Marshall, a trapper by trade and frontiersman by inclination, accompanied General Sutter to California, assisted in the building of Sutter Fort and, on account of his mechanical ability, was sent to Coloma to superintend the erection of a sawmill.  It was in the mill-race that he picked up the nugget which made the name “California” the magnet for the world’s adventurers.  Unaware of the nature of his “find,” he took it to Sacramento, where it was declared to be gold.  He was implored by General Sutter to keep the mill operatives in ignorance of his discovery, for fear they should desert their work.  But how could such a secret be kept, especially by a man of generous and impulsive instincts?  At any rate the news leaked out and the stampede followed.

From Mr. Hooper’s account, Marshall was a very human character.  Late in life the state legislature granted him a pension of two hundred dollars per month.  This sum being far in excess of his actual needs, it followed as a matter of course that his cronies assisted him in disposing of it.  In fact, “Marshall’s pension day” became a local attraction, and the Coloma saloon — still in existence — the rendezvous.  These reunions were varied by glorious excursions to Sacramento, his friends in the legislature imploring him to keep away.  After two years the pension was cut down to one hundred dollars per mouth and finally was discontinued in toto — a shabby and most undignified procedure.  Opposite the saloon, at some little distance, is a conical hill.  For many years Marshall, seated on the steps of the porch, had gazed dreamily at its summit.  Shortly before his death, addressing a remnant of the “old guard,” he exclaimed:  “Boys, when I go, I want you to plant me on the top of that hill.”  And “planted” he was, with a ten-thousand-dollar monument on top of him!

The poor old fellow died in poverty at Kelsey, near Coloma, August 10, 1885, at the age of seventy-five.  It is a sad reflection that a tithe of the money spent on the monument would have comforted him in his latter days; for the blow to his pride by the withdrawal of his pension, still more than the actual lack of funds, hastened the end.

Mr. Hooper intimated that the population of Coloma diminished perceptibly after the termination of Marshall’s pension.  To common with the majority of the old miners, be saved nothing and never profited to any extent by the discovery that will keep his memory alive for centuries to come.

Coloma in its palmy days had a population variously estimated at from five to ten thousand souls, with the usual accompaniment of saloons, dance halls and faro banks.  There was a vigorous expulsion of gamblers in the early fifties and an incident occurred which quite possibly supplied the inspiration for Bret Harte’s “Outcasts of Poker Flat.”  A notorious gambler and desperado, and his accomplice, demurred.  Whereupon the irate miners placed them on a burro, and with vigorous threats punctuated by a salvo of revolver shots fired over their heads, drove them out of camp.  They disappeared over the hill upon which the monument now stands, and were seen no more.