SeeCalifornia.com

The Holiday Season during the early days of the Gold Rush was for many a very harsh, lonely and difficult time to cope with. Miner Elisha Perkins wrote in his diary in 1849: “Oh, how I wish I could spend this day at home, what a Merry Christmas I would have and what happy faces I should see, instead of the disappointed set around me, Christmas Day was ushered in by the firing of guns…This is about the amount of celebration.”

Despite sadness and gloom for many miners, there was also optimism in California’s Mother Lode during the holiday season of 1849. Gold had been discovered a year earlier and miners were scampering to the Sierra Nevada foothills to make their fortunes. Some succeeded right away but even those who didn’t thought it would be only a matter of time before their labor paid off in gold.

Like his peers, William George Wilson was a hopeful miner in Auburn- Georgetown area northeast of Sacramento. Unlike most his fellow miners, Wilson brought his wife with him from Utah to the California gold fields. Women were such a rarity to the area that miners sometimes traveled several miles out of their way to catch a glimpse of Mrs. Wilson washing clothes in a stream.

But the miners were in store for a real treat that holiday season. On Christmas Day, Mrs. Wilson gave birth to a 12-pound boy- the first child to be born on Canyon Creek during the Gold Rush.  The Wilsons were a modest couple and kept the birth a secret. However, the child’s cries were heard by a couple miners who spread the rumor that the Wilsons found a 12-pound nugget, “the handsomest ever seen!”  Read A Golden Child is Born by author Craig MacDonald from his book, “Old West Christmas–Tales with a Twist”.