The saga of the early prospectors and all the others who made their mark during the Gold Rush. This historical visitor's guide includes recommended routes along Highway 49, dubbed the Mother Lode Highway, and many historical and full-color photos.

This comprehensive narrative history of the California Gold Rush describes daily life during this historic period, documenting its wide-reaching effects and examining the significant individuals and organizations of the time. It is easy to see the vestiges of the California Gold Rush in the state's modern culture. The San Francisco 49ers football team are named after the term given to those who flocked to California in 1849 in search of gold; California is nicknamed "The Golden State;" and the official state motto is "Eureka" meaning "I have found it" in Greek-a reference to mining success. But the Gold Rush was not only a pivotal event with lasting impact in California; it also greatly affected America as a whole and global society. This book examines the historical significances of the California Gold Rush, beginning with life in California prior to the Gold Rush and European colonization and concluding with information regarding contemporary California. Readers will gain historical insights from the highly detailed explorations of how life in California evolved and understand the enormous impact of an event over 160 years ago on present-day America.

David Baer Hackman (1827-1896) a Mennonite from Millport, Lancaster County, PA, traveled west to California in 1850, seeking his fortune during the great Gold Rush. David wrote many letters home concerning his crossing of the plains by wagon and his many detailed experiences in and around the gold fields of California. A vivid writer for such a young man, David captures images of the mining communities, the boom towns of Sacramento, Hangtown, Mokelumne Hill, Columbia and Sonora and the lawlessness found there. He writes of early San Francisco, the local Indians, trouble with bears, and the great trees of Calaveras County. His journal then captures his return trip in 1854 by steam ship to Panama, across the Isthmus and then to New York City. Lawrence Knorr presents the journal and letters in sequence along with their historical context, providing corroborating accounts where available. In all, an excellent primary source and piece of social history from one of the most exciting times in American history.

A riveting true account of gold rush fever in mid-nineteenth-century America, rich with the thrilling exploits of daring fortune seekers and dangerous outlaws America was never the same after January 24, 1848. It was on that day that a carpenter named James Marshall discovered a tiny nugget of gold while building a sawmill at Sutter’s Fort, just east of Sacramento, California. Marshall’s find ignited a fever the nation had never known before, drawing people from all over the country to the West Coast with high hopes of getting rich quick. Over the next six years, three hundred thousand prospectors raced to the California gold fields to make their fortunes, leaving their lands and families behind in order to chase a dream of easy wealth, but all too often encountering a reality of lawlessness, disease, cruelty, and death. A former columnist for the New York Times, author Fred Rosen takes readers back to the seminal moment when the American dream exploded. Chock full of fascinating details, unforgettable characters, and shocking real-life events, the captivating true story of the California gold rush brings an era of unparalleled change to breathtaking life. Rosen’s enthralling history of the gold rush of 1848 demonstrates how this golden ideal was supplanted by a culture of selfishness and greed that endures in America to this very day.

An American Book Award winner’s creative memoir “traces his own family's history, as well as the long story of Hispanics in America . . . Spirited writing” (Library Journal). People who live in California deny the past, asserts Alejandro Murguía. In a state where what matters is keeping up with the current trends, fads, or latest computer gizmo, no one has the time, energy, or desire to reflect on what happened last week, much less what happened ten years ago, or a hundred. From this oblivion of memory, he continues, comes a false sense of history, a deluded belief that the way things are now is the way they have always been. In this work of creative nonfiction, Murguía draws on memories—his own and his family’s reaching back to the eighteenth century—to (re)construct the forgotten Chicano-indigenous history of California. He tells the story through significant moments in California history, including the birth of the mestizo in Mexico, destruction of Indian lifeways under the mission system, violence toward Mexicanos during the Gold Rush, Chicano farm life in the early twentieth century, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s, Chicano-Latino activism in San Francisco in the 1970s, and the current rebirth of Chicano-Indio culture. Rejecting the notion that history is always written by the victors, and refusing to be one of the vanquished, he records, and draws us into, his own California history.