From the preface: Such a work as Edward McIlhany's is most valuable because it gives an insight into the life and struggles of the "days of '49" that the ordinary history, embellished as it may be, must needs lack.
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.
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.
Solider, politician, miner, pioneer, scion of a Founding Father, William Stephen Hamilton led a prolific life. Rough Diamond: The Life of Colonel William Stephen Hamilton examines the tumultuous early Republic period of American history through the life of Alexander Hamilton's son. Born in New York in 1797, the fifth son of Alexander Hamilton, he was only seven when his father was infamously killed in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr. After resigning from West Point, Hamilton moved to frontier Illinois in 1817. The famous name of Hamilton that may have acquired him rank and prestige at one time was meaningless in a Midwestern frontier society driven by the Jacksonians. Yet, despite being hurled into a clash of economic, political, and cultural cultures, Hamilton determined to live his life by his own rules. A veteran of the Winnebago and Black Hawk Wars, Hamilton was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives before moving to the Wisconsin territory, where he founded the mining town of Hamilton's Diggings (Wiota, WI). When gold was discovered in California in 1848, he traveled west, where he would die in Sacramento in 1850. In Rough Diamond: The Life of Colonel William Stephen Hamilton, author A. K. Fielding expands the story of the Hamilton family. Hamilton's life offers a firsthand account of the formation of the Midwestern states, the realities of life on the frontier, and mass migration caused by the California Gold Rush.
“Jolly fellows,” a term that gained currency in the nineteenth century, referred to those men whose more colorful antics included brawling, heavy drinking, gambling, and playing pranks. Reforms, especially the temperance movement, stigmatized such behavior, but pockets of jolly fellowship continued to flourish throughout the country. Richard Stott scrutinizes and analyzes this behavior to appreciate its origins and meaning. Stott finds that male behavior could be strikingly similar in diverse locales, from taverns and boardinghouses to college campuses and sporting events. He explores the permissive attitudes that thrived in such male domains as the streets of New York City, California during the gold rush, and the Pennsylvania oil fields, arguing that such places had an important influence on American society and culture. Stott recounts how the cattle and mining towns of the American West emerged as centers of resistance to Victorian propriety. It was here that unrestrained male behavior lasted the longest, before being replaced with a new convention that equated manliness with sobriety and self-control. Even as the number of jolly fellows dwindled, jolly themes flowed into American popular culture through minstrelsy, dime novels, and comic strips. Jolly Fellows proposes a new interpretation of nineteenth-century American culture and society and will inform future work on masculinity during this period.