John Goller

John Goller (died 1874) was a pioneer settler in Los Angeles, California, as a result of the great gold rush of 1849, escaping with his life during a perilous crossing of the desert and claiming he had found prodigious gold deposits there. He owned a blacksmith and carriage-making business and was a member of the governing body of Los Angeles as well as a founder of the city's first gas company.

John Goller set out with other California Gold Rush pioneers from Galesburg, Illinois, on April 5, 1849, and traveled with them through Missouri and on to Salt Lake. From there, they began with others on the Southern Emigrant Trail on December 4, 1849, but later his party decided to strike out for California on an unrecorded route. The result: They made their way through a trackless desert, and many times they were without water and, for food, they had to eat their starving cattle. "They had no shoes now and wrapped their bleeding feet in pieces of hide which they spared from the cookpots." The emigrants, included two children, age 4 and 7, traveled through Death Valley, without water for long stretches, watching members of their party die. Eventually they found their way, haggard and hungry, to the Santa Clarita Valley, where they were welcomed, fed and given shelter.

And when Goller finally reached Los Angeles,

he was still loaded down with gold nuggets he had picked up in Death Valley . . . . John reported that where he found them he could have loaded a pack mule with gold . . . There must be a mine there, he said, of fabulous richness; and during the whole of his long and prosperous life in Los Angeles John Goller spent his spare time and money fitting out expeditions to search for his lost bonanza. The 'Goller Mine' is one of the real phantoms today in mining lore; . . . he had produced corroborating evidence in actual gold.

Goller was the father of a daughter, Christine, who was born in 1863 and was married to George Stephenson in 1886.

The porch roof of his wagon shop at the corner of Los Angeles Street and Commercial Street, which was a block south of Negro Alley, then part of Chinatown, was used as a lynching spot in the Chinese massacre of 1871, in which eighteen Chinese were confirmed dead. Aided by newly discovered documents from the Huntington Museum, John H. Johnson Jr. wrote for the LA Weekly 140 years later that:

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