On This Day: March 9th

On March 9, 1842, Francisco Lopez, the uncle of Antonio's second wife, Jacoba Feliz, took a rest under an oak tree in Placerita Canyon and had a dream that he was floating on a pool of gold. When he awoke, he pulled a few wild onions from the ground finding flakes of gold in the roots.

Contrary to some portraits of him as a farmer who stumbled upon his discovery by dumb luck, Lopez had studied mineralogy at the University of Mexico and had been actively searching for gold. Evidence suggests that gold had previously been found in the area about thirty years prior, but the Lopez gold find was the first popularly documented incident in the area.

This sparked a gold rush on a much smaller scale than the 1849 California Gold Rush. About 2,000 people, mostly from the Mexican state of Sonora, came to Rancho San Francisco to mine the gold.

Knowledge of the gold find seems to have remained largely within Mexican territory. John Sutter, who sided with Gov. Manuel Micheltorena during the governor's power struggle with former Gov. Alvarado, was imprisoned after the californio insurrectionists won the Battle of Providencia in 1845. After his release, he headed north through Placerita Canyon, saw the mining operation, and was determined to search for gold near where he later established Sutter's Fort; the latter in Mexican territory.

During the Mexican-American War, Del Valle destroyed the mine to prevent the United States from gaining its control.

The tree where Lopez took his nap is now known as the "Oak of the Golden Dream" and is registered as California Historic Landmark #168.

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