Seeing the Elephant through Yankee Spectacles

Abstract

In ways both simple and complex, the California gold rush forever changed America. An event unique in our national experience, the gold rush created a new, culturally diverse social order on the Pacific Coast, linked by politics, laws, and bonds of sentiment to the United States. California gold mining inspired large-scale migration, stimulated economic growth, attracted investors, and subsidized hundreds of auxiliary businesses that served the mines and the miners. With rapid improvements in mining technology, the gold rush became the catalyst for the development of a wealth-producing, ecologically calamitous, socially divisive economy of extraction that, pushed by engineering expertise gained in California, spread rapidly to the Rocky Mountain West, British Columbia, Australia, New Zealand, the Andes of South America, and South Africa. In addition, Malcolm Rohrbough wants us to understand, the rush to California was a critical episode in American social history. It changed the lives of tens of thousands of men who left home in 1849, vowing (in the slang of the day) to see the elephant and find their fortune in a distant, littleknown land not yet fully Americanized. Equally important, the gold rush had a profound impact on those who remained home. The absence of these men, and additional thousands who followed them over a period of years, Rohrbough writes, reshaped families and communities across the American nation. To substantiate this point, he has combed the relevant primary sources in print and hundreds of manuscript collections, mainly diaries and personal correspondence, in more than a dozen states, and he has organized the resulting data in a form that is elegantly accessible. Without sacrificing scholarship, his writing is lucid, devoid of jargon, graceful. Rohrbough's first two chapters establish the setting. His account briefly describes California's social geography at the beginning of the gold rush era,