A native of Maine, Franklin Agustus Buck (1826-1909) was working in New York City when he heard of the gold strikes and set out for California in January 1849. A Yankee trader in the gold rush (1930) contains Buck's letters to his sister in Maine. They chronicle his first dozen years in the West: a voyage round the Horn to San Francisco; prospecting and storekeeping in various gold camps and the towns of Sacramento, Downieville, North Fork, Marysville, and Weaverville; and a trading voyage to Tahiti and Hawaii. Politics interest Buck, and he pays close attention to the issues in the 1852 election, local secessionist debate, and the impact of the Civil War. In the 1860s, Buck turns to agriculture, raising fruit and cattle at farms in Weaverville, Oakville, and Red Bluffs. Discoveries of silver lead him back to mining at Treasure City, Meadow Valley, and Pioche, Nevada.

Examines the interaction of capitalism and community in the founding of the gold rush city of Sacramento, and of the clashes between miners and city founders.

From the author of Hellacious California!, deeply human stories of the California Gold Rush generation, full of brutality, tragedy, humor, and prosperity. In less than ten years, more than 300,000 people made the journey to California, some from as far away as Chile and China. Many of them were dreamers seeking a better life, like Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, who eventually became the first African American judge, and Eliza Farnham, an early feminist who founded California's first association to advocate for women's civil rights. Still others were eccentrics—perhaps none more so than San Francisco's self-styled king, Norton I, Emperor of the United States. As Gold Rush Stories relates the social tumult of the world rushing in, so too does it unearth the environmental consequences of the influx, including the destructive flood of yellow ooze (known as “slickens”) produced by the widespread and relentless practice of hydraulic mining. In the hands of a native son of the Sierra, these stories and dozens more reveal the surprising and untold complexities of the Gold Rush. “Seamlessly fuses academic rigor, original reporting and emotional intensity into one meditation on an era.... If the task of the historian is to be faithful to lost truths, then Noy's latest exploration succeeds on every level, and does so in a way that will keep readers wanting to dig deeper into the past.”—Scott Thomas Anderson, Sierra Lodestar “An original and lively look at all the usual suspects, plus bears, weather, women, Joaquín, disappointment and dissipation…. Exhaustively researched and highly entertaining.”—JoAnn Levy, author of They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1948.

"Gold! Gold on the American River!" This declaration, shouted in the streets of San Francisco in the spring of 1848, electrified the nation, and its echo was heard in the farthest corners of the globe. In the five years that followed, tens of thousands of hopeful argonauts made their way to the vast territory on the Pacific conquered by the United States in its recent war with Mexico. They traveled overland from the Missouri River, their ox-drawn wagons crossing the Rocky Mountains, vast plains and deserts, and the formidable peaks of the Sierra Nevada. They journeyed by boat and on foot across the fever-ridden jungles of the Isthmus of Panama. They took ship from eastern seaports and sailed sixteen thousand miles via Cape Horn to the gateway of the goldfields, the new city of San Francisco. In Eldorado, award-winning historian Dale L. Walker presents the complete, often gaudy, always fascinating story of the California Gold Rush, the greatest mining bonanza in all of American history. The story ranges from the discovery by a New Jersey carpenter at a sawmill north of Sutter's Fort to the advent of large-scale hydraulic mining that spelled the ruination of the land and the end of the boom days when a Forty-niner with a pick and a pan found "colors" in a streamed and earned his wages-an ounce of raw gold a day. Walker's narrative of this pivotal event of American history is drawn from the lives and experiences of those "on the ground" in the rush, those who blazed the trails and settled the West in their search for the riches at the rainbow's end. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Along with the rapid expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, such innovations as photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in nineteenth-century society. The proliferation of visual prints, ephemera, spectacles, and technologies transformed public values and perceptions, and its legacy was as significant as the print revolution that preceded it. Consuming Identities explores the significance of the pictorial revolution in one of its vanguard cities: San Francisco, the revolving door of the gold rush. In their correspondence, diaries, portraits, and reminiscences, thousands of migrants to the city by the Bay demonstrated that visual media constituted a central means by which people navigated the bewildering host of changes taking hold around them in the second half of the nineteenth century, from the spread of capitalism and class formation to immigration and urbanization. Images themselves were inextricably associated with these world-changing forces; they were commodities, but as representations of people, they also possessed special cultural qualities that gave them new meaning and significance. Visual media transcended traditional boundaries of language and culture that divided diverse groups within the same urban space. From the 1848 conquest of California and the gold discovery to the disastrous earthquake and fire of 1906, San Francisco anticipated broader cultural transformations in the commodification, implementation, and popularity of images. For the city's inhabitants and sojourners, an array of imagery came to mediate, intersect with, and even constitute social interaction in a world where virtual reality was becoming normative.