Amazon.com: The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (Search and Recover): 9780385720885: Brands, H. W.: Books

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From the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, bestselling historian, and author of Our First Civil War—the epic story of the California Gold Rush, “a fine, robust telling of one of the greatest adventure stories in history" (David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of John Adams).

The California Gold Rush inspired a new American dream—the “dream of instant wealth, won by audacity and good luck.” The discovery of gold on the American River in 1848 triggered the most astonishing mass movement of peoples since the Crusades. It drew fortune-seekers from the ends of the earth, accelerated America’s imperial expansion, and exacerbated the tensions that exploded in the Civil War.

H.W. Brands tells his epic story from multiple perspectives: of adventurers John and Jessie Fremont, entrepreneur Leland Stanford, and the wry observer Samuel Clemens—side by side with prospectors, soldiers, and scoundrels. He imparts a visceral sense of the distances they traveled, the suffering they endured, and the fortunes they made and lost. Impressive in its scholarship and overflowing with life, The Age of Gold is history in the grand traditions of Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“An engrossing, multifaceted history.” —The New York Times

“A barn burner. . . . Masterfully sketched historical figures, subtly developed themes, and epically well-braided stories. . . . There’s only one thing to say . . . and that’s ‘Eureka!’ ” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Exuberant. . . . Entertaining, lively. . . . Brands [is] a wonderfully skilled narrative historian.” —Los Angeles Times

“Highly readable and entertaining. . . . History titles loom large, and perhaps none larger than The Age of Gold.” —Houston Chronicle

“A triumph. . . . Brands has struck gold.” —The Oregonian

“[H. W. Brands] will change the way you see history. . . . The Age of Gold brilliantly pans the historical record for nuggets of hardship and, in the process, hits upon a mother lode of a story.” —Austin American-Statesman

“Gripping. . . . Thoroughly researched. . . . An eminently readable, detail-filled book.” —Chicago Tribune

“A serious, comprehensive study, filled with memorable visions and interesting observations. . . . A book that explores history, politics, geology, adventure and industry with omnibus enthusiasm. . . . Its author, like the miners of the gold rush themselves, leaves no stone unturned.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

“A fine, robust telling of one of the greatest adventure stories in history.” —David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize—winning author of John Adams

“Brands assembles a colorful collection of people swept into this craze from around the world . . . in[to] a dazzling setting that conveys the world-changing effects of this era. . . . [He is a] master storyteller.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“Few historians can tell a tale better than Brands.” —Dallas Morning News

“Populated with colorful California characters. . . . Brands makes a convincing case that the discovery of gold was a seminal event in American history.” —Boston Herald

“Fascinating. . . . Brands brings the era and its characters to life in a remarkably entertaining narrative that is meticulously researched and crisply written. . . .The Age of Gold is historical reporting at its best.” —Arizona Daily Star

From the Inside Flap

"I have found it." These words, uttered by the man who first discovered gold on the American River in 1848, triggered the most astonishing mass movement of peoples since the Crusades. California's gold drew fortune-seekers from the ends of the earth. It accelerated America's imperial expansion and exacerbated the tensions that exploded in the Civil War. And, as H. W. Brands makes clear in this spellbinding book, the Gold Rush inspired a new American dream—the "dream of instant wealth, won by audacity and good luck."
Brands tells his epic story from multiple perspectives: of adventurers John and Jessie Fremont, entrepreneur Leland Stanford, and the wry observer Samuel Clemens—side by side with prospectors, soldiers, and scoundrels. He imparts a visceral sense of the distances they traveled, the suffering they endured, and the fortunes they made and lost. Impressive in its scholarship and overflowing with life, The Age of Gold is history in the grand traditions of Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough.

From the Back Cover

"I have found it." These words, uttered by the man who first discovered gold on the American River in 1848, triggered the most astonishing mass movement of peoples since the Crusades. California's gold drew fortune-seekers from the ends of the earth. It accelerated America's imperial expansion and exacerbated the tensions that exploded in the Civil War. And, as H. W. Brands makes clear in this spellbinding book, the Gold Rush inspired a new American dream--the "dream of instant wealth, won by audacity and good luck."
Brands tells his epic story from multiple perspectives: of adventurers John and Jessie Fremont, entrepreneur Leland Stanford, and the wry observer Samuel Clemens--side by side with prospectors, soldiers, and scoundrels. He imparts a visceral sense of the distances they traveled, the suffering they endured, and the fortunes they made and lost. Impressive in its scholarship and overflowing with life, The Age of Gold is history in the grand traditions of Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough.

About the Author

H. W. BRANDS holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin. A New York Times bestselling author, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography for The First American and Traitor to His Class.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

In the Footsteps of Father Serra

A less likely terminus of all these journeys could scarcely have been conceived. A principal attraction of California in the period before Coloma was that it was so far off the beaten track. John Sutter could hide there from his wife and creditors; James Marshall could hope to shake the failure that had dogged his steps since Missouri. At a time when long-distance travel averaged little faster than a man could walk--railroads were appearing in the most advanced countries, and promised to revolutionize transport, but for now they were primarily local or regional affairs--California was about as far from the centers of Western civilization as a land could be. The sea voyage around South America from New York or Liverpool or Le Havre required five or six months, depending on conditions off Cape Horn, which could terrify the most hardened unbeliever to prayer. Recently, intrepid and lightly laden travelers had begun to attempt the Central American isthmus, but the justifiably dreaded Chagres fever and the uncertain connections to vessels on the Pacific side deterred many who otherwise would have employed this shortcut. For those setting out from the American East, travel by foot or wagon was feasible, but hardly attractive. Since the early 1840s emigrants had been crossing the plains and mountains to Oregon; the journey required half a year and all the fortitude and stamina ordinary folks could muster. And it was essentially one-way: when people left for Oregon, they might as well have dropped off the face of the earth for all their relatives were likely to see them again. The trail to California was much less traveled, and far less certain, than that to Oregon.

In the time before Coloma, those few outsiders who did visit California fell into a small number of discrete categories. European explorers arrived in the sixteenth century. Spain's Juan Cabrillo in 1542 sighted the coast of Alta California--as distinct from peninsular Baja California--but promptly sailed away. The English sea dog Francis Drake scouted California in 1579, landing at some bay never since clearly identified, but probably Drake's Bay, below Point Reyes, and burying a plaque never since found, but staking England's claim to the region. Subsequently Russian ship captains, seeking provisions for their country's Bering Sea fur hunters, began appearing in the neighborhood north of San Francisco Bay.

The English and Russians eventually awoke the Spanish, who already controlled most of the territory from Tierra del Fuego to Mexico, to the wisdom of colonizing California. The Spanish monarchy in the late eighteenth century enlisted the padres of the Franciscan order, who set out to secure California for the king of Spain even as they secured the souls of California's inhabitants for the King of Heaven.

Junipero Serra, the Majorca-born missionary who headed the effort, and his small band of Franciscan followers built a chain of missions from San Diego in the south to San Rafael in the north. The missions were located a day's walk apart, typically near the mouths of the short rivers that ran from the coastal mountains to the sea. Each mission centered on a chapel, usually built of adobe but occasionally of stone. Adjacent to the chapel was the home of the resident priests (typically two per mission) and assorted other structures. Surrounding the mission proper was a large tract of land, a hundred square miles or more. In time the mission lands supported great herds of cattle and horses and flocks of sheep. Grain fields, vegetable gardens, and fruit orchards rounded out the farms.

Besides the missions, which were controlled by the Franciscans, were four presidios, at San Diego, Santa Barbara, Monterey, and San Francisco. These forts barracked soldiers of the Spanish army, who were assigned to protect the missions and inspire awe in the local Indians. The Indians were encouraged by this means to seek refuge in the vineyards of the Lord and the fields of the friars.

Separate from the missions and the presidios were a handful of pueblos, or independent towns. Los Angeles was the most important of the pueblos; during the early nineteenth century it surpassed in size and economic activity all but a few of the missions.

In its heyday, the Spanish system in California constituted a pastoral empire of impressive proportions. Several of the missions boasted herds and flocks that numbered in the scores of thousands, barns bursting with grain and other produce, and the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars in specie or precious plate. Indian "neophytes"--natives attached to the missions religiously and economically--totaled perhaps twenty thousand. They would have numbered far more if not for the introduced European diseases that ravaged the native populations even as they lent credence to the friars' assertion that repentance was in order because the end was near.

But the mission system was no stronger than the Spanish authority on which it rested, and when Mexico threw off Spanish control in the early 1820s, the California missions quickly declined. The new government of independent Mexico was republican and anticlerical; neither the power of the mission priests nor the subjection of the mission Indians sat well with those who now ruled California.

More precisely, the new regime claimed to rule California; in fact Mexican independence inaugurated an era of turbulence in California affairs. The friars preferred sabotage to secularization of the missions; they began to liquidate the herds and run down the farms. The Spanish-descended elites in California often disdained the mixed-blood mestizos of Mexico. The inhabitants of Monterey and the northern part of California fell out with the Los Angelenos of southern California. The small but growing contingent of foreigners, especially Americans, contributed a further element of restiveness and uncertainty.

Of all this, the large majority of Americans knew next to nothing until 1840, when Richard Dana published Two Years Before the Mast. Dana was heir to a tradition of distinguished Boston lawyers; his father had signed the Articles of Confederation and served fifteen years as chief justice of Massachusetts. The younger Dana was preparing for a legal career of his own when he contracted a bad case of measles. The illness especially afflicted his eyes, precluding an early return to his studies. Doctors suggested a sea voyage, perhaps a cruise to India. But the strapping young man, now returned to all but visual health, chafed at the thought of months in a deck chair; instead he chose to ship before the mast, on the brig Pilgrim, bound for the coast of California via Cape Horn.

The vessel left Boston in August 1834. After five months it reached Santa Barbara. Dana's first impression of California was decidedly unfavorable. "The hills have no large trees upon them, they having been all burnt by a great fire which swept them off about a dozen years ago, and they had not yet grown again," he wrote. "The fire was described to me by a inhabitant, as having been a very terrible and magnificent sight. The air of the whole valley was so heated that the people were obliged to leave the town and take up their quarters for several days upon the beach."

Dana's opinion of California gradually improved. He came to appreciate the climate and soil and scenery, and was fascinated by the polyglot mix of souls frequenting the coast: Polynesians, Russians, Italians, French, English. Yet he never learned to like the Californians themselves. They were "an idle, thriftless people," he said, unwilling or unable to make anything of the land they inhabited. A passenger who traveled aboard the Pilgrim from Monterey to Santa Barbara epitomized the type. Don Juan Bandini was descended from aristocrats, his family priding itself on the purity of its Spanish blood and its continuing importance in Mexico. Don Juan's father had been governor of California, and had sent his son to Mexico City for school and an introduction to the first circle of Mexican society. But misfortune and extravagance eroded the family estate, and the young Don Juan was now returning to California--"accomplished, poor, and proud, and without any office or occupation, to lead the life of most young men of the better families: dissipated and extravagant when the means are at hand; ambitious at heart, and impotent in act; often pinched for bread; keeping up an appearance of style, when their poverty is known to each half-naked Indian boy in the street, and standing in dread of every small trader and shopkeeper in the place."

Senor Bandini made a fine show. "He had a slight and elegant figure, moved gracefully, danced and waltzed beautifully, spoke good Castilian, with a pleasant and refined voice and accent, and had, throughout, the bearing of a man of birth and figure. Yet here he was, with his passage given him (as I afterward learned), for he had not the means of paying for it, and living upon the charity of our agent." He was polite to one and all, from the captain to the lowliest sailor. He tipped the steward four reals--"I dare-say the last he had in his pocket." The sight was rather touching. "I could not but feel a pity for him, especially when I saw him by the side of his fellow-passenger and townsman, a fat, coarse, vulgar, pretentious fellow of a Yankee trader, who had made money in San Diego, and was eating out the vitals of the Bandinis, fattening upon their extravagance, grinding them in their poverty; having mortgages on their lands, forestalling their cattle, and already making an inroad upon their jewels, which were their last hope."

The decadent pride of the Bandinis, as Dana interpreted it, appeared more broadly in the Californians at large. "The men are thriftless, proud, extravagant, and very much given to gaming; and the women have but little education, and a good deal of beauty, and their morality, of course, is none of the best." The Californians would hazard everything on small points of honor and were given to murderous feuds. Meanwhile they were careless of the natural wealth around them, and were apparently impervious to any notion of progress. The contrast Dana perceived between the character of the Californians and the character of California struck him with a kind of moral force. "Such are the people who inhabit a country embracing four or five hundred miles of sea-coast, with several good harbors; with fine forests in the north; the waters filled with fish, and the plains covered with thousands of herds of cattle; blessed with a climate than which there can be no better in the world; free from all manner of diseases, whether epidemic or endemic; and with a soil in which corn yields from seventy to eighty fold. In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!"

Dana's account appeared in the year America's sixth census showed the population of the United States to be just under 17 million people. To a later generation this number would seem minuscule, but to many of Dana's contemporaries it occasioned claustrophobia. America in 1840 was a land of farmers, and farmers--and their children and grandchildren--always needed more land. Since 1803, when Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana territory from France, the only appreciable addition to the American patrimony had been Florida--swampy, disease-ridden Florida. The country was filling up; where would all the people live? What fields would they farm?

Adding to the worries was the dismal condition of the American economy. The previous decade had begun with the "bank war" between Nicholas Biddle, the powerful, prideful director of the Bank of the United States, and Andrew Jackson, the determined, prideful president. Jackson won the war by killing the Bank, but in doing so gravely wounded the economy. The Panic of 1837 bankrupted farmers, who saw the price of their crops fall 50 percent or more, and cast tens of thousands of laborers out on the streets and highways of America. Many headed west, as Americans had always done in times of trouble, hoping to make a new life where land was cheaper and opportunity more abundant. Yet land in 1840 wasn't as cheap as it had been when there weren't so many people trying to buy it, and opportunity was accordingly less abundant. As the economic depression continued into the new decade, it intensified demands for more land.

The demands acquired evangelical overtones. During the first half of the nineteenth century, American Protestantism--which was to say, the religion of nearly all Americans--bubbled and boiled with one reform movement after another. The "second Great Awakening" (the first having occurred during the previous century) saw people speaking in tongues and thrashing about wildly. One man jerked so violently--resisting grace, the pious said--that he broke his own neck. Camp meetings lasted weeks or months and spun off temperance crusades, abolitionist rallies, and missionary voyages. The religious ferment fostered an outlook that had no difficulty interpreting the pressure for territorial expansion in providential terms. If God had smiled on the United States of America--and almost none doubted that He had--wouldn't He want America to grow? Wouldn't He want Americans to spread their blessings into neighboring lands? And wouldn't He want this all the more, considering that the inhabitants of those neighboring lands were heathen Indians and papist Mexicans?

Of course He would--or so concluded the publicists of what came to be called Manifest Destiny, the ideology of expansion in the 1840s. This ideology was seductive, stroking the conscience of America even as it flattered America's vanity and served America's self-interest. It appealed most powerfully to the religiously minded majority of Americans, but the secular, too, could sign on, as advocates of the export of democracy. The popularity of Manifest Destiny naturally caught the attention of politicians, especially those in the Democratic party, who were hungry to regain the presidency after a surprising defeat in 1840. In 1844 the Democrats nominated James K. Polk of Tennessee on a platform promising the vigorous extension of America's frontiers westward. Looking southwest, Polk vowed to bring Texas into the Union. Looking northwest, he pledged to take all of Oregon.

Polk won the presidency and proceeded to act on his promises. As it happened, he didn't get all of Oregon (which at that time stretched to the southern border of Alaska), but, in negotiations with Britain, he got the largest and best part. Nor did he take Texas, which was annexed after Polk's election victory but before President John Tyler vacated the White House.

That didn't end the Texas story, however. Nor did it satisfy the aggressive appetite of Manifest Destiny. Although Texas had claimed independence from Mexico in 1836, the Mexican government rejected the claim and sent troops to suppress the rebellion. The Texans lost at the Alamo, but won at San Jacinto and forced the Mexicans to withdraw. Even so, Mexico refused to make peace or recognize the independence of the Texas republic. Consequently, when the United States annexed Texas in 1845, Mexico protested vehemently.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor (October 14, 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 592 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385720882
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385720885
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.19 x 1.2 x 7.91 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #107,550 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #143 in Expeditions & Discoveries World History (Books)
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- #966 in U.S. State & Local History (Books)

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H. W. Brands

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H.W. Brands taught at Texas A&M University for sixteen years before joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is the Dickson Allen Anderson Centennial Professor of History. His books include Traitor to His Class, Andrew Jackson, The Age of Gold, The First American, and TR. Traitor to His Class and The First American were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

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Customers appreciate how the book tells the story of the Gold Rush through people's experiences, with one customer noting it reads like a novel. Moreover, the book is well-researched and educational, providing an informative history of the California Gold Rush. Customers like the writing style, with one describing it as colorful.

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40 customers mention "Storytelling style"37 positive3 negative

Customers appreciate the storytelling style of the book, which is written in a narrative format and tells the story of the Gold Rush through people's experiences.

"...He's a great storyteller; and most of us know the story...." Read more

"...The whole of the story is told through peoples' stories and experiences and has a very personal feel. Well worth reading." Read more

"...It's all here, along with colorful and exciting narrative concerning not only the physical locations, but also talking about many of the interesting..." Read more

"...This is a compelling history. The intersection of the lives of so many people, institutions and events is nothing short of astonishing...." Read more

37 customers mention "Readability"37 positive0 negative

Customers find the book engaging and fun to read, with one customer noting it's worth its weight in gold.

"...us today, but Brands make them come alive again and again in this excellent book...." Read more

"...Well worth reading." Read more

"Very good book . The author's writing style is like smooth sailing ." Read more

"...All in all, this is a great book and great story...." Read more

36 customers mention "Historical accuracy"36 positive0 negative

Customers praise the historical accuracy of the book, finding it well-researched and enlightening, with one customer noting it covers many facets of the subject.

"...the discovery of gold in California and comes up with some very interesting insights...." Read more

"This is a focused and sweeping history of California that essentially begins with the Gold Rush of 1848...." Read more

"...if you’re interested in what happened before we got here this is a good source 👍🙏🤓..." Read more

"Feels like the way history class should have been. Gripping, compelling and a window into lives unimaginably harrowing, yet inspiring." Read more

21 customers mention "Writing style"21 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the writing style of the book, with one customer noting it reads like a great novel and another mentioning it is easy to understand.

"...He is a rare bird- a scholar who can write well for a popular audience...." Read more

"Very good book . The author's writing style is like smooth sailing ." Read more

"...remarkable how Brands puts it all together in a cohesive and coherent way." Read more

"...Book is well written and extremely informative and worth the read. Just know that it it is politically heavy and scant of gold." Read more

7 customers mention "History"7 positive0 negative

Customers find the book informative about the California Gold Rush, with one customer highlighting the inclusion of journal entries from gold seekers and another noting how it captures the impact of gold on society.

"...He does a great job of capturing the impact Gold had on the evolution of America and how it contributed to the development of the "get rich..." Read more

"This is a well written, interesting and informative history of the California Gold Rush...." Read more

"This book includes journal entries from gold seekers as well as factual narratives. It provides a unique picture..." Read more

"Well written history of the perils of the gold rush." Read more

4 customers mention "Style"4 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the author's writing style, with one noting its unique picture and another describing it as a stunning portrait of luck.

"...It's all here, along with colorful and exciting narrative concerning not only the physical locations, but also talking about many of the interesting..." Read more

"Author is very good. This is my second book by this author, and I like his style, his presentation, and the way formulation put together history and..." Read more

"...was the first book I've ever read by Brands and I can say that I like his style. (I also have his Andrew Jackson and American Colossus books.)..." Read more

"...There is some expert debunking done here. A stunning portrait of luck, greed and naivete. I recommend it for students of American history." Read more

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James Barton Phelps
A Great Story Told Once Again By A Great Modern Historian
Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2009
Verified Purchase

When James Marshall thought he saw a few specks of gold at the bottom of the American river near the sawmill he was building for John Sutter near Coloma California on January 25 1848 California was still a part of Mexico with the capital in Monterey; and from the Rio Grande and the Colorado to Oregon was Spanish or Indian - take your pick. - and thinly "settled" if it could be called "settled" at all. The site of San Francisco was a settlement of a few small cabins called Yerba Buena and the country that was the United States lay hundreds of miles away to the east beyond huge mountains through which only the hardy could pass and even then on small, difficult do-it-yourself trails,. But John Charles Fremont and his detachment of American soldiers had got through; and, as Marshall was making his discovery, Fremont was dashing about with his Army, cheerfully fighting a war that was fast closing down on him, a war that ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo a few days later - February 2 1848 - and which transferred ownership of and dominion over the country through which Fremont was cruising to the United States. That was the beginning

Twenty years later the village of Yerba Buena was a cosmopolitan city called San Francisco; a railroad and telegraph linked California through the mountains to New York and Washington; California had millions of new residents, some called to the gold fields, some to the mines, some to the towns, some to the fields and orchards being sown and planted on thousands of acres, some to the railroad, some to finance, and some to any one of the scores of occupations so necessary to a thriving and expanding economy. Most importantly the question of slavery which had so dogged the soul of the new Republic since its founding eighty years before had been settled by a great Civil War, and California had entered the Union as a free state where slavery was not permitted.

The story of what happened in those twenty years in California is told by H. G. Brands, a distinguished professor of American History at the University of Texas in Austin, in The Age of Gold. He's a great storyteller; and most of us know the story. But he tells it again - and it holds our interest: How Sam Brannan spread the word in mid to late 1848 - Gold for the picking in California! How the Argonauts flocked to the gold fields in 1849 - first from Australia and Chile and the Hawaiian Islands and China, then across the plains and over the mountains and through the desert, losing life and property along the way. What life was like in the gold fields. How Yerba Buena grew through fires and Committees of Vigilance from a spindly village to the most sophisticated city on the Pacific Coast. How the search for gold proceeded from a miner in the stream with a pan to several who were employees of a mining company behind a nozzle taking down a hill with a water cannon (placer mining) or on a dredge churning up a beautiful river bed and leaving nothing but detritus and bare rocks or digging a shaft into a lovely hillside in Mariposa and taking out gold bearing quartz and leaving the tailings behind to scar the hill forever. How the railroad was built - the Central Pacific, which so enriched Colis Huntington Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins. How the boundaries of the present day State of California became established and how it became a state midst the controversy of. In short, what happened in these twenty years - the era he has called "The Age of Gold".

We already know about the people - people like Lily Langtry, Sam Clemens, Joaquin Murrieta, John Charles Fremont, William Walker - and others so familiar to us today, but Brands make them come alive again and again in this excellent book.

I was particularly interested in his touch on the great compromises - the compromises between those who endorsed slavery and those who did not - compromises which subdued the great conflict for eighty years - first the compromise over the three-fifths rule in 1784, then the Missouri Compromise of 1829, then the nullification compromise of the 1830s and finally the compromise of 1850 which permitted California - which had never had status as a Territory - to enter the Union as a State with the Monterey (anti slavery) Constitution, established Utah and New Mexico as Territories without prejudice regulating slavery, made the boundaries between Texas and New Mexico final, banned the slave trade from the District of Columbia and strengthened the fugitive slave law .

My only criticism of the book is that Brands goes overboard in taking the position that California in the 1850s was pretty much responsible for what happened in ther next several decades. No matter what happened in California the time for a "Compromise" over slavery had already passed when California became a part of the picture; and the California question was virtually a non-issue in the coming conflict over slavery. California added really nothing of critical value to that mix. But since 1940 California has been the essential ingredient of the mix that has been the United States in this century.

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M. Strong
Great approach - lays out the impact of gold in California
Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2007
Verified Purchase
If you are looking for a book about gold mining in the 1850s in California, this actually isn't it. The book spends very few pages talking about the actual mining of of gold. Instead, Brands takes a broader approach, looking at the historical impact of the discovery of gold in California and comes up with some very interesting insights.

The first thing Brands analyzes in Age of Gold is how the masses that flocked to California actually got there and where they came from. By using personal stories, Brands really brings the voyages and the hardships to life. He finds individuals who came to California from Chile, Australia, Europe and the Eastern U.S. and explains what was unique and common to each of their experiences. It's truly amazing to someone living in the age of commercial jets to read about the trails of getting from New York to San Francisco in 1850, no matter the choice of land or sea.

The second aspect of Brand's analysis is the culture of California in the 1850s and beyond. How the cities of the territory emptied on the discovery of gold and then filled up. Brands talks about the bar and brothel filled towns and settlements and the initial lack of women in California. He also points out how hard it was to set up a civil society with everyone in town simply for the purpose of getting rich quickly off of gold. The rapidity with which California goes through different phases is fascinating.

Brands then looks at how California's population explosion forced the statehood debate for California into the fore in Congress and ultimately forced the slavery debate into prominence again. Every state that came into the Union at this time was hotly contested as to whether it would be a free state or a slave state, with huge ramifications for the balance of free/slave power in congress.

The whole of the story is told through peoples' stories and experiences and has a very personal feel. Well worth reading.

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Max Layton
A Nugget In Every Chapter!
Reviewed in Canada on April 12, 2016
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H. W. Brands tells a story of immense historical sweep through the eyes of the individuals who transformed America and redefined the American Dream. From ne'er-do-wells like John Marshall (who discovered the gold in the first place and died a pauper) to George Hearst (who stumbled upon the largest gold mine in the world and left his son, William Randolph, a fortune) these are heart-rending and heart-warming stories of grit, determination, and just plain luck. Absolutely fascinating!

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C. Ball
The best overview of the Gold Rush out there...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 5, 2011
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It's no exaggeration to say that California was created by gold. No doubt there'd have been a state there anyway - the concept of Manifest Destiny ensured that Americans were always going to spread out across the continent - but the discovery of gold in 1848 accelerated the process and made for a way of life and an atmosphere quite unlike America up to that point. In pre-Gold Rush America the cardinal virtues were patience and hard work, rural, agrarian and slow - Jefferson's gentleman farmers. The Gold Rush ushered in the era of the quick buck, the sudden fortune, the wealth that could be gambled for, won and lost in the space of a week.

This is a wonderful book, well-written and pacy, and it covers far more than just the lives and wealth of the men and women - Americans and immigrants alike - who rushed to California to strike it lucky. It explores how the Gold Rush impacted the rest of the country, the role of California in upsetting the precarious balance between slave and free states that resulted in the Civil War, the way the ripples of gold spread out to affect the rest of the world, most particularly in the concept of the gold standard and free trade.

Whilst I might have liked a bit more about the day-to-day lives of the miners, more about life in the new city of San Francisco or in the mining camps themselves, for a broad-ranging, comprehensive overview of the Gold Rush and its place in California and America's history, the book can't be bettered.

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Jasper 1
Gold From The Past
Reviewed in Canada on April 27, 2019
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Interesting Read

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vaughan lewis
Four Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 11, 2014
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Well rearched. Lively and gave a sense of the golg fever. Interesting links to present day.

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Dickens
Covers A Vast Subject Well
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 22, 2014
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This book could have been renamed the history of American expansion, as it details a lot more than just a gold rush, especially its chapters on the efforts of Washington Politicians. Similar to Klondike, by Pierre Berton, this book details a period of 19th Century American history when the ordinary man thought anything possible and headed to a land in search of wealth. However, unlike Klondike which mainly concentrates on personal tales of hardship and strife The Age of Gold provides an a overview of a larger subject matter. Its none the worse for it, just different. Enjoyable, would recommend.

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The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (Search and Recover) Paperback – Illustrated, October 14, 2003

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5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Story Told Once Again By A Great Modern Historian

4.0 out of 5 stars Great approach - lays out the impact of gold in California

Top reviews from other countries

5.0 out of 5 stars A Nugget In Every Chapter!

5.0 out of 5 stars The best overview of the Gold Rush out there...

4.0 out of 5 stars Gold From The Past

4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars

5.0 out of 5 stars Covers A Vast Subject Well

A Great Story Told Once Again By A Great Modern Historian

Great approach - lays out the impact of gold in California

A Nugget In Every Chapter!

The best overview of the Gold Rush out there...

Gold From The Past

Four Stars

Covers A Vast Subject Well