In January 1848, six Mormon men bunked together in a small wood
cabin along the South Fork of the American River in Cullumah, as
the Nisenan named the land where they had lived for thousands of
years, meaning “beautiful valley.”
The men, part of the U.S. Army Mormon
Battalion, had traveled from Iowa to San Diego to fight in the
Mexican-American War, which, fortuitously or not, was close to an
end upon their arrival. The war allowed the victorious United
States to acquire more than 500,000 square miles of Mexican
territory from the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean. Undeterred,
the men headed north to become laborers at John Sutter’s sawmill