Gold Rush Stories

49 Tales of Seekers, Scoundrels, Loss, and Luck

Gary Noy

• Publisher: Heyday
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781597143844
• eBook ISBN: 9781597143851
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

From the author of Hellacious California!, deeply human stories of the California Gold Rush generation, full of brutality, tragedy, humor, and prosperity.

In less than ten years, more than 300,000 people made the journey to California, some from as far away as Chile and China. Many of them were dreamers seeking a better life, like Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, who eventually became the first African American judge, and Eliza Farnham, an early feminist who founded California's first association to advocate for women's civil rights. Still others were eccentrics—perhaps none more so than San Francisco's self-styled king, Norton I, Emperor of the United States.

As  Gold Rush Stories relates the social tumult of the world rushing in, so too does it unearth the environmental consequences of the influx, including the destructive flood of yellow ooze (known as "slickens") produced by the widespread and relentless practice of hydraulic mining. In the hands of a native son of the Sierra, these stories and dozens more reveal the surprising and untold complexities of the Gold Rush.

"Seamlessly fuses academic rigor, original reporting and emotional intensity into one meditation on an era.... If the task of the historian is to be faithful to lost truths, then Noy's latest exploration succeeds on every level, and does so in a way that will keep readers wanting to dig deeper into the past."—Scott Thomas Anderson,  Sierra Lodestar

 

"An original and lively look at all the usual suspects, plus bears, weather, women, Joaquín, disappointment and dissipation…. Exhaustively researched and highly entertaining."—JoAnn Levy, author of  They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• The Wings of the Future
• Undisciplined Squads of Emotion
• The Consequence of Fearful Blindness
• “I know it to be Nothing Else”
• The Tale of Teleguac
• “A Vast Deal of Knavery”
• “The El Dorado of their most Sanguine Wants”
• “A Perfect used up Man”
• “With a Taint of Fraud and a Spice of Comedy”
• Castles in the Air
• “Death Stared them Full in the Face”
• “That Blighting Curse”
• “Plenty of Jabbering and Quarreling and Several Fights”
• “Gambling on One Card the Fruit of His Labor for the Year”
• “There is no Persuasion more Esteemed for Moral Conduct”
• “Everything looks Forlorn and Wretched”
• “A Wind Turned Dark with Burning”
• “The Blue Vault of Heaven”
• A Crumbling Kingdom
• The Devil’s Chaos
• “As Huge, to me, as an Elephant”
• “A Very normal Childhood”
• “The Years have been Full of Hardships”
• Shadow and Light
• A Vast, Glowing empty Page
• “Emperor of these United States”
• “Very Little Law of any Kind”
• “Enjoy it with Luxurious Zest”
• Letter of the Law
• “To the Land of Gold and Wickedness”
• “The Theatre of Unrest”
• Draped in a Butterfly Robe
• “Convulsive Throes and Conflicts of Passion”
• Cheesquatalawny
• “I am Joaquín!”
• Cock-Eye and Snowshoe
• Dueling Designations
• “A Great Deal of Hard Times”
• Guilty of Dust and Sin
• Players and Painted Stages
• “So Wonderful, So Dangerous, So Magnificent a Chaos”
• The Legislature of a Thousand Drinks
• “An Act for the Better Regulation of the Mines and the Government of Foreign Miners”
• “We are not the Degraded Race you would make Us”
• “The Theatre of Scenes which we Hope will never be Repeated”
• Going up the Flume
• “Awful Calamity”
• The Territory of Colorado
• The Final Accounting
• Sources
• Sources for Chapter Titles
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• About the Sierra College Press