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| Great reading!This is one of the best I have read in a long time. I think Mr Brands deserves a literary award. I learned a whole lot, was entertained, and amazed. His writing caused me to actually seem like I was there and I found it most interesting. Now if you like gore or drippy romance novels this is not your book. But if like history, finance, struggle, and learning a little about mining you'll like this. Facsinating topic.
A Great Story Told Once Again By A Great Modern HistorianWhen 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.
Popular history at its finestThe Age of Gold is a fascinating read. The book primarily deals with the California gold rush and its consequences, but the author adeptly deals with so many other issues related to California's early history. These include the struggles to build order in newly created communities, racial relations, the transcontinental railroad, the Civil War, international trade, etc. Mr. Brands's primary thesis is that the gold rush was not simply an influential event that helped shape California and our nation's history, but that it was a truly paradigm-shifting type of moment. He superbly demonstrates the effects of the gold discovery on mining and transportation technology. He argues persuasively that the gold rush played an important role in shaping the national character. He argues that the early admission of California into the Union, itself facilitated by the discovery of gold, inflamed North-South tensions and may have speeded the resort to rebellion. The gold discovery also encouraged the creation of the transcontinental railroad, which, as Brands argues, created the largest integrated market in the world and transformed America into an economic power.
And yet, I don't want people to get the impression from what I've written so far that this book deals solely with large, impersonal socioeconomic and political forces. Because this book is first and foremost a tale of fascinating personalities. This is, in my opinion, where Mr. Brands really makes his mark, in retelling the stories of the men and women who braved numerous obstacles to come to California and who then created the technology and the institutions that led to its statehood. Brands relies almost exclusively on personal diaries and firsthand accounts in the first section of the book, which details the practical difficulties of reaching California from the eastern US and from foreign countries in the mid-19th century. The first part of the section covers the voyage by sea, both around the Cape Horn and over the Central American isthmus. The latter route was taken by Jesse Fremont, wife of famous explorer John, who crossed the isthmus with her young daughter while her husband was conducting an overland expedition. The second part of this section looks at those who made the overland expedition from the eastern states. While the grueling hazards of cross-country travel are pretty familiar to most Americans who learned about the Oregon Trail and the Donner party in school, Brands nonetheless adds new layers to this dramatic story through his expert storytelling and adept use of diaries.
After detailing what people went through to reach California, Brands analyzes daily life in the territory and discusses the challenges of creating law and order in a place overflowing with newcomers whose primary goal was not to create a society but simply to strike it rich. He points out that San Francisco in its earliest days was overrun by criminal gangs (including some fearsome Australian gangs), who in turn were confronted by vigilante citizens' groups. In the absence of building codes, the city was also a perennial fire hazard. The process of creating a society was long and drawn out. Brands next looks at the role California and its bid for statehood played in national politics, and specifically its role in inflaming North-South tensions and contributing to the outbreak of war. Individuals who loom large in this section include William Sherman, who played an important role in California politics prior to the Civil War, and John Fremont (along with his extraordinary wife), who unsuccessfully carried the Republican banner in the presidential election in 1856. Finally, after the civil war, Brands turns his attention to the creation of the transcontinental railroad, including the important role in its construction played by former governor Leland Stanford.
Along the way, Brands manages to cover numerous other issues, including the threat posed by the populating of California to Native Americans, the debates in early California over slavery (including the fascinating legal case of Archy Lee), life in California for original Mexican Californians and immigrant Chinese, and much more. And again, I want to emphasize the fact that while Brands deals adeptly with large-scale historical forces, his narrative is populated by fascinating individuals, and informed by their personal accounts. In conclusion, I'd recommend this book to anybody with an interest in American history, and anybody with an appreciation for well-written and intelligent social history.
California GoldThe Age of Gold is the best book that I have read (and I have read quite a few) about the California Gold Rush for it tells the story in the words of the people involved and gives a feeling of the incredible change the discovery of gold brought to the State of California.
Disconnected narrativeMild disappointment. Too episodic and written just north of the level of a USA Today article. I think the author intends the narrative episodes to illustrate valid historic points, but he doesn't really tie the narrative and the theses together explicitly, and he isn't a good enough writer to make them flow together implicitly.
His key premise appears to be "The California Gold Rush was really important. Here are some examples." And the examples are often interesting and amusing, but not enough on which to hang a story which has no point.
Product Description“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.
Amazon.com ReviewTexas A&M University professor H.W. Brands enhances his reputation as one of America's great popular historians with The Age of Gold, which tells the story of the California gold rush through rollicking narrative and intelligent analysis. "James Marshall's discovery of gold at Coloma [in 1848] turned out to be a seminal event in history, one of those rare moments that divide human existence into before and after," he writes. It launched "the most astonishing mass movement of people since the Crusades" and "helped initiate the modern era of American economic development." Brands describes how thousands of people from all over the world hazarded the journey, faced the scientific challenge of extracting precious metal from the earth, and finally struggled "to sink roots" where so many came merely "to strip the land." This book is something of a departure for Brands, who most recently has written biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt (both of them excellent). Yet he tackles this new topic with confidence, telling dozens of stories about John Fremont, Leland Stanford, and less famous forty-niners. He concludes by describing why these tales have a national and even global importance. The Age of Gold is magnificent in its sweep, and not to be missed by fans of American history. --John Miller
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