"Author Brings Gold Rush To Life"

The history of the California gold rush includes stories about many of our ancestors who left jobs and families in the east to search for gold in the mountains and foothills of California. A friend of mine tells about her great-great grandfather who left his wife and six children in Winnebago County, Illinois to join the hunt for California gold. A few months later, he died of dysentery in San Francisco in March of 1850.
“The Age of Gold; the California Gold Rush and the New American Dream” by H.W. Brands, published by Doubleday in 2002 is a remarkably good book about this period in our nation’s history when a succession of “Argonauts” invaded California following the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848. According to the author, by 1853 more than 250,000 people had made incredible journeys by land and by sea to seek their fortunes in the mine fields.

Americans made up about two-thirds of the group. A tenth of the gold seekers were from Latin America, especially Chile; a tenth from France and other European countries; and many were from China and the subcontinents of Australia and New Zealand. From its inception, California had a diverse population.

The hurly burly life of the newcomers to California as depicted by the author makes for interesting and oftentimes entertaining reading. There were pitched gun fights with the native Indians who resisted the encroachment of the foreign people scrambling for gold. The native Mexicans were disenfranchised and relegated to a subculture for the next 150 years. Vigilante committees considered themselves “in charge’ of law and order and relished a “good” hanging. It was a time of thugs with gangs formed by individuals grouping together to protect themselves from other gangs.

The people in San Francisco suffered through fires and outbreaks of the Bubonic plague. In the mining areas various methods of extracting the ore were tried from panning to re-channeling whole rivers. In many cases the terrain changed as hills and mountains were flattened and pristine valleys became muddy slews devoid of vegetation and wildlife. The author’s lively narrative brings to the reader a vivid picture of how gold in California influenced our young nation’s image of itself.

A memorial donation to the Columbus Library Foundation was received from Shirley Deyke Thompson in honor of Art Roth. Mr. and Mrs. Bill Ferguson presented a donation in memory of Olga Asche. Dr. and Mrs. Richard Ward gave a memorial in honor of John Brown. These memorials are gratefully received and are used to purchase library materials and fixtures.