Described as a "forest of masts," San Francisco's Gold Rush waterfront was a floating economy of ships and wharves, where a dazzling array of global goods was traded and transported. Drawing on excavations in buried ships and collapsed buildings from this period, James P. Delgado re-creates San Francisco's unique maritime landscape, shedding new light on the city's remarkable rise from a small village to a boomtown of thousands in the three short years from 1848 to 1851. Gleaning history from artifacts—preserves and liquors in bottles, leather boots and jackets, hulls of ships, even crocks of butter lying alongside discarded guns—Gold Rush Port paints a fascinating picture of how ships and global connections created the port and the city of San Francisco. Setting the city's history into the wider web of international relationships, Delgado reshapes our understanding of developments in the Pacific that led to a world system of trading.

Nothing set the world in motion like gold. Between the discovery of California placer gold in 1848 and the rush to Alaska fifty years later, the search for the precious yellow metal accelerated worldwide circulations of people, goods, capital, and technologies. A Global History of Gold Rushes brings together historians of the United States, Africa, Australasia, and the Pacific World to tell the rich story of these nineteenth century gold rushes from a global perspective. Gold was central to the growth of capitalism: it whetted the appetites of empire builders, mobilized the integration of global markets and economies, profoundly affected the environment, and transformed large-scale migration patterns. Together these essays tell the story of fifty years that changed the world.

A fascinating tour through BC’s historical gold rush trails, focusing on the nineteenth-century churches that were pivotal to the establishment of early settler communities. Much has been written about the Cariboo gold rush—from the trails and wagon roads to the rowdy mining camps, from tales of great luck to those of disappointment and despair. This book paints a different picture of those pioneer days. It is a guide to the nineteenth-century churches that were built during the gold rush or in the settlement days that followed. Most of these historic structures were handmade of local wood, though they differed greatly in size and style. Some are now abandoned, untenanted but still worthy of inspection. All were built to fill the spiritual need of the European migrants who flooded to the area, to nurture a sense of community that survived even after the gold was gone. Filled with beautiful colour photography and detailed maps, Pioneer Churches along the Gold Rush Trail highlights the history, geography, architecture, craftsmanship, and social context of dozens of gold rush–era churches, preserving them, in their varying states of decay, for posterity. While acknowledging the destructive forces of colonialism, including Christianity, on Indigenous Peoples, this book also examines the historical role of churches in community building and invites the reader to consider this dichotomy with an open and curious mind.

Between 1849 and 1853 shares in nearly 120 public companies to exploit the booming goldfields of California and Australia were offered to the British public. The companies were collectively capitalised at over £15 million, but in the end only some £1.75 million was actually raised between 42 of them, with only one company surviving what the newspapers of the day described as a ’gold bubble’. This book provides an overview of the entire bubble event, its antecedents and its outcomes. A number of researchers have investigated an earlier boom in the mid-1820s to reopen gold and silver mines in Latin America and several have studied individual company operations of that period. This is the first detailed investigation of the British gold bubble companies of the 1850s and their involvement in the almost simultaneous gold rushes on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

Winner of the Golden Kite Award for Nonfiction The remarkable tale of two young men during the Klondike Gold Rush, told through first-hand diaries, letters, and more—“excellent reading” for middle grade fans of The Call of the Wild and adventure stories (School Library Journal) As thousands head north in search of gold, Marshall Bond and Stanley Pearce join them, booking passage on a steamship bound for the Klondike goldfields. The journey is life threatening, but the two friends make it to Dawson City, in Canada, build a cabin, and meet Jack London—all the while searching for the ultimate reward: gold! A riveting, true, action-packed adventure, with their telegrams, diaries, and letters, as well as newspaper articles and photographs. An author’s note, timeline, bibliography, and further resources encourage readers to dig deeper into the Gold Rush era.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Zodiac, Auto Focus, and Black Fire. SO CLOSE TO SHORE, SO FAR FROM FORTUNE. WITH THE DISCOVERY OF GOLD, THEY CAME. San Francisco, 1849. Some arrived by land, but most came by sea. From packet to clipper, the first steamers, and even a stolen paddlewheeler, ships of every kind poured in through the Golden Gate. Packed to the gills with passengers and bursting to the brim with valuable cargo, they crowded Yerba Buena Cove. The perfect harbor in every way except one fatal flaw—its shallow waters offered no passage to shore. Fever overtook even the heartiest of men. Passengers and crew alike jumped ship and swam ashore. Within sight of their prize destination, a thousand majestic vessels were left adrift. Each incapacitated vessel’s fate locked in by the next. Some dedicated captains remained aboard these derelict hulks, in a short time forming a fantastic floating city, Graveyard Harbor. Families, commerce, intrigue, and crime all thrived and died within its skeletal framework. Among them were captains held hostage by their own cargo, families that could not afford nor find housing on land, criminals hiding out from the law, and their pursuers hot on their heels. A LANDLOCKED CAPTAIN. A KILLER WHO LOOKED LIKE CHRIST. HIS UNFORTUNATE DOPPELGÄNGER. THE BLOODTHIRST OF SAN FRANCISCO’S FIRST VIGILANTE SOCIETY. AND THE TEXAS RANGER TURNED SAN FRANCISCO SHERIFF. WOULD CRIME, JUSTICE OR VIGILANTISM PREVAIL? Illustrations by the author.

"The mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes bring to mind raucous mining camps and slapped-together cities populated by carousing miners, gamblers, and prostitutes. And yet many of the white men who went to the gold fields were products of the Victorian era: the same people popularly remembered as strait-laced, repressed, and order-loving. How do we make sense of this difference? Examining the closely linked gold rushes in California and British Columbia, historian Christopher Herbert shows that gold rushers worried about the meaning of white manhood in the near-anarchic, ethnically mixed societies that grew up around the mines. Their anxieties about reproducing the white male dominance they were accustomed to played a central role in the construction of colonial regimes. As white gold rushers flocked to the mines, they encountered a wide range of people they considered inferior and potentially dangerous to white dominance, including Indigenous people, Latin Americans, Australians, and Chinese. The way that white miners interacted with these groups reflected the distinct political principles and strategies of the US and British colonial governments, as well as the ideas about race and respectability the newcomers brought with them. In addition to renovating traditional understandings of the Pacific Slope gold rushes, Herbert argues that historians' understanding of white manliness has been too fixated on the Eastern United States and Britain. In the nineteenth century, popular attention largely focused on the West, and it was in the gold fields and the cities they spawned that new ideas of white manliness emerged, prefiguring transformations elsewhere."--Provided by publisher.