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Gold Rush
A Literary Exploration
Edited by Michael Kowalewski
500 pages (6 x 9), with b&w photos, illustrations
Trade paper, ISBN: 0-930588-99-1, $18.48
Published in conjunction with the California Council for the Humanities.
Winner of the 1998 Award of Merit from the American Association of State and Local History
The news of gold in California beckoned people from every continent on earth. This astonishing and instant migration would leave its mark forever on California and, indeed, the entire world. Taking a comprehensive look at the excitement, unrest, exploitation, and romanticism of the California gold rush, this unique and authoritative anthology combines firsthand accounts by the participants themselves and retrospective writings by later authors with dozens of historical photographs, cartoons, and other illustrations.
Long sea voyages, arduous overland trips, life in early, bohemian San Francisco, and the feudalism of late gold rush society - all are vividly described in the words of those who experienced them. The writings of well-known authors like Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Dame Shirley, Henry David Thoreau, and Jack London blend with less familiar voices - Native Californians, Jews, immigrants from Asia, South America, and Europe, and women. Modern authors such as Bill Barich, Czeslaw Milosz, and Gary Snyder offer contemporary perspectives on the gold rush's environmental, economic, and cultural legacies. Together, these rich writings evoke the spirit and emotions of this legendary era. |
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Reviews:
"A remarkable gathering of the very best writings that encompass the gold rush, before, during, and after."—Dr. J. S. Holliday, author, The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience
"For both the general reader and specialists, this collection is a delightful treasure trove of information and insight."—Booklist
"An extraordinary read, bringing fresh life to a legendary era."—James D. Houston, author, Californians: Searching for the Golden State
"Thanks to this elegant anthology, the Gold Rush can, at long last, be fully appreciated as an occasion and stimulus to much fine writing. Here, cumulatively, are the inner meanings and enduring reverberations of that founding epic."—Dr. Kevin Starr, State Librarian of California, author, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915
"This splendid selection of voices from the past provides evocative testimony to the greed, excitement, courage, curiosity, despair - the gamut of human emotion and enterprise - that characterized the California gold rush. Kowalewski's first-class assemblage of diverse first-person witnesses captures wonderfully the tumultuous drama of the time."—JoAnn Levy, author, They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush |
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Table of Contents
Before the Rush
Marie Potts, The Northern Maidu
Garci Rodriguez Ordonez de Montalvo, Las sergas de Esplandian
Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast
John Bidwell , Echoes of the Past
William H. Thomes, On Land and Sea in 1843, '44, and '45
Lansford Hastings, The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California
Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Recuerdos historicos y personales tocante a la alta California
Edwin Bryant, What I Saw in California
James W. Marshall, Marshall's Own Account of the Gold Discovery
John Sutter, The Discovery of Gold in California
Getting There
Peter Browning, Editor, To the Golden Shore
George D. Dornin, Thirty Years Ago
Bayard Taylor, El Dorado
James L. Tyson, Diary of a Physician in California
James R. Starkey, Letter to Frederick Douglass
Hannchen Hirschfelder, Letter from California
A. C. Ferris, B. To California in 1849 Through Mexico
Alonzo Delano, Life on the Plains and among the Diggings
Sarah Royce, A Frontier Lady
William L. Manly, Death Valley in '49
J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed In
Rachel Ann Brown, Letters from Home
John Carr, Pioneer Days in California
James P. Beckwourth, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth
J. Goldsborough Bruff, Gold Rush
Gold Rush Life
Andrew Freeman, The Arrival of Whites
Thomas 0. Larkin, Letter to James Buchanan
William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of General William T. Sherman
Walter Colton, Three Years in California
Joseph Warren Revere, A Tour of Duty in California
William Newell, The Glories of a Dawning Age
Brigham Young, Discourses
Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Recuerdos historicos y personales tocante a la alta California
Mining Camps of the Gold Country
Daniel B. Woods , Sixteen Months at the Gold Diggings
Alonzo Delano, California Correspondence
Felix Wierzbicki, California as It Is, and as It May Be
Vicente Perez Rosales, Viaje a California
Ernest de Massey, A Frenchman in the Gold Rush
William Perkins, Journal of Life at Sonora
James H. Carson, Early Recollections of the California Mines
Sarah Royce, A Frontier Lady
William Downie, Hunting for Gold
Charles B. Gillespie, A Miner's Sunday in Coloma
Anonymous, The Gold Rush Songbook
J. D. Borthwick, Three Years in California
George Horatio Derby, Phoenixiana
Ygnacio Villegas, Boyhood Days
John Rollin Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta
Joseph Heco, The Narrative of a Japanese
Frank Marryat, Mountains and Molehills
William Taylor, Story of My Life
John M. Letts, California Illustrated
Daniel Wadsworth Coit, Digging for Gold Without a Shovel
John Carr, Pioneer Days in California
Friedrich Gerstacker, Narrative of a Journey Round the World
William Joseph, Indian Boy Hanged for Stealing Gold
William T. Coleman, San Francisco Vigilance Committees
Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, Shadow and Light
Tse Chong-Chee , Letters to Tsi Chow-Choo
Jerusha Merrill, Letters from San Francisco
Louise Clappe, The Shirley Letters
Chauncey L. Canfield, Editor, The Diary of a Forty-Niner
James M. Hutchings, The Miners' Ten Commandments
Charles Dickens, Editor, The Household Narrative of Current Events
Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life
Ida Pfeiffer, A Lady's Second Journey Round the World
John Steele, In Camp and Cabin
Mary Ballou, I Hear the Hogs in My Kitchen
Pierre Garnier, Voyage Medical en Californie
Hinton Helper, The Land of Gold: Reality Versus Fiction
Eliza Farnham, California In-Doors and Out
Georgiana Bruce Kirby, The Journal of Georgiana Bruce Kirby, 1852-1860
James Clarke, An Emigrant of the Fifties
Bernhard Marks, A California Pioneer
Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Twenty-four Years After
Legacies
J. Ross Browne, Crusoe's Island
Prentice Mu!ford, California Culinary Experiences
Mark Twain, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Bret Harte, The Luck of Roaring Camp
Mark Twain, Roughing It
Bret Harte, Dickens in Camp
Joaquin Miller, Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History
Wong Sam and Assistants, An English-Chinese Phrase Book
Hubert Howe Bancroft, California Inter Pocula
Clarence King, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevadas
Charles Nordhoff, California for Health, Pleasure, and Residence
John Muir, The Mountains of California
Frank Norris, McTeague
Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain
Robert Frost, A Peck of Gold
Marlon K. Hom, Editor, Songs from Gold Mountain
Blaise Cendrars, Gold
G. Ezra Dane, Ghost Town
Curt Gentry, The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California
Stephen Birmingham, California Rich
Janice Gould, History Lesson
Ruthanne Lum McCunn, Thousand Pieces of Gold
Wendy Rose, Questions for a Miwok Uncle: Ahwahneechee Man
Czeslaw Milosz, On the Western
Bill Barich, Big Dreams
Thurston Clarke. California Fault
David Rains Wallace, The Klamath Knot
Gary Snyder, What Happened Here Before
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Editor Biography:
Michael Kowalewski is an associate professor of English and American Studies at Carleton College in Minnesota. A native Californian who grew up in Redding, he has been teaching and writing about California for the past decade, both at Carleton and at Princeton University. His essays and reviews have appeared in more than a dozen periodicals. He is the author, among other works, of Deadly Musings: Violence and Verbal Form in American Fiction (1993) and the editor of Reading the West: New Essays on the Literature of the American West (1996). |
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