Customer Reviews

The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

H.W. Brands shows again why he is one of America's foremost historians with his compellingly readable account of the 1849 California Gold Rush and the early history of the state. Brands digs down through the myths about the Gold Rush and unearths the fascinating stories of the people (immigrants and Americans alike) who caught America's first big burst of gold fever. Among the key players were William T. Sherman (later the famous Civil War General), explorer John C. Fremont (later the first Presidential nominee of the Republican Party), and Leland Stanford (founder of the University that bears his last name). They all come together at what was truly one of American history's major crossroads.

Brands does not limit himself to just recounting the adventures in the gold fields. He focusses on the larger political, social and even military effects of the gold rush. The chapters recounting the lengthy, perilous journeys by land and sea that the gold miners took to get to Califorinia are particularly compelling. Brands also discusses at length the growth of San Francisco into a major city and the establishment of California's state government. Additionally, he devotes time examining the U.S. congresional Compromise of 1850, which allowed California to be admitted as a state only after a bitter and acrimonious sectional feud over slavery.

Brands is an excellent writer with that rare ability among historians to make his historicals accounts read like fiction. His book is well-researched and the author has a flair for capturing the essence of the historical figures involved. He also argues strenuously that the gold rush's effects on American politics as a whole, including pushing the country toward Civil War, should not be underestimated.

Overall, an outstanding work of history that can be enjoyed by serious students and casual readers alike.

This kind of larger scale canvas is a bit of a switch for Teddy Roosevelt and Ben Franklin biographer H.W. Brand, a history prof at Texas A&M. Yet he has turned out a smooth and accessible work on the process and possible long-term effects of the California gold rush.

Brand manages a fine mix of the larger view -- statistics, maps of larger immigration movements, etc. -- with storylines of various specific characters, from the familiar (General William Sherman and John Fremont), to the vaguely familiar (Leland Stanford and the actual discoverer of gold at Sutter's Mill, James Marshall), to the unknown (fortune hunters and settlers who chronicled their trips across the western prairies as well as from Australia, France, and China). Although the Chinese experience still gets short shrift, Brand has chosen some terrific characters (and decent writers) from other foreign lands to tell their stories.

This book also makes very clear how hard a time most people had of it. Brand describes in detail the effort of crossing the raw continent, the many human and animal carcasses that fell by the wayside (or succumbed to violence), and the arduous physical process of extracting precious metals from the earth until industrialization took over that work too.

One of the more eye-opening sections for me was the description of how many fires -- big, devastating ones -- San Francisco suffered in the 1840s and 1850s.

In trying to make a case for the larger and long-term effects of the gold rush (impressive shifts of world population, the decline of the Native American west due largely to the railroads), Brand gets a little far afield from California's gold fields toward the end of the book, but the text is always interesting and very readable.

This is the story of the California Gold Rush, its impact on the American people then and now, and its contribution to the Civil War and the ultimate forging of the American nation.

Like his biography of Franklin, "The First American," Brands presents history in an engaging manner that allows the reader to imagine vividly conditions and lives in times gone-by. He brings history to life.

The narrative follows from the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill and the mass, world-wide movement of humanity to California to the settling of San Francisco, the rush to statehood and the Compromise of 1850.

The core significance of the book for me wasn't so much about the gold, as about the debates and mounting animosities between slave and free states back east as California sought admission; and about how California, and the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads united a country on the East-West axis, even as the Civil War was forging a new union between North and South.

As Brands presents them, Leland Stanford and William Tecumseh Sherman are as large in the union of East and West as Lincoln and Grant are in uniting North and South. Stanford as the first Republican governor of California met with Lincoln - the "rail-splitter" and former railroad attorney. Grant and Sherman worked together in the war, but before then, Sherman was a banker in San Francisco, commuting between New York and the West coast.

From California gold, the narrator follows the prospectors into Nevada and its silver mines. Brands includes Mark Twain's observations on the silver bubble of that day. In a manner of speaking, Twain worked for a time as a stock analyst covering Nevada mining companies in very much the same way dot.com analysts operated in recent years. This was an inspired and fun piece to include - worth the price of admission itself.

The only disappointment with the book is the final chapters are a bit rushed. There is a very cursory discussion of the economics of gold and a denouement in describing the futures of the main players in the story, most of whom - like Sutter - ended their days poor and broken men.

If you are interested in the further development of San Francisco and the west, I recommend picking up Gray Brechin's "Imperial San Francisco." That work includes aspects of the California story that Brands does not, e.g., why Fremont named the gate, the "Golden Gate," and a discussion of the economic and environmental impact of hydraulic mining.

In the main, this is an important and entertaining look at the Gold Rush and the lives of the people who took a part in the event. Highly recommended.

Unlike Brands' more academically inclined biographies on Teddy Roosevelt and Benjamin Franklin (both excellent), his most recent work "The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream" is what some may call "popular history."

The author is a natural raconteur, and he delivers a light but thoroughly entertaining narrative of the Gold Rush as seen through the eyes of an eclectic group of argonauts - some famous (such as John and Jessie Fremont, Leland Stanford, and William Tecumseh Sherman) and others anonymous to history.

As a recent transplant to northern California, I'd been interested in reading a good scholarly account of the Gold Rush and its political, economic and social consequences. In an age when seemingly every historical topic has been debated from six different angles I was surprised to find very little still in print on the subject, let alone a modern account by an accomplished historian. Brands and his publishers have chosen their subject and their audience (i.e. mainstream) well.

In the end, I enjoyed this book immensely, but it was not the book I would have expected Brands to write. It is expertly written and a joy to read; nevertheless, it lacks the intellectual gravity of David McCullough's piece on the Panama Canal or Richard Rhodes' telling of the building of the atomic bomb, for instance, which I would have preferred.

H.W. brands has done it again. His Franklin was brilliant in humanizing a mythic American figure. Age of Gold reads like a novel. This story of the 1848 California gold rush is beautifully told. Brands has a way of maximizing the human element of his story. His portrayal of the mania of gold fever is mesmerizing. Today we have little appreciation of the difficulty faced in just getting to California, let alone the crude conditions faced by those who survived the trip. Brands weaves in the political overtones of how California's position on slavery contributed to the Civil War. He also gives us the story of the development of San Francisco, our most cosmoplitan city today but then a lawless backwater. Read Mr. Brands book and then discover his book on Franklin.

If you are fascinated with U.S. history and appreciate good storytelling, H.W. Brands' glittering new work is worth its weight in gold. In "The Age of Gold," Brands, an acclaimed biographer of Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt, trains his considerable narrative talents on the California Gold Rush. We learn of the worldwide flight to California catalyzed by gold's 1848 discovery, and the role of central figures, such as John Fremont, Leland Stanford, and many lesser known characters, in shaping the Golden State in its early years.

I found Brands' central thesis particularly interesting. The Gold Rush, he says, can be seen as a demarcation line in the forging of a new American Dream. Prior to the gold strike at Coloma, most Americans held to a Puritan belief in the value of thrift, hard work and gradual wealth accumulation. A deep-seated aversion to failure made risk-taking something to be strenuously avoided. After Coloma, failure began to lose its stigma. Americans became more comfortable with the concept of risk. A failed gold strike -- or the demise of any business venture -- became a learning experience, an accepted setback in the inexorable quest for ultimate success. The Gold Rush can be seen as the Mother of the American entrepreneurial spirit, and Brands says its no coincidence that the same northern California region that yielded gold in abundance 150 years ago is home to today's Silicon Valley.

An excellent read. Highly recommended.

In January 1848, James Marshall was checking on the progress of construction of his sawmill on the American River in California. In the tailrace of the mill, he found quartz that bore flakes of gold. It might have meant nothing. His crew had spent months moving dirt and rocks around for the mill, but no previous shiny yellow specks had shown up. The discovery was kept quiet for a while, but then Sam Brannan heard about it. He owned a general store at Sutter's Fort nearby, and he pondered whether to start digging for the gold himself, or to make his fortune selling supplies to others doing the digging. He went with the latter strategy (the one that more reliably made eventual fortunes from the gold mines) - he filled a jar with gold dust, and paraded it around San Francisco. The word was out; the Gold Rush was on. According to H. W. Brands, the effect of the discovery of gold in California was to change local, national, and international history. He describes the effects in a long, entertaining narrative of individual stories, _The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream_ (Doubleday).

There had never been anything like this before. The world had had a long lust for gold, but it was so rare and finds were so haphazard that there had never before been a rush for gold. The international effects of the gold discovery preceded even the national ones, for the word went out over the ocean to Chile, Australia, and China before it could be carried overland, or via the Panama land bridge, to Washington DC and other east coast cities. The gold veins of California and Nevada were big and rich, and there were new technologies to bring them out. There were different variations of the famous panning for gold to start off with, and then miners became true miners by digging for it. Eventually, large operations were launched to uncover the gold hydraulically, aiming water cannon at the mountains and bringing them low. The huge population boom was like nothing the world had seen. It had been assumed that California would slowly fill up with people, just as the lands purchased from France had done, and this was the process up until 1848. By 1849, however, California overtook many existing states in population, and the new Californians were interested in admission to the Union, skipping the usual territorial stage. Brands argues that the admission affected the national debate on slavery versus abolition, and may have accelerated the Civil War. Be that as it may, it is clear that transcontinental railroad was probably the most significant result of the Gold Rush. There had never been a larger construction enterprise, and it created "the largest unified market in the world, the market that allowed the American economy to grow into the colossus it became by the beginning of the 20th century."

It is fitting that Brands winds up this illuminating and wide-ranging book with Silicon Valley. Silicon is everywhere in sand, and entrepreneurs are ubiquitous; was the American Dream so exemplified years ago in striking a rich gold vein perhaps fueling again a legendary California boom? The two booms both had their share of resultant tycoons and bankrupts, resource and hype. Brands's conclusion about the participants in the first boom may by future historians be seen to apply to the subsequent one: "They went to California to seek individual happiness. Some found it; some didn't....The men and women of the Gold Rush hoped to change their lives by going to California; in the bargain they changed their world."

Dr. Brands' "Age of Gold" is a fascinating, insightful and alluring read of the 1849 California gold rush and how this gluttonous thirst for quick wealth ignited rippling effects on the futurity of our country politically, economically, technologically, sociologically, etc.
They came from all over the world: Europe, South America, Australia, Asia and overland from east of the Mississippi. Through journals and diaries of these wealth seekers, Brands takes the reader from their places of origin to their final destination. Exceptional portrayals of the hardships, misfortunes and fortitude these pioneers endured: crossing the oceans, trudging through the Panama Isthmus, overland across the United States, etc.
With the population explosion in northern California, we read of the wild and unpredictable life in early San Francisco, Sacramento and the mining camps.
Brands then follows up on how California establishes itself with a state Constitution, which among other things opens up the whole issue of slavery and the ramifications thereof.
The gold rush influenced so much history, not only of California itself, but the entire United States.
Excellent read and extremely well researched, couldn't put it down.

I amazed at the range of H.W. Brands knowledge. Not only has he supplies with the greatest biography on BEn Franklin, but he also given us this gem.

"The Age of Gold", is a winner on all fronts. It is highly readable, very informative, sheds light on multiple historical personalities (Stanford, Sherman, Fremont) along with other less notable participants of the era. Brands not only explains everyones involvement in the Gold Rush, but he also follows them through their life. Brands leaves us with no loose ends, everything is explained in full. I was continually amazed at the amount of hardships that these pioneers had to withstand.

"The Age of Gold," is highly readable (Reading at times like a novel) and I would recommend it to anyone who has any interest in 19th century history or the California Gold Rush.

I buy more books faster than I can read them so I always have a large queue of books to read. Over half of the books I read are about history. I picked up this book intending to simply read a few pages to get an idea of its content but, once I started reading, I couldn't put it down. What Brands has done better than perhaps any other historian is put the gold rush into historical, social, political, and even world context. When gold was discovered in January of 1848, China was having a revolt that cost more lives than any other conflict of the 19th Century (approximately 13,000,000!), France was in the middle of a revolution, and depression was sweeping Europe. Ironically, the trip to the gold fields was a longer journey for Americans on the East coast than it was for any other nation bordering the Pacific Ocean. People from all over the globe dropped everything and headed for California. The journeys of those who sought gold were often the greatest adventures of their lives and many of them never survived the trip. They headed into the unknown not knowing what would happen to them and having only a vague idea of what was in store for them. Doctors, lawyers, farmers, shopkeepers, laborers, gamblers, criminals, seamen, and virtually everyone imaginable dropped everything and headed for California.

The first part of the book covers some of those incredible journeys both by land and sea, relying on first-hand accounts by those you made the trip. I found that part of the book alone to be fascinating. Brands then takes us to the gold fields and briefly describes how the evolution of mining technology developed. But that's only the beginning; we learn about the amazingly rapid growth in the population of California and how it impacted the the people involved. We also learn how California's admission into the Union caused brought the underlying causes of the Civil War to a head. Unlike many historical books, Brands puts everything into context, giving meaning to his subject.

I haven't done justice to this book in this review. But I can tell you that it is one of the finest books of its kind that I have read and I am a voracious reader of history. If you have any interest in history at all, you will almost certainly find this a fascinating read. H.W. Brands may be one of the finest historians of our time. I can't recommend this book too much.