to assert further that "we well knew of the existence of gold deposits on the slopes of the northern mountains, but the Indians, who were so much more numerous than we, prevented our exploring in that direction."
Because Phillips, in his Mineralogy, edition of 1818, spoke of gold in California, many thought he had knowledge of the existence of that metal in the Sierra foothills.
In the possession of the San Francisco Society of Pioneers is a stone tablet, indicating the discovery of gold on Feather river in 1818. It was presented to the society by W. F. Stewart in 1868, and is held in great estimation by the wise men of the day. The stone is of hard, yellowish, sandy texture, about twelve inches in length by an average of three inches
