John Sutter did not found Sutter Creek in 1846 with a sawmill on the creek; researchers have found that by at least 1844 he had sent men into the Sierra foothills to a place about four or five miles north called Pine Woods. Pine Woods had no sawmill, but it did have whipsawyers who, from platforms and pits, sawed giant cedar and pine felled in the area into planks and lumber for flat boats and improvements at Sutter’s Fort. The outdoor manufactory there also produced charcoal, shingles, pumps, and barrel staves, and Sutter’s hired hands included Indians, overland immigrants, early California settlers, and at least one woman and her children, who traveled there on the trail created by Sutter’s wagons, now Highway 16 to Drytown. As Sutter’s empire grew, Pine Woods could not produce lumber fast enough, because whipsaws could not outcut a sawmill, so in 1847 he sent James Marshall to find another forest beside a stream large enough to power one. Marshall found such a place at Culloma valley, and in the race dug to divert the American River’s flow to that mill, gold was discovered in January 1848 at Coloma. Whether called a camp or a settlement, Pine Woods was surely the first non-Indian seasonal home in the lower Sierra, and without the search for a sawmill site on the creek, gold might instead have been discovered in the valley above Sutter Creek or at Pine Woods.