![\"img\"](\"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/images\/agchild.jpg\")
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The Holiday Season during the early days of the Gold Rush was for many a very harsh, lonely and difficult time to cope with<\/a>. 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\u2026This is about the amount of celebration.”<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0Some 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0Women 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0The Wilsons were a modest couple and kept the birth a secret. However, the child\u2019s cries were heard by a couple miners who spread the rumor that the Wilsons found a 12-pound nugget, \u201cthe handsomest ever seen!\u201d \u00a0Read A Golden Child is Born<\/strong><\/em><\/a> by author Craig MacDonald from his book, “Old West Christmas–Tales with a Twist”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14840"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}