Gold - Fred Rosen

 Sub-title: - The Story of the 1848 Gold Rush and How It Shaped a Nation

This book gave me new perspectives on the impact of the gold rush on the migration across America.  According to the author more than 300,000 people had trekked across the plains, rounded South America, crossed Panama and Mexico and traveled from Australia to the California gold fields.  It was a scramble for riches and upward mobility, a chance for a better life for men and their families.  He covers the treaty with Mexico to add California to the U.S. and how the Native Americans were driven off into reservations. 

I was fascinated by the personalities in the story, Sutter the merchant, Marshall, the builder.  The generals who oversaw the war with Mexico, the diplomats sent by the government to negotiate an agreement and the hundreds of unnamed men who swarmed the area, establishing gold rush towns that disappeared when the gold ran out and they moved on.  One story was about A.D. Hobson, a man from Yadkin County on the Yadkin River in East Bend, North Carolina, born in 1825 and of English and Welsh ancestors. He and his brother traveled through Salt Lake City to Shaw Flat on the Tuolumne River "where they did very well in mining".

An in-depth read of the 1840 to 1870 period of a mass migration that populated the West.

Published: 2005  Read: May 2024  Genre: History

At the Edge of the Orchard - Tracy Chevalier

This was a book my step-daughter got me for Easter, by the author of The Girl with the Pearl Earring, which I read many years ago.  It's the story of a family in the 1800's that moves from Connecticut to Ohio to create a homestead and grow apples.  The first half of the story tells of their struggles in Ohio and the second half is the life of their son who heads west for a better life.

I found the book painful to read because the mother, Sadie, is a mean-spirited, broken woman who abuses applejack and takes out her unhappiness on her children and husband.  He's completely absorbed in raising the apple trees and blandly overlooks her nastiness as long as the orchard thrives. Johnny Appleseed is an occasional visitor to the family, feeding Sadie's need for hard cider.

The story shifts abruptly to their son, Robert, who strikes out as a teen for the west. He quickly wanders across America, ending up in California during the gold rush.  He hooks up with a botanist in the Calaveras big trees area, collecting seeds of the giant trees to be exported to England, all the time keeping a secret of his family's past.  We visited this park back in 2008 and I liked the backstory this book provided on its use in the 1800's.

There's a lot of research here on the life of pioneer settlers but with unlikeable characters, the story is hard to enjoy.


Published: 2016  Read: April 2016  Genre: Fiction

ISBN: 978 0 525 95300 5