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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.” ....

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