When The World Rushed In was first published in 1981, the Washington Post predicted, “It seems unlikely that anyone will write a more comprehensive book about the Gold Rush.ā€¯ Twenty years later, no one has emerged to contradict that judgment, and the book has gained recognition as a classic. As the San Francisco Examiner noted, “It is not often that a work of history can be said to supplant every book on the same subject that has gone before it.ā€¯
Through the diary and letters of William Swain--augmented by interpolations from more than five hundred other gold seekers and by letters sent to Swain from his wife and brother back home--the complete cycle of the gold rush is recreated: the overland migration of over thirty thousand men, the struggle to “strike it richā€¯ in the mining camps of the Sierra Nevadas, and the return home through the jungles of the Isthmus of Panama.
In a new preface, the author reappraises our continuing fascination with the “gold rush experienceā€¯ as a defining epoch in western--indeed, American--history.
