Sierra County
Marshall's gold discovery was made in 1848, but the real boom of arrivals in the gold country didn't get well started until 1849. The early birds spread out through the foothills, taking gold where they found it and settling into established camps or starting their own.
By 1850 things were beginning to get crowded in the foothills. New arrivals had to push on through established camps and find their own new fields, make their own discoveries of places where gold lay thickly. They did, working ever more deeply into the Sierra Nevada range where the going was harder, the slopes steeper, the winters and the snows colder and deeper.
Just so one such party of prospectors, out to find their own path to riches, pushed on up the heights to where the ridges were higher and the slopes more precipitous, moving into country they thought never before visited. Wrong. There, by some happy accident, they stumbled across a keg of port wine, stowed for safekeeping by some provident forerunner. Or, perhaps, abandoned by some earlier pioneer headed West and desperate to lighten the load on his wagon there where the going was toughest.
Well. Gold was the first thing on all their minds, but you can bet drink ran a close second. The whole party gathered around, the cask was broached, the wine sampled. And sampled again and then again until it was gone. Night, and a need for sleep, overcame the party.
As is normal after overindulgence, when one of the party awakened early it was to find himself with a parched mouth and a demanding thirst -- for water. He went slipping and sliding downhill to the bottom of the canyon, on the side of which the big drunk had taken place. There, dividing the narrow space between two towering rocky walls, he found a trickle of water threading through mossy rocks and between the roots of ferns. And grasses. Found something else, too, that forced thirst from his mind, and everything else but the need to get back to get his gold pan. He panned out smooth, worn nuggets. All the ground on both sides of that trickling, chuckling stream were rich with them.
As could be expected, the settlement that grew there, populated by the original party and as many others as found out about it and could cadge a way in could only have one name.
That's right. It was called 'Port Wine.'
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