Suspicion was now
excited, and the affair underwent a thorough examination, which elicited
the following facts: The convict, in the hope of obtaining his pardon as
a reward, had filed a guinea and some brass buttons, which, judicially
mixed, made a tolerable pile of gold-dust, and this he carefully
distributed over a small tract of sandy land. In lieu of the expected
freedom, his ingenuity was rewarded with close confinement and other
punishments. Thus ended the first idea of a gold-field in these
colonies.
Suddenly, in 1851, at the time that the approaching opening of the
Crystal Palace was the principal subject of attention in England, the
colonies of Australia were in a state of far greater excitement; as the
news spread like wildfire, far and wide, that gold was really there. To
Edward Hammon Hargreaves be given the honour of this discovery. This
gentleman was an old Australian settler, just returned from a trip to
California, where he had been struck by the similarity of the geological
formation of the mountain ranges in his adopted country to that of the
Sacramento district.
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