Roughing it in Gold Country
Roughing it in Gold Country

Author: William S. Pierson

Publisher: Mountain N' Air Books

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9781879415218

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"Roughing It in Gold Country" covers nearly sixty-five years of traveling from the southernmost boundaries of the Mother Lode to the north near the Yuba Gap. From the age of sixteen William S. Pierson built on a fascination for the bright yellow metal of the Mother Lode. It happened while he attended Sequoia High School during the Great Depression, while providing for himself by harvesting hay in Mountain City, Nevada, delivering groceries around Tahoe City, and working in a gold mine. He has explored for new treasures from the depths of many mine shafts from Death Valley to the Yuba Gap, from the highest in elevation, the Old Kentucky Mine, to the oldest continuously running gold mine in California, the Sixteen-to-One in Alleghany, California. Writing in a rich and prosaic style, the author describes the fascination for gold that bestows upon its seekers a lifelong desire for its possession.

Hard Road West
Hard Road West

Author: Keith Heyer Meldahl

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-01-11

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0226923290

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The dramatic journeys of the 19th century Gold Rush come to life in this geologist’s tour of the American West and the events that shaped the land. In 1848, news of the discovery of gold in California triggered an enormous wave of emigration toward the Pacific. The dramatic terrain these settlers crossed is so familiar to us now that it is hard to imagine how frightening—even godforsaken—its sheer rock faces and barren deserts once seemed to them. Hard Road West brings their perspective vividly to life, weaving together the epic overland journey of the covered wagon trains and the compelling story of the landscape they encountered. Taking readers along the 2,000-mile California Trail, Keith Meldahl uses settler’s diaries and letters—as well as his own experiences on the trail—to reveal how the geology and geography of the West shaped our nation’s westward expansion. He guides us through a landscape of sawtooth mountains, following the meager streams that served as lifelines through an arid land, all the way to California itself, where colliding tectonic plates created breathtaking scenery and planted the gold that lured travelers west in the first place. “Alternates seamlessly between vivid accounts of the 19th-century journey and lucid explanations of the geological events that shaped the landscape traveled.”—Library Journal

American Alchemy
American Alchemy

Author: Brian Roberts

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 9780807848562

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California during the gold rush was a place of disputed claims, shoot-outs, gambling halls, and prostitution; a place populated by that rough and rebellious figure, the forty-niner; in short, a place that seems utterly unconnected to middle-class culture.

Exterminate Them
Exterminate Them

Author: Clifford E. Trafzer

Publisher: MSU Press

Published: 1999-01-31

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0870139614

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Popular media depict miners as a rough-and-tumble lot who diligently worked the placers along scenic rushing rivers while living in roaring mining camps in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Trafzer and Hyer destroy this mythic image by offering a collection of original newspaper articles that describe in detail the murder, rape, and enslavement perpetrated by those who participated in the infamous gold rush. "It is a mercy to the Red Devils," wrote an editor of the Chico Courier, "to exterminate them." Newspaper accounts of the era depict both the barbarity and the nobility in human nature, but while some protested the inhumane treatment of Native Americans, they were not able to end the violence. Native Americans fought back, resisting the invasion, but they could not stop the tide of white miners and settlers. They became "strangers in a stolen land."

Bound for Gold
Bound for Gold

Author: William Martin

Publisher: Forge Books

Published: 2018-07-03

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 076538423X

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Rare-book dealer Peter Fallon returns in a thrilling historical novel about the California Gold Rush, by New York Times bestselling author William Martin Bound for Gold continues New York Times bestselling author William Martin’s epic of American history with the further adventures of Boston rare-book dealer Peter Fallon and his girlfriend, Evangeline Carrington. They are headed to California, where their search for a lost journal takes them into the history of Gold Rush. The journal follows young James Spencer, of the Sagamore Mining Company, on a spectacular journey from staid Boston, up the Sacramento River to the Mother Lode. During his search for a “lost river of gold,” Spencer confronts vengeance, greed, and racism in himself and others, and builds one of California’s first mercantile empires. In the present, Peter Fallon’s son asks his father for help appraising the rare books in the Spencer estate and reconstructing Spencer’s seven-part journal, which has been stolen from the California Historical Society. Peter and Evangeline head for modern San Francisco and quickly discover that there’s something much bigger and more dangerous going on, and Peter’s son is in the middle of it. Turns out, that lost river of gold may be more than a myth. Past and present intertwine as two stories of the eternal struggle for power and wealth become one. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The California Gold Country
The California Gold Country

Author: Elliot H. Koeppel

Publisher: Gem Guides Book Company

Published: 1996-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780938121121

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The saga of the early prospectors and all the others who made their mark during the Gold Rush. This historical visitor's guide includes recommended routes along Highway 49, dubbed the Mother Lode Highway, and many historical and full-color photos.

The World Rushed In
The World Rushed In

Author: J. S. Holliday

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2015-03-16

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 0806181214

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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.

Three Years in California [1846-1849]
Three Years in California [1846-1849]

Author: Walter Colton

Publisher:

Published: 1850

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13:

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Walter Colton (1797-1851) of Vermont had a career as clergyman and journalist before sailing to California as naval chaplain of the Congress. In July 1846, Commodore Stockton named him alcalde of Monterey, a post to which he was elected a few months later. He remained in California until 1849, using his time to found the state's first newspaper and building its first schoolhouse. Three years in California (1850) contains Colton's memoirs of that period, including descriptions of the U.S. military occupation of California, social life and customs of Monterey, discovery of gold and firsthand impressions of the Sonora mining camp in the Southern Mines, visits to Stockton and San José, John Charles Frémont, the Constitutional Convention of 1849, and California missions.

Roughing It by Mark Twain
Roughing It by Mark Twain

Author: Mark Twain

Publisher: Independently Published

Published: 2021-08-24

Total Pages: 594

ISBN-13:

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The celebrated author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn mixes fact and fiction in a rousing travelogue that serves as "a portrait of the artist as a young adventurer."* In 1861, young Mark Twain found himself adrift as a newcomer in the Wild West, working as a civil servant, silver prospector, mill worker, and finally a reporter and traveling lecturer. Roughing It is the hilarious record of those early years traveling from Nevada to California to Hawaii, as Twain tried his luck at anything and everything--and usually failed. Twain's encounters with tarantulas and donkeys, vigilantes and volcanoes, even Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, come to life with his inimitable mixture of reporting, social satire, and rollicking tall tales.