Officials compelled some Californians to sell their holdings to establish the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park in 1948. Two families descended from enslaved people lost significant amounts of land. Now their relatives are demanding restitution.
that ended President James Polk’s expansionist war with Mexico, and that granted a huge swath of territory, including California and much of the American West, to the United States. Soon after, the gold rush started in earnest. Prospectors dismantled Sutter’s sawmill for scrap lumber. Marshall, despite his discovery, was out of a job. And the village of Coloma became a wild and dangerous frontier town, full of claim lawyers, gamblers, saloon owners, and other threats to a lucky miner’s wealth.
Finally, Burgess cites an aerial photo from the late forties showing most of the plots around Pearley Monroe’s land whitened by vast dredging trails. The photo, Burgess argues, proves that, five years after state officials forced Monroe to sell his land, boats had dredged both sides of the American River for gold tailings. He argues that the plots of land would be a source of generational wealth for his family if the state had not seized them.
Jonathan and Matthew both remember driving down to Coloma on family trips and hearing about their ancestors and the land around Sutter’s Mill. They also remember that, when they were kids—in the nineteen-seventies and eighties—there was a distinct lack of acknowledgment in the state park that Black families had existed, never mind thrived, in Coloma.
The Coloma case is less straightforward. The Burgesses cannot produce a continuous paper trail connecting Jonathan’s claim of massive Burgess landholdings in the eighteen-seventies to the nineteen-forties, when the eminent-domain proceedings began. “Right now, there’s no paperwork that has come up to show that we had more [land],” Jonathan Burgess admitted. “That is one-hundred-per-cent correct.
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