Crossing the Continent to the California Gold Fields PDF Download

Author: Riley Senter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : California
Languages : en
Pages : 30

View

Book Description

Author: Malcolm J. Rohrbough
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520922077
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

View

Book Description
On the morning of January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall discovered gold in California. The news spread across the continent, launching hundreds of ships and hitching a thousand prairie schooners filled with adventurers in search of heretofore unimagined wealth. Those who joined the procession—soon called 49ers—included the wealthy and the poor from every state and territory, including slaves brought by their owners. In numbers, they represented the greatest mass migration in the history of the Republic. In this first comprehensive history of the Gold Rush, Malcolm J. Rohrbough demonstrates that in its far-reaching repercussions, it was the most significant event in the first half of the nineteenth century. No other series of events between the Louisiana Purchase and the Civil War produced such a vast movement of people; called into question basic values of marriage, family, work, wealth, and leisure; led to so many varied consequences; and left such vivid memories among its participants. Through extensive research in diaries, letters, and other archival sources, Rohrbough uncovers the personal dilemmas and confusion that the Gold Rush brought. His engaging narrative depicts the complexity of human motivation behind the event and reveals the effects of the Gold Rush as it spread outward in ever-widening circles to touch the lives of families and communities everywhere in the United States. For those who joined the 49ers, the decision to go raised questions about marital obligations and family responsibilities. For those men—and women, whose experiences of being left behind have been largely ignored until now—who remained on the farm or in the shop, the absences of tens of thousands of men over a period of years had a profound impact, reshaping a thousand communities across the breadth of the American nation.

Author: Sabrina Crewe
Publisher: Gareth Stevens
ISBN: 9780836833935
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 36

View

Book Description
The California Gold Rush.

Author: Alonzo Delano
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803266490
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

View

Book Description
Lured by ?the astonishing accounts of the vast deposits of gold in California,? Alonzo Delano (1806?74) of Ottawa, Illinois, bid farewell to his wife and children and joined the rush to El Dorado. For the next five months?April to early September 1849?he persevered in writing his remarkably detailed diary, recounting his experiences among the more than thirty thousand goldseekers representing all thirty states who struggled across half of the continent to California?s ?gold fields.? With each entry the reader is drawn into the changing circumstances, from a hurried trailside burial of a comrade to a defense against an Indian attack; from suffering thirst in the desert to anger at a lazy campmate. ø Unlike most diarists who at the end of the epic journey gave up their demanding task, Delano continued his vivid account until the summer of 1851. He went on to report as a professional journalist, ranging far and wide across the scenes of life in the diggings and the cities, from prospecting along the Yuba River to witnessing lynch law in San Francisco. ø First published in 1854 as Life on the Plains and among the Diggings and deemed a California Gold Rush classic, this new edition will carry on the adventure for thousands of new readers.

Author: Edward Washington McIlhany
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business
Languages : en
Pages : 224

View

Book Description
Edward Washington McIlhany (b. 1828) left West Virginia for the California gold fields in 1849. Recollections of a 49er (1908) describes his overland journey west, gold prospecting on Feather River and Grass Valley, hunting and trapping, proprietorship of a general store and hotel in Onion Valley, the Colorado gold rush, and Missouri railroading after the Civil War.

Author: John Walton Caughey
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520027633
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

View

Book Description

Author: Elizabeth Hudson-Goff
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780836871999
Category : California
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description
Presents a graphic history of the California Gold Rush of 1849, the dangerous journey across the continent, and the many challenges the people faced.

Author: James P. Burger
Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc
ISBN: 0823958493
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 30

View

Book Description
Discusses the California gold rush, relating how people from all walks of life and from many nations sought to strike it rich, and further describes the routes they traveled, their tools, daily lives, and hardships.

Author: Charles River Editors
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781543031294
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 60

View

Book Description
*Includes pictures. *Includes primary accounts of the gold rush. *Includes footnotes and a bibliography for further reading. "As the spring and summer of 1848 advanced, the reports came faster and faster from the gold-mines at Sutter's saw-mill. Stories reached us of fabulous discoveries, and spread throughout the land. Everybody was talking of "Gold! gold!!" until it assumed the character of a fever. Some of our soldiers began to desert; citizens were fitting out trains of wagons and pack-mules to go to the mines. We heard of men earning fifty, five hundred, and thousands of dollars per day..." - William Tecumseh Sherman One of the most important and memorable events of the United States' westward push across the frontier came with the discovery of gold in the lands that became California in January 1848. Located thousands of miles away from the country's power centers on the east coast at the time, the announcement came a month before the Mexican-American War had ended, and among the very few Americans that were near the region at the time, many of them were Army soldiers who were participating in the war and garrisoned there. San Francisco was still best known for being a Spanish military and missionary outpost during the colonial era, and only a few hundred called it home. Mexico's independence, and its possession of those lands, had come only a generation earlier. Everything changed almost literally overnight. While the Mexican-American War technically concluded with a treaty in February 1948, the announcement brought an influx of an estimated 90,000 "Forty-Niners" to the region in 1849, hailing from other parts of America and even as far away as Asia. All told, an estimated 300,000 people would come to California over the next few years, as men dangerously trekked thousands of miles in hopes of making a fortune, and in a span of months, San Francisco's population exploded, making it one of the first mining boomtowns to truly spring up in the West. This was a pattern that would repeat itself across the West anytime a mineral discovery was made, from the Southwest and Tombstone to the Dakotas and Deadwood. Of course, that was made possible by the collective memory of the original California gold rush. Despite the mythology and the romantic portrayals that helped make the California Gold Rush, most of the individuals who came to make a fortune struck out instead. The gold rush was a boon to business interests, which ensured important infrastructure developments like the railroad and the construction of westward paths, but ultimately, it also meant that big business reaped most of the profits associated with mining the gold. While the Forty-Niners are often remembered for panning gold out of mountain streams, it required advanced mining technology for most to make a fortune. Nevertheless, the California Gold Rush became an emblem of the American Dream, and the notion that Americans could obtain untold fortunes regardless of their previous social status. As historian H.W. Brands said of the impact the gold rush had on Americans at the time, "The old American Dream ... was the dream of the Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin's 'Poor Richard'... of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year by year. The new dream was the dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck... [it] became a prominent part of the American psyche only after Sutter's Mill." While the gold rush may not have every Forty-Niner rich, the events still continue to influence the country's collective mentality. This book comprehensively covers the history and legacy of the gold rush that took place from 1848-1855, analyzing how it affected the participants and the nation at large. Along with pictures and a bibliography, you will learn about the California Gold Rush like you never have before, in no time at all.

Author: J. S. Holliday
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806183527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 580

View

Book Description
When The World Rushed In was first published in 1981, the Washington Post predicted, “It seems unlikely that anyone will write a more comprehensive book about the Gold Rush.” Twenty years later, no one has emerged to contradict that judgment, and the book has gained recognition as a classic. As the San Francisco Examiner noted, “It is not often that a work of history can be said to supplant every book on the same subject that has gone before it.” Through the diary and letters of William Swain--augmented by interpolations from more than five hundred other gold seekers and by letters sent to Swain from his wife and brother back home--the complete cycle of the gold rush is recreated: the overland migration of over thirty thousand men, the struggle to “strike it rich” in the mining camps of the Sierra Nevadas, and the return home through the jungles of the Isthmus of Panama. In a new preface, the author reappraises our continuing fascination with the “gold rush experience” as a defining epoch in western--indeed, American--history.