What the Gold Rush Migrants Didn't Know

Abstract

This book juxtaposes the history and the geology of the California Trail, segment by segment and chapter by chapter. The history comes from Gold-Rush migrants' memoirs and diaries, supplemented by standard secondary works such as those by John Mack Faragher and John D. Unruh, Jr., on the crossing; Elliott West on the Great Plains; and J. S. Holliday, Malcolm Rohrbough, and H. W. Brands on the Gold Rush itself.1 Only a few concluding pages tell of what the migrants met once they arrived in the Mother Lode country on the western slope of the Sierras. The bibliography provides two lists of sources, one historical, the other geological. The histories hold few if any surprises for historians and teachers of the nineteenth-century American West; the listing of both primary sources and secondary literature is selective rather than exhaustive, but it is sufficient for the purpose. The geology rests on a rather longer list of books and articles in that field, with which this reviewer (and surely most historians) has been previously unacquainted. Keith Heyer Meldahl is a professor of geology and oceanography at Mira Costa College near San Diego, and I must take it on faith that he represents accurately the state of the field regarding plate tectonics, orogenesis (mountain formation), and other fundamental geological phenomena. The geology is presumably as well known to geologists as the Overland Trail historiography is to historians of the West. Meldahl provides a glossary of geological terms, which is useful, although his explanations of them as the text proceeds are so lucid that one almost never needs to flip to the glossary. The contribution of the book is to combine history and geology into a readable account of what the migrants experienced and where their passing landscape ultimately came from. In this, the author succeeds very well. At several points, he takes pains to lay out the majority view of earth scientists while also explaining significant or recent dissident views. This strategy builds the reader's confidence in his geological explanations.