Before my parents came out to visit in August 1999, my mother told me that, instead of counting sheep one night when she couldn't sleep, she'd made a mental list of all the places in California I'd taken them. I'd lived in California for eleven years at that point, which was a lot of parental vacations. Because of that, this vacation presented a challenge.

The solution, as it turned out, was easy. 1999 was the 150th year since the California Gold Rush, so it was an excellent time to drive up to the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park to see the place where it all began.

I hauled out the guidebooks. Coloma, the ghost town at the heart of the park, is little more now than a handful of rebuilt buildings along Highway 49. 49, which turns off the main highway at Auburn, traces the original trail between the gold camps of the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode. The Complete Gold Country Guidebook listing for Coloma mentioned "two splendid churches" inside the park. I hoped that where there were churches, there would be churchyards. The question was: should I ditch my folks to go poke around the old graves?

The drive to Coloma was spectacular, winding high above the American River gorge, where a jogger was eaten by a mountain lion only a couple of years earlier. This continues to be wild country, despite the well-maintained highway and the canyon-leaping bridges. I tried to imagine what it would've been like one hundred and fifty years ago, when you had to ford the foaming river rapids to reach the relative civilization of Sacramento.

*

When we stepped out of the air-conditioned car outside the State Park's Visitor Center, sunlight glanced off the parking lot as if it were a mirror. Mom pointed out where the asphalt was melting in the sun. No surprise then that after we'd finished exploring the little museum, I loitered in the gift shop, trying to soak up enough of the air conditioning to brave the blast furnace heat outside.

"Did you see this?" Mom wondered, handing me a paperbound booklet titled Coloma Cemeteries. So there were graveyards here! I paid the ranger for the book without even glancing through it.

Our exploration of the dead buried in California's first state park began a short drive up a hill to the Marshall monument. Towering above the valley, the monument was erected in 1890 to the memory of the man responsible for changing the territory to a state.

James Marshall made history when he picked a golden nugget out of the tailrace of Sutter's Mill on January 24, 1848. Sutter, perhaps foreseeing what would happen to his land once word got out, asked Marshall to keep quiet about the find. Of course, Sutter himself couldn't help mentioning it to Sam Brannan, a local Mormon shopkeeper, who collected a golden tithe from all the Mormon workers at the mill, then ran through the streets of San Francisco, flashing the vial and shouting, "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!"

A year passed before the rush became a torrent of immigrants. Sutter lost his land, his mill, and even his cattle to the gold seekers. Marshall, a spiritualist who believed that gold had vibrations that could speak to him, was hounded by men hoping he'd lead them to their fortunes. Both men died embittered and penniless.

Five years after Marshall's death in 1885, California decided to show its gratitude to the man who'd made the state's fortune. Tens of thousands of people came to the ceremony to dedicate Marshall's monument, including the Governor. It must have been the biggest day that Coloma had ever seen.

The monument towered over our heads, an obelisk of white marble and gray granite. A relief of the Amazon queen Califia, for whom California is named, and her grizzly bear decorated the side of the monument facing the river. Above them hung a bronze placer pan, pick, and shovel. On the monument's opposite side hung a bronze two-handed saw, a log scythe, and a plane: the carpentry tools with which Marshall had built the fateful mill. Below the tools was carved a relief of Marshall's rough wooden cabin, the buildings of Coloma, and Sutter's mill.

At the very top of the monument stood a statue of Marshall himself, pointing down at the river to the place where he'd found the first gold. The park's visitor center contained a watercolor portrait of Marshall done from life, so a record exists of what he actually looked like. All the same, the man on the monument was shrouded by a beard and shadowed by a large soft-brimmed hat. He was fairly anonymous, the Everyman Forty-Niner.

One of the park's signs said that this spot was chosen for the monument because it was Marshall's grave. I read elsewhere that he'd died in nearby Kelsey, where his body was packed in ice for the journey back to Coloma. Nowhere have I found an explanation of why Marshall wasn't buried in the pioneer cemetery down in the valley. I wondered if the ground around the monument had ever been consecrated. I wondered if impoverished Marshall had had any marker at all before the state stepped in to build this monument.

*

The afternoon was growing old as I parked the car in the lot below the Pioneer Cemetery. Golden as antique jewelry, sunlight slanted through the deep green leaves of the black oak trees. The cemetery was away from the traffic on Highway 49, away from the kids panning for gold in the cold American River, away the heat-stunned adults shuffling from one historical plaque to the next through the ghost town of Coloma.

The heat had taken a toll on my father, who napped in the shady car as I wandered among the old graves. With the sun sinking behind the foothills, it must have cooled down to the mid-nineties. Seeing the lovely old grave markers revitalized me.

The cemetery had borne a variety of names, but was founded as the Sutter's Mill Cemetery in 1848. All of the original wooden markers have vanished in the intervening years. The oldest remaining gravestone dates to 1849. A century and a half is not old in the scope of Europe or Japan, but it marks the earliest years of the significant American presence in California.

Before 1851, marble for headstones and other uses had to be brought from Vermont or Italy. Such a long delivery made marble prohibitively expensive, so most monuments were simply shaped out of wood. In 1851, a Sacramento stone mason discovered native marble in the Sierra Mountains. From that point on, reasonably wealthy mourners could commemorate loved ones in a more permanent way.

Now, in the late afternoon sun, listening to the birds singing and the hum of the insects, I tried to imagine the California these pioneers had known. It must have seemed like the edge of the earth. In the terrible winter of 1846-47, the Donner Party had been trapped by twenty-two-foot snows near Lake Tahoe, in the mountains not too far from here. Like the mountain lion outside of Auburn, the Donners resorted to eating human flesh to stay alive. Wild country, and dangerous, in which to raise a family and make a living. Could anything other than greed have sparked such a migration?

After Marshall retrieved his glittering rock in January 1848, people flooded in from all over the world. The names in the graveyard ranged from Rasmusson to Sakurai, Papini to LeGuerre, McGonagle to Teuscher. The rough camp of Sutter's Mill was transformed into a little wooden town and renamed Coloma. At its height, the town served as home to three thousand men, women, and children.

A town of any size requires a place to honor its dead. The difficult conditions — hellish heat, frigid winters, overcrowded inadequate shacks, a diet of beans, and the backbreaking labor of standing all day in bone-chilling water to scoop up pan after pan of gravel in hopes of finding a fortune — took a predictable toll. According to the Coloma Cemeteries booklet I picked up in the gift shop, the Pioneer Cemetery has over six hundred known burials in four to five hundred graves.

Since 1990, a preservation society has made it their work to label as many graves as they can. Small bronze plaques with names and dates, if known, are set in concrete on some of the graves. Others have only a wooden obelisk with a typed paper label.

As I strolled around, brown leaves crackled under my feet. I made a quick circuit of the graveyard, unwilling to make my parents wait while I looked as long as I would've liked. Finally, when I glanced down from the crest of the hill, I saw my mom sitting, gazing, at a pair of headstones. I scrambled down to join her.

"What do you make of this?" she asked. "The mother died first, and then the baby."

The gravestone that had captured Mom's attention was a simple arched marble tablet, decorated with a low relief of a right hand in a clownishly large cuff. The hand's index finger pointed upward, while the other fingers curled around the broken stem of a rosebud. To the Victorians, a broken rose symbolized a life ended too soon. Harriet A. Beck had died on July 5, 1870, aged twenty-seven years, nine months, and five days.

Our first suspicion was childbirth. However, to the left of Harriet's headstone was the simple rectangular marble block that marked the grave of John Beck Jr., who died July 10, 1870, aged two months. The sad little marker's only decoration was a single wilted long-stem rose carved atop the block of stone. He'd outlived his mother by five days.

"It could've been an epidemic," I suggested. "Cholera or even the flu."

By 1870, the easy gold at Coloma had been pretty well harvested. The town's population dropped to two hundred souls. Did Harriet's husband stay to visit the graves year after year? Or did he move on, chasing his fortune, leaving his wife and son buried here above a ghost town? And why did the pair touch my mother's heart?

That's the thing I like best about graveyards: they provide such endless food for thought. The faceless shadows of the past become real when you stand before their graves and puzzle over their lives.

Graveyards also make me appreciate the present company all the more. I gave Mom a hug as we went back to the car to wake Dad.

***

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" was originally published on Gothic.Net in August 1999.