Customer Reviews

Dame Shirley and the Gold Rush (Stories of America/8100x)

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Jim Rawls's book is a wonderful resource for children to study the reality of the typical mining town from heyday to ghost town. It includes a general description of the hardships endured by the miners as well as several examples of the effects of prejudice (and too much whiskey!) on the many "foreign" miners. I would have liked to see a few more direct quotes from the Dame Shirley letters, but the information is given using age-appropriate language and length. Definitely worth the time to read.

Although Dame Shirley and the Gold Rush has suggested age range of grades 3-6, I think it is suited towards slightly younger ages as well. The book is slim, only 4 chapters, making it a good choice for an older struggling reader or a younger audience with shorter attention span. It gives a brief glimpse of life in the gold camps from the point of view of Dame Shirley, the wife of a doctor, as recollected through letters to her sister in the east. It is said those letters are the first truly honest written records of the gold camps. I used this book with 1st and 4th graders. We read it aloud over the course of a week. The language was simple, easily understood by both. There are a few black and white pictures to help the younger crowd. What this book provided that other resources did not interestingly was an introduction to the problem of racial tensions between the Hispanic and white miners during the time. Very little was mentioned about this in other books we read, but it features prominently in the camp described by Dame Shirley, causing her much distress. This gives a nice leap to talk about the history of these tensions throughout California history and into modern times. For such a short book, this is a very nice addition to our California study with grammar age students.