Gold!
The Story of the 1848 Gold Rush and How It Shaped a Nation
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rosen, a former arts columnist for the New York Times and true crime writer, is out of his element in this mundane history. He proposes that the American character is dominated by an unrestrained desire to get rich quick, an affliction directly traceable to "when Polk's lips uttered the magic word 'gold!' " in his 1848 State of the Union address. According to Rosen " announcement let loose something primordial that had been lurking in the American character since John Adams had been a boy." But facts to support such broad premises are sorely lacking. Much of the book is true to Rosen's crime-writing roots, with chapters devoted to the lawlessness that pervaded the mining camps and lurid tales of notorious gold rush criminals. Rosen also speculates that Jesse James's predations were linked to the gold rush because James's father headed for California, leaving Jesse bereft of moral guidance. Rosen describes the toddler Jesse "in halting though plain language" begging his father not to go. Such melodrama, along with the lack of source notes and a very brief bibliography, put this in the category of history super-lite. 8 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.
