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Summary
Summary
A riveting portrait of the Gold Rush, by the award-winning author of Down the Great Unknown and The Forger's Spell .
In the spring of 1848, rumors began to spread that gold had been discovered in a remote spot in the Sacramento Valley. A year later, newspaper headlines declared "Gold Fever!" as hundreds of thousands of men and women borrowed money, quit their jobs, and allowed themselves- for the first time ever-to imagine a future of ease and splendor. In The Rush , Edward Dolnick brilliantly recounts their treacherous westward journeys by wagon and on foot, and takes us to the frenzied gold fields and the rowdy cities that sprang from nothing to jam-packed chaos. With an enthralling cast of characters and scenes of unimaginable wealth and desperate ruin, The Rush is a fascinating-and rollicking-account of the greatest treasure hunt the world has ever seen.
Author Notes
Edward Dolnick is the author of The Forger's Spell, Down the Great Unknown and Edgar Award-winning The Rescue Artist. A former chief science writer at the Boston Globe, he has written for The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. There are over 130,000 copies of his books in print. He lives with his wife near Washington, D.C.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This headlong narrative from former Boston Globe science writer Dolnick (The Clockwork Universe) covers the tumultuous years from the discovery of gold in California to the gold bubble's burst. Dubbed "a new history of the gold rush," it's new in its color and descriptive riches, all enlivened by the author's prose. However, it doesn't break any new ground, offer new explanations for the action-filled scenes Dolnick portrays, or change our view of the mad scramble for riches in California's rivers. Dolnick tapped into the diaries and memoirs of men and women of the era to bring brilliantly alive the experiences of so many thousands (1% of the U.S. population) who left the East Coast, Europe, and even Asia in the search for freedom (often found, if only briefly) and wealth (mostly never found). He also emphasizes the great irony that many of those who grew rich during the gold rush did so not from the panned gold but from provisioning the miners and camp followers with their necessities. Dolnick's compulsively readable story is one that's rarely been told better. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The miners of the California GoldRush didn't need law and order, toothpaste or running water. They needed acourse in money management.In a bit of nicely rendered irony,Dolnick (The Clockwork Universe:Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World,2011, etc.) closes this spirited account of the Gold Rush with a fiscalreckoning: The average miner earned a whopping $20 per dayno small sumat thestart of the rush in 1848, but only $6 per day toward the end in 1852. Whatthey made went through their fingers like water, but, writes the author, theyfound treasure of another kind in the freedom they enjoyed: "They had wokenevery morning in a shabby tent or a crude cabin and dreamed that they wouldfall asleep that night as rich as Croesus." The sentiment is a touch purple,given the damage the rush wrought on the landscapes of California and thepeople who lived among them. Nonetheless, Dolnick does a good job of locatingthe sentimental core of the rush and placing it in the context of its timejusta few years, he notes, after the word "millionaire" had been coinedto describe the "exotic creatures," no more than a dozen or so, who boasted thegreatest wealth the country had ever seen. The mere existence of the word wasenough to set dreamers' hearts to fluttering about becoming one of that dozenin the faraway fields of equally exotic California, a "half-unreal locale likeChina or Egypt." Dolnick draws on the best historiography and writes winninglyof the events in question, augmenting but not supplanting the many books thathave come before this one. Readers new to Gold Rush history willfind a bonanza hereand for old hands, Dolnick provides enough freshinterpretation to keep the pages turning. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
THE AMERICAN MINING FRONTIER burst on the scene with an undeniable frenzy in the spring of 1849. "No one," Edward Dolnick writes, "could have imagined how quickly the West would change." Shouts of "Gold!" would later be raised in such scattered locales as Bannack, Mont, Cripple Creek, Colo., and Nome, Alaska, but it all began in California near a place called Sutter's Mill. Had this first great gold rush occurred only a few years earlier, California might not have dropped so easily into the American orbit. Instead, a tidal wave of gold seekers propelled California to almost instant statehood, and anchored the United States on both coasts. The individual dreams and the myriad hardships they endured are the heart and soul of "The Rush." Dolnick, the author, most recently, of "The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World," quite appropriately divides his narrative into three parts: "Hope," "Journey" and "Reality." In mid-19th-century America, when one's path through life was relatively fixed by birth, gold for the taking offered the hope of something better. Those who went beyond idle fantasies and summoned the grit to journey thousands of miles found all routes to be perilous, whether overland by wagon train, through the jungles of Panama or round Cape Horn. The final stage - stark reality - awaited all who survived the journey. Relatively few of the tens of thousands who streamed to California managed to pick a fortune from the earth. By the end of the rush, many of those who came away rich did so not from labor in the mines but by providing services to the miners - as hoteliers, prostitutes, merchants, bankers and more. They mined the miners as readily as the miners themselves worked the ground. Relying on an impressive array of gold rush diaries and letters, Dolnick skillfully peppers his account with dozens of first-person quotations and experiences, though his focus is on the hopes, journeys and realities of five varied but engaging individuals. Luzena Wilson survived a flood in Sacramento and a fire in Nevada City to make a fortune in real estate. Alonzo Delano found no gold in the mines but garnered meager rewards as an author of gold rush literature. Grumpy Israel Lord returned to Illinois with little to show for his two-year adventure and again took up his medical practice. Jennie Megquier prospered running a San Francisco boardinghouse and then went back to Maine in 1851, only to have the lure of California pull her across the continent twice more. As for J. Goldsborough Bruff, this purposeful soul weathered an epic tale of wintry survival and spent two fruitless years in the diggings before returning to Washington, D.C., to resume work as a federal draftsman. Decades later, his obituary dwelt on his long government service but noted "one interregnum, when, in 1849, with other young men, he was stricken with the gold fever and started for California to amass a fortune. He was unsuccessful." "Here was a society," Dolnick writes of life in the mining camps, "that was cosmopolitan, rowdy, violent, brand-new, thrilled with itself when it was not horrified, exploding in size, knee-deep in wealth, with no entrenched leadership class but instead a churning, changing hierarchy based on fortunes newly made and newly lost" Such words resound as an articulate reprise of the historian Rodman W. Paul's landmark "Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848-1880," but Dolnick has also succeeded admirably in putting a decidedly personal face on these general characteristics and in the process he has produced a highly readable and graphic account of an episode that changed America. WALTER R. BORNEMAN'S most recent book is "American Spring: Lexington, Concord, and the Road to Revolution."
Library Journal Review
Dolnick (The Clockwork Universe) brings to life the giddy excitement and mortal dangers of the California gold rush of 1848-55. Beginning with an overview of a penny-wise America, Dolnick follows the gold rush fever as thousands began grueling journeys west, both over land and by sea, daring to claim fortunes for themselves and their families. Included are personal accounts as well as primary source citations of notable men and women of the era, such as entrepreneur Luzena Wilson and historian J. Goldsborough Bruff. These individual insights add zest and an occasional morose perspective to the larger overview of the time period. VERDICT Energetic writing and interesting research convey the state of America before, during, and after the social liberation caused by the sudden explosion of capitalistic wealth. The text clearly communicates the emotional highs and lows felt by the "forty-niners," as opposed to more academic political histories such as Leonard L. Richards's The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War. Warmly recommended for both general and academic readers with interests in California and Western history.-Nathan Bender, Albany Cty. P.L., Laramie, WY (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Prologue | p. 3 |
| Part I Hope | |
| Chapter 1 A Crack in Time | p. 7 |
| Chapter 2 "I Believe I Have Found a Gold Mine!" | p. 28 |
| Chapter 3 Headlong into History | p. 47 |
| Part II Journey | |
| Chapter 4 Swarming from All Over | p. 71 |
| Chapter 5 A Day at the Circus | p. 90 |
| Chapter 6 An Army on the March | p. 115 |
| Chapter 7 Let Us Glory in Our Magnificence | p. 135 |
| Chapter 8 A Rope of Sand | p. 157 |
| Chapter 9 Gone! | p. 175 |
| Chapter 10 Marooned | p. 186 |
| Part III Reality | |
| Chapter 11 First Peeks at the Golden Land | p. 207 |
| Chapter 12 Hard Times | p. 227 |
| Chapter 13 At Ease in a Barbarous Land | p. 248 |
| Chapter 14 Taking the Bread from American Miners | p. 257 |
| Chapter 15 The Princess and the Mangled Hand | p. 276 |
| Epilogue | p. 285 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 301 |
| Notes | p. 305 |
| Bibliography | p. 329 |
| Index | p. 341 |