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AGE OF GOLD
by
BRANDS, H. W.
After the discovery of gold in California in 1848, people swarmed from as far as China. In this story, Captain John Fremont, the adventurer who "liberated" California from Mexico, finds himself accused of mutiny. Fremont meets his match in young Jessie Benton, and together, they play a fateful role in the drama unfolding on the gold fields.
Stock: In Stock, Delivery: Standard 2-3 Days (inc BFPO), £2.65
Format: Paperback
Published: 02/03/2006
Publisher: ARROW BOOKS LTD
ISBN: 0099476568
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Reviewed By: |
BBC History Magazine |
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Date: |
09/05/2006 |
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EARLY ONE frosty January morning in 1848 James Marshall, who was building a timber mill for his Swiss employer John Sutter high up in the Californian foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, found his eye caught by something glinting in a stream.
It was gold, and Marshall's casual discovery sparked one of the most extraordinary episodes in American and indeed 19th¬century history. Once word of the
discovery filtered out to the east, it sparked a rush of men-and some women - from all over the world to what had been one of its most remote and obscure corners, in the hope of becoming rich. Within four years, the immigrant population of California had spiraled from 14,000 to 250,000 and the west coast of the United States was opened up. A country which had hitherto been probing cautiously westwards was suddenly on course to spread right across the North American land mass and the discovery of gold helped to transform the national economy from an agrarian to an industrial one that would eventually dominate the world. Despite the hazards of the voyage, the argonauts as they were called set sail from Europe and the Far East, from Australia and Latin America. On the Chinese mainland, peasants were enticed with advertisements boasting: "Americans are very rich people. They want the Chinese to come and will make him welcome ... It is a nice country without mandarins or soldiers. All alike: big man no larger than little man" : Those who survived the crossing discovered that this was only marginally true. Once they arrived, the gold diggers discovered that their troubles were only just beginning. They had difficulties staking out claims and found that however much gold dust they extracted, costs were so high that they could barely make a living.
Although some made, and often lost, fortunes, as many as 30,000 a year gave up and braved the long journey home, sadder and sometimes wiser men. But the state they left behind, or perhaps settled in to other trades, was firmly established and indelibly marked by the experience. Sacramento, the state capital, was founded near John Sutter's fort, a few miles from the site of Marshall's discovery. Stanford University would be endowed by Leland Stanford, who originally came to set up a grocery business to service the miners and William Randolph Hearst (the model for Citizen Kane) one of the founders of the modern media, was the son of a successful prospector. Gold as a commodity had remained in static supply for years but the discoveries in California changed all that. Within a few years, men were rushing to Nevada, Montana - George Custer's disastrous Little Bighorn expedition was intended to protect prospectors-and to the Yukon. Gold was discovered in Australia by a man who noticed how similar the landscape and geological strata were to the Sierra Nevada.
HW Brands, a professor at the University of Texas, is an award winning historian whose work has not been published in Britain before. In the story of the gold rush he is -pun intended - mining a rich seam. The argonauts left copious letters behind them. The book is therefore an extremely fluent read, but sometimes its focus on individuals obscures analysis: how typical were the experiences of the 49-ers he has chosen?
It is Brands's benign thesis that the surge westwards fuelled the American dream. "The gold rush shaped history so profoundly because it harnessed the most basic of human desires, the desire for I happiness ... the side effect of their pursuit the cumulative outcome of their individual quests - was a transformation of American history" : Sutter's sawmill lasted only a couple of years. Both he and Marshall died impoverished-but at least the latter now has a statue erected in his honour near the site of his great discovery. ©
Stephen Bates is a senior correspondent with The Guardian
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