On this Day, February 28, 1849, the first prospectors for the Gold Rush of '49 arrive in San Francisco. Gold was discovered by James Marshall on Sutter's Mill the previous year. Over 300,000 people, known as "forty-niners" (from year 1849), would go to California to seek their fortune.

James Wilson Marshall was born to Philip Marshall and Sarah Wilson on his family’s homestead in Hopewell Township, New Jersey on October 8, 1810. The family homestead was known as the Round Mountain Farm and is still known as Marshalls Corner. He was the oldest of four children, and the only son. He followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming a skilled carpenter and wheelwright.

At age eighteen, after his father died, James Marshall left New Jersey in 1834 and headed west. After spending time in Indiana and Illinois, he settled in Missouri in 1844, and began farming along the Missouri River near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. There, he contracted malaria, and in 1844, on the advice of his doctor, Mar...