Gold Fever

On a cold January morning in 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall bent over a millrace in the Sierra foothills and picked up a pea-sized fleck of shining metal. Within a year the news had crossed oceans, and a quiet Mexican province was overrun by three hundred thousand strangers chasing the oldest dream of all: sudden, undeserved, life-changing fortune.

Gold Fever tells the full story of the California Gold Rush and the age of gold rushes it set off around the world. Here are the forty-niners who sailed around Cape Horn and died of fever crossing Panama; the Chinese, Chilean, Hawaiian, and Black gold-seekers who built the diggings and were taxed, robbed, and legislated against for it; the Native Californians whose world was shattered; the merchants named Levi Strauss and Wells and Fargo who got rich selling shovels while the miners went broke; the vigilantes who hanged men from San Francisco's rafters; and the water cannons that washed away whole mountains and buried the valley farms in mud.

From Coloma to the Comstock, from Ballarat to the frozen Chilkoot Pass, E.B Cohen braids adventure and reckoning into a single sweeping narrative — the boomtowns and the fortunes, the greed and the grit, and the long shadow of mercury and myth that the rush left on the modern world.