The Gold Rush and the Shaping of the American West

Abstract

take my turf for this paper to involve both a geo graphical and a chronological spread. First, and very briefly, will consider the ways in which the Gold Rush shaped the American West in terms of the spread of mining throughout the interior. (That is, after all, the purpose of the symposium, and one wants to do a little in support of the concept of truth in advertising.) Then, and a little more expansively, will address the situation of western mining in our own times, and how dramatically its relationship to American society has changed in a century and a half. The last part of the paper will ask you to reflect on the question, what on earth is the kinship between the miners of the California Gold Rush and the peo ple who are working?and working with great vigor?in gold mining in the American West today? Why does Sutter's Mill have such widespread name recognition, while the phrase Carlin Trend leaves nearly everybody looking blank? Let us turn, first, to the topic of how the Califor nia Gold Rush shaped the American West in general over the last half of the nineteenth century. I'll cover this briefly, in part because much of this is familiar to people who follow gold-rush history and also because am, to a degree, returning to ground cov ered in my book The Legacy of Conquest (1987). For an author, however, returning to a topic you wrote about eleven years ago is not an entirely dull or pre dictable experience, because, generally speaking, a year or two after you have written something, you have entirely forgotten what you said. Well, this is quite remarkable, you can say when you read some thing that you, in fact, wrote; I had no idea knew anything about that. Less gratifyingly, on some occasions a reading of your own prose will bring quite a different response, on the order of I wonder what in heaven's name could have meant by that. When was in graduate school, took a class with the great historian of the South, C. Vann Woodward. About half of the course books were, of course, by C. Vann Woodward. When we would stumble