Bayard Taylor was among the thousands of young men who spilled into California in the tumultuous year 1849. Dispatched by Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, Taylor was to report on the madness, exuberance, and upheaval of the California gold rush. Traveling throughout the state, Taylor witnessed the explosive growth of San Francisco and the instantaneous creation of Sierra townships. He traversed the nearly deserted lands of the Spanish missions and attended the constitutional convention that set the boundaries and forged the laws for the new state.

Now newly introduced by James D. Houston, with annotations by Robert Senkewicz, this cornerstone of California literature is once again available to a wide audience. Roger Kahn (Boys of Summer), himself once a journalist with the New York Herald Tribune, provides an afterword.

Reviews

"With his keen eye and penchant for details, Taylor bestowed upon these tumultuous and anarchistic times an almost cinematic quality. Writing as he traveled, he managed to combine a sense of the poetic with straightforward historical documentation, underpinned with a wry sense of humor.... Widely regarded as a classic of western literature, Taylor's lively chronicle of the birth of modern California has lost nothing in terms of its initial freshness and vitality in the interim."—Rain Taxi Review of Books

"Of all books written about the Gold Rush and the Forty-Niners, Eldorado is one of the most compelling narratives....A California version of the Federalist Papers."—The San Francisco Chronicle