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Title: The Age of Gold : The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream by H.W. Brands ISBN: 0-385-72088-2 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 14 October, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.56 (18 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Enjoyable history of the Gold Rush
Comment: 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.
Rating: 4
Summary: A History of California Dreaming and Its Impact on a Nation
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Well-written history of the Gold Rush
Comment: Being a native Californian, the Gold Rush has interested me for quite a while, but outside of information picked up in school, I never really read much about it. A year or so back I finally read a book on the period that was disorganized, overly political and just generally not well-written. It did not exactly make me long to read another book on the subject, but then I saw Age of Gold by H.W. Brands. Having read his well-written book on Benjamin Franklin, I approached this book with guarded enthusiasm and was very pleased with what I got.
Brands's history includes all the pivotal characters of the era: Sutter, Marshall, Fremont, Stanford and a host of lesser names. After the discovery of gold, the people poured into California, an area generally isolated from the rest of the world. For East Coasters, the only ways to get there were three perilous routes: over the land with the dangers of desert and mountain; by boat and the Panama isthmus, with its disease; or the Cape route, extremely long and with the risky Straits of Magellan. Those who made it found that easy wealth was not all that easy after all: prospecting was not that simple, there were too many others also seeking the gold and high costs bit deeply into what earnings that people could make.
The myth of the grizzled lone prospector was mostly just that: a myth. In the end, most of the prospecting was done in cooperative efforts, and gold mining became just another job, akin to farming, except the people were reaping minerals instead of crops. The impact of the Gold Rush, however, was incredible, as the huge population shift made California qualify for statehood earlier than expected; normally, newly acquired territories grew slowly and took a while to become a state. California's early qualification created new conflicts between North and South that led to the Compromise of 1850, a stopgap measure that postponed the Civil War for a decade. In addition, with the creation of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, the United States was truly a coast-to-coast country.
Brands is a good writer, both entertating and educational and this is definitely a great read for anyone interested in this period of the American history.
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Title: The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s by H. W. Brands ISBN: 0226071162 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: April, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Trans Atlantic Cable by John Steele Gordon ISBN: 0802713645 Publisher: Walker & Co Pub. Date: June, 2002 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Pathfinder: John Charles Fr¿mont and the Course of American Empire by Tom Chaffin ISBN: 0809075571 Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub Pub. Date: 04 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H.W. Brands ISBN: 0385495404 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 12 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Wagons West: The Epic Story of America's Overland Trails by Frank McLynn ISBN: 0802117317 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 10 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $32.50 |
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