By Steve Cottrell | Special to The Union
In the summer of 1850, when 20-year-old William Garratt dipped a pan in Deer Creek, he had no way of knowing that he would later manufacture one of the most famous gold objects in American history.
As a teenager, he worked alongside his father, who owned a brass foundry in Cincinnati. But when he heard about gold in California, he left Ohio, arriving in San Francisco on July 20, 1850. From there, he took a steamboat to Sacramento, then headed up into the mountains.
“When I made my first trip from Sacramento to Nevada City,” Garratt once wrote, “I was weighed and paid 12-1/2 cents a pound to ride there on a six-mule wagon, one of the conditions being I would walk up all the hills and help hold back the wagon on downgrades. There were eight or ten passengers,” he recalled, “and we all traveled on the same conditions.”