When The World Rushed In was first published in 1981, the Washington Post predicted, “It seems unlikely that anyone will write a more comprehensive book about the Gold Rush.” Twenty years later, no one has emerged to contradict that judgment, and the book has gained recognition as a classic. As the San Francisco Examiner noted, “It is not often that a work of history can be said to supplant every book on the same subject that has gone before it.” Through the diary and letters of William Swain--augmented by interpolations from more than five hundred other gold seekers and by letters sent to Swain from his wife and brother back home--the complete cycle of the gold rush is recreated: the overland migration of over thirty thousand men, the struggle to “strike it rich” in the mining camps of the Sierra Nevadas, and the return home through the jungles of the Isthmus of Panama. In a new preface, the author reappraises our continuing fascination with the “gold rush experience” as a defining epoch in western--indeed, American--history.

A thorough, exhaustively researched history of the California Gold Rush retraces the monumental movement of more than thirty thousand fortune seekers who headed west to find gold in the 1840s. Reprint. (History)

In January of 1848, James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter's Mill in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. For a year afterward, news of this discovery spread outward from California and started a mass migration to the gold fields. Thousands of people from the East Coast aspiring to start new lives in California financed their journey West on the assumption that they would be able to find wealth. Some were successful, many were not, but they all permanently changed the face of the American West. In this text, Mark Eifler examines the experiences of the miners, demonstrates how the gold rush affected the United States, and traces the development of California and the American West in the second half of the nineteenth century. This migration dramatically shifted transportation systems in the US, led to a more powerful federal role in the West, and brought about mining regulation that lasted well into the twentieth century. Primary sources from the era and web materials help readers comprehend what it was like for these nineteenth-century Americans who gambled everything on the pursuit of gold.

Traces the history of the California Gold Rush from 1849 through 1884 when a court decision forced the shut down of the hydraulic mining operations, bringing decades of careless freedom to an end.

Traces the history of the California Gold Rush from 1849 through 1884 when a court decision forced the shut down of the hydraulic mining operations, bringing decades of careless freedom to an end.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize The world of the California Gold Rush that comes down to us through fiction and film is one of half-truths. In this brilliant work of social history, Susan Lee Johnson enters the well-worked diggings of Gold Rush history and strikes a rich lode. Johnson explores the dynamic social world created by the Gold Rush in the Sierra Nevada foothills east of Stockton, charting the surprising ways in which the conventions of identity—ethnic, national, and sexual—were reshaped. With a keen eye for character and story, she shows us how this peculiar world evolved over time, and how our cultural memory of the Gold Rush took root.