California Gold Research Articles

Book review: Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong, written by Elizabeth Sinn

Book review: Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong, written by Elizabeth Sinn

America’s First Adventure in China: Trade, Treaties, Opium, and Salvation by John R. Haddad, and: Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong by Elizabeth Sinn

America’s First Adventure in China: Trade, Treaties, Opium, and Salvation by John R. Haddad, and: Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong by Elizabeth Sinn

When Law Was in the Holster: The Frontier Life of Bob Paul by John Boessenecker (review)

Reviewed by: When Law Was in the Holster: The Frontier Life of Bob Paul by John Boessenecker Brooke Wibracht When Law Was in the Holster: The Frontier Life of Bob Paul. By John Boessenecker. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. Pp. 502. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index.) Note regarding changes to the book reviews section: The publishing world is undergoing a revolution in product delivery that no longer restricts the choice in book form to cloth or paperback. Electronic and print editions in various formats each require a separate ISBN, prices vary on a frequent basis, and there are increasing opportunities for self-publication that defy traditional bibliographical organization. Consequently, with this issue the editorial board of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly has decided to streamline the headers that introduce book reviews by removing ISBN, format, and pricing information. The rest of the publication data will be provided based on the print copies from which reviews are done, and in those cases where a book appears in electronic format, the publisher’s listing will be employed. We hope the change does not produce too much inconvenience. Attorney John Boessenecker has published the first full-length biography of the nineteenth-century lawman Robert Havlin Paul. Boessenecker claims that Paul’s career as a peace officer played an important role during a turbulent period in the American West. However, historians mainly remember Paul for his association with Wyatt Earp and the gunfight near the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. The author corrects the narrow understanding of Paul’s career by expanding the scholarship with this biography. His book is not thesis-driven, and simply gives readers a broad understanding of Paul’s life and career. Since Paul did not leave behind a diary or memoir, Boessenecker combs through numerous archives, newspapers, and court records to piece together Paul’s life story. Boessenecker’s biography starts with Paul’s childhood, exposing important events and jobs that affected Paul’s worldview. He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1830. At the age of twelve he joined the crew of a whaleboat with his older brother. He worked as a whaleman for six and a half years among a diverse crew and sailed the world. He left the profession when he heard the news that miners found gold in California. Paul found his way to Campo Seco where he searched for gold. In 1852 voters elected him constable for Campo Seco in Calaveras County, and thus began his lifelong career in law enforcement. He investigated murders and other crimes, gaining valuable experience and knowledge of the state laws and the state judicial system. Boessenecker praises Paul’s determination to bring criminals to justice because he repeatedly defended the men in his custody against lynch mobs. After the Civil War, Paul found himself in need of a stable income. For nine years he supported his growing family by working as a shotgun messenger for Wells Fargo. His law enforcement experience prepared him for the criminals he faced as they attempted to rob cargo wagons. In the late 1870s Paul changed positions within Wells Fargo from shotgun messenger to a detective, but he eventually returned to law enforcement as a United States marshal. Though ultimately, a combination of old age and politics pushed Paul out of his U.S. marshal career. Throughout his life he dabbled in coal mining and ranching and continued in those trades in his retirement. Boessenecker’s book will appeal to history buffs more than to professional historians for several reasons. For history buffs, Boessenecker provides an entertaining story of a lawman’s life when California and Arizona experienced gun-battles and bandits. The author includes captivating characters such as Tom Bell, Ike Clanton and the Cowboys, and Pearl Hart. He gives readers an excellent overview of famous events such as the gunfight at the OK Corral and relays the details in a colorful style. However, professional historians will find little in the book that advances the scholarship. Boessenecker does not utilize the historiography to place Paul’s biography in historical context or explain how Paul’s career adds to historians’ understanding of American history. At numerous points in the book the author gives...

Correction for Singer et al., Enduring legacy of a toxic fan via episodic redistribution of California gold mining debris

Correction for Singer et al., Enduring legacy of a toxic fan via episodic redistribution of California gold mining debris

Book Review: Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong

Book Review: Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong

Elizabeth Sinn. Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong.

Elizabeth Sinn. Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong.

Rush to gold: France and the California gold rush, 1848-1854

Rush to gold: France and the California gold rush, 1848-1854

Book review: Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong

Book review: Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong

“Overland to Los Angeles, by the Salt Lake Route in 1849,” by Judge Walter Van Dyke

Walter Van Dyke, a young lawyer, headed overland to the California gold rush in 1849 with a large party that started late, traveled through Salt Lake City and over the Old Spanish Trail, and finally arrived in Los Angeles after an eight-month odyssey. He gives his first-hand impressions of the limited opportunities Los Angeles offered in 1850 and credits California’s progress four decades later to American settlers like himself.

“From St. Louis to San Francisco in 1850,” by J. E. Clark

J. E. Clark worked his way to the California gold rush as an employee of the company building the railroad across the Isthmus of Panama. He describes the company’s recruitment process, the poor food furnished to the construction workers, and the horrific death toll. He was one of those fortunate to reach the Pacific and take ship to San Francisco.

Seeking America in America

This article presents the California Gold Rush as an ideological battleground. The 1848 discovery of gold in California and the 1848 Revolutions in France launched an influx of French argonauts with expectations of equal opportunities and individual rights common to both nations’ ideologies. In the accounts of four bourgeois French observers of the Gold Rush, this article finds America’s promise falling short of practice as nativism barred European foreigners from the equal fruits of free enterprise.

The Essential West: Collected Essays by Elliott West Richard White

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 4 The Essential West: Collected Essays by Elliott West foreword by Richard White University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2012. Illustrations . 328 pages. $29.95 cloth. Everyone with an interest in the history of the American West should read this collection of essays by Elliott West, one of the very finest scholars and writers in the field. All fourteen essays sparkle with delightful turns of phrase, surprising perspectives, and penetrating insights. The book’s opening essay, for example, is intriguingly titled “Lewis and Park; Or Why It Matters that theWest’s Most Famous Explorers Didn’t Get Sick (or at Least Not Really Sick).” What or who could Park be? It turns out that Park is Mungo Park, a Scot naturalist who led an exploring expedition not unlike Lewis and Clark’s through the interior of West Africa during the same time. There was one major difference between the two expeditions: most of Park’s men succumbed to yellow fever, but despite concerns that the Corps of Discovery might contract yellow fever or malaria, the Corps’ route kept it beyond the reach of those diseases. All of this, West explains, illustrates how microbes “have shaped profoundly the history of imperialism” and invites reflection on “how differently things would have gone in western and national history if Lewis and Clark had found themselves facing the kind of menace” encountered by Park (p. 19, 37). The “Lewis and Park” essay is included with others on the theme of “Conquest” that explore the effect of the Colorado and California gold rushes on the nation’s self-perception, the experience of the Cheyennes as a“frontier people” of “imaginative courage” (p. 57), the hidden history of the telegraph in creating the West and binding it to the nation, and the creation of a distinctive racial hierarchy in the West during the period of what the author terms the “Greater Reconstruction” (p. 119). The second section of the book, “Families,” brings together essays on the region’s social history and reveals West’s unusual commitment and talent for recovering voices and stories that historians rarely hear or tell, such as those of a Missouri Indian woman (her name is unknown) who traveled with a French coureur de bois to Paris in the early eighteenth century, or children growing up Mormon in Missouri and Utah. Essays in the last section of the book, on “Myth,” take up well-known topics but in wholly new light.In“Bison R Us,” for example, West considers how buffalo has become a “mythic food,” a “supermeat, high in protein but with barely a whiff of cholesterol or fat” (p. 227). Other essays explore the shifting image of Jesse James in the context of sectional politics and nation-building during and after the CivilWar,the place of trails in the American imagination, the balance between “myth and anti-myth” (p. 277) in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove,and the paradox of the West as a “land demanding to be made over, and of country forever wild” (p. 295). The Essential West is the product of an original mind with an extraordinary range and erudition. It is rare to find a historian who has so much to say on so many subjects and who says it with such wit and grace. Jeffrey Ostler University of Oregon Breaking Chains: Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory by R. Gregory Nokes Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2013. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 240 pages. $19.95 paper. Until recently, historians have paid little attention to slavery in the Far West. The myth that the West’s geography imposed “natural limits ” on slavery and kept the institution from ...

Comparative Racialization, Immigration Law, and James Williams’s Life and Adventures

Wong’s essay investigates James Williams’s largely forgotten postbellum slave narrative, The Life and Adventures of James Williams, A Fugitive Slave (1873) to chart the various constellations of racial formations emerging from the politics and cultures of early black westward migration. Williams’s once-popular autobiography chronicling his experiences as a fugitive slave and California gold miner knits together stories from the Underground Railroad with firsthand observations on Chinese labor migration and Indian resettlement in the West. This essay reads Williams’s narrative alongside the key legal and political contexts that gave its narrative shape (and to which Williams addressed his text), including California Governor John Bigler’s anti-coolieism campaign (1852), the California Supreme Court ruling in People v. Hall (1854), and the widely publicized Modoc War (1872–73). It builds upon the analytics for articulating racial difference honed in US race and ethnic studies to help illuminate Williams’s literary efforts to formulate an early politics of comparative racialization.

The Lowdown on Denim by T. L. Kyi

Kyi, Tanya Lloyd. The Lowdown on Denim. Illus. Clayton Hanmer. Toronto: Annick Press, 2011. Print. It’s springtime: time to pick up a pair of the latest blue jeans for the new season. This year, however, thanks to The Lowdown on Denim, young fashionistas can also read about their pants, and consider the cultural, economic, political, and environmental issues surrounding them. The Lowdown on Denim provides an entertaining introduction to how jeans have evolved, who makes them, and what they’ve meant throughout the world. Author Tanya Lloyd Kyi, based in British Columbia, has created a wide variety of curiosity-sparking non-fiction titles; including 50 Underwear Questions (reviewed by T. Chatterley in this issue) and 50 Poisonous Questions (reviewed by K. Frail in Vol. 1, No. 1, 2011). Here, she applies an unobtrusive narrative frame; protagonists JD and Shred are sent to detention, having been caught blue-handed running their teacher’s jeans up the school flagpole. In detention, JD and Shred are tasked with writing a report on the history of jeans, which, as Shred points out, “have been around way longer than Google”. Kyi takes her protagonists on a tour of jeans beginning in the mid-19th century, and illustrator Clayton Hanmer carries the reader along by placing JD and Shred in each time and place along the way. They begin by panning for gold in California in garments woefully lacking in ruggedness. They go on to explore wartime periods, the cold war, rock’n’roll, disco, punk, hip hop, and more. Throughout, Kyi and Hanmer also touch upon issues including trade globalization, factory working conditions, marketing strategies, gender norms, and pesticide-intensive cotton. Hanmer’s award-winning illustrations are well-known thanks to publications such as OWL Magazine, National Geographic Kids, and The Globe & Mail, as well as several books. Here he effectively captures JD and Shred’s bewilderment at their whirlwind tour, while highlighting key moments of insight. The Lowdown on Denim is unfortunately mistitled. Kyi and Hanmer have actually given us The Lowdown on Jeans Beginning with Levi Strauss. Readers may unfortunately be left with the impression that jeans were a solely American invention; denim fabric’s European origins, for example, go unmentioned. Despite this, The Lowdown on Denim is a detailed, readable, engaging commodity history. It will draw in pre-teen and early teen readers, and could serve as a great launching point for a variety of classroom discussions and projects. Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Sarah PolkinghorneSarah is a Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta. She enjoys all sorts of books.

From Tennessee to California in 1849: Letters of the Reeve Family of Medford, New Jersey

These letters written in journal form by Clayton and Robert Reeve, brothers, and their sister, Rebecca Foster Reeve tell the story of their travels westward to seek out gold and other treasure in California.

Mormon Gold: Mormons in the California Gold Rush Contributing to the Development of California and the Monetary Solvency of Early Utah

Mormon Gold: Mormons in the California Gold Rush Contributing to the Development of California and the Monetary Solvency of Early Utah

Translating the American West into English: The Case of Hendrik Conscience's Het Goudland

This essay analyzes the US adaptations of Het Goudland (1862), an adventure novel about the California Gold Rush by the Flemish writer Hendrik Conscience (1812–1883). Contrary to other European writers of Western romances, Conscience refrained from romanticizing the West. Rather, he approached the hunt for gold as a symptom of moral decay in Belgian society at a time of intense social change. During the early 1880s, Het Goudland was adapted for an American audience in two English translations, The Boys of the Sierras (1883) and Off to California (1884). The translational changes reveal how the work was refunctionalized to fit into an emergent monolingualized vision of the West as a site of American self-realization. We argue that Conscience's novel was submitted to a threefold domesticating strategy to adjust its depiction of California and its inhabitants to an increasingly dominant Anglo-Protestant vision of the frontier: (1) the multilingualism of the original was flattened out; (2) Conscience's very negative portrayal of the West as a lawless nonplace was neutralized; and (3) the Roman-Catholic framework of the book was downplayed even while its eschatological dimension received added emphasis. Thus, the essay demonstrates that the American West as a cultural space was made not only within the borders of what is now the United States, but that this cultural construction depended in part on a selective engagement with international and multilingual traditions.

So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812-1848 (review)

Reviewed by: So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812-1848 Clyde A. Milner II (bio) So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812-1848. By Will Bagley. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. Pp. 458. Cloth, $45.00.) Will Bagley has begun an epic four-volume journey through the mountains of personal accounts, newspaper reports, government records, and scholarly studies that have recounted the saga of the overland trails. This book examines the era before the California gold rush, an event that changed dramatically both the number and destination of the emigrants. Starting in 1812 allows Bagley to recognize the importance of Robert Stuart's discovery of South Pass, the gateway through the Rocky Mountains that made transit to Oregon and California more accessible. Other extreme obstacles lay farther west, such as the formidable Sierra Nevada in eastern California. A public historian with over a decade of experience working in the National Park Service, Bagley knows both the terrain and the literature. Bagley is an accomplished writer and historian whose earlier book Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (2002) produced enough concern within the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that a team of Mormon historians attempted a refutation. The book built on the heroic efforts of Juanita Brooks, the Mormon author who in 1950 exposed the Mormons' involvement in the 1857 killing of at least 120 men, women, and children. Here Bagley's first installment has another vital scholarly antecedent, John D. Unruh's monumental The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60 (1979). Unruh's foreshortened career never intersected with those of a new set of historians, like John Mack Faragher, who demonstrated that westward emigration had a greater complexity than popular assumptions about heroic pioneers and wagon trains. By the mid-1980s, a "new western history" arose exemplified best by the work of Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard White. Bagley's interpretations are influenced by these no-longer-so-new historians, but his extensive research is impressive in its own right. He has utilized some five hundred overland narratives unknown to scholars before 1988. The desire of so many to record what they experienced in the journey has provided the greatest source of information. The prominent trails historian Merrill Mattes "estimated that of the almost 500,000 sojourners . . . [End Page 82] between 1812 and 1866, about 1 in every 250 left some sort of meaningful record of their adventure" (285). Perhaps only the accounts of Civil War soldiers can match such an outpouring. These records contain many surprises. For example, native peoples played an important peaceful role interacting with the overland migrants. John Unruh first researched this aspect of the journey, and Bagley effectively expands this analysis by looking at the work of Lillian Schlissel and Glenda Riley. Their examination of women's trail diaries revealed much fear of possible Indian hostilities but remarkably few, and in many cases no, incidents. As Bagley recognizes, "Until the 1860s, the level of violence on the road west was surprisingly low" (348). Women's stories along the trail demonstrate the dominant male attitude in gender relations. Bagley incorporates the accounts of two women—Lucinda Jane Saunders and Narcissa Burdette Land Vasquez—that are not included in earlier histories of the overland trails. Saunders's and Vasquez's accounts reveal the hostility, as well as the occasional admiration, that independent women elicited from male observers. Yet, Bagley does not ignore the better-known episodes and prominent characters. For example, John Charles Frémont appears regularly with his government expeditions and political ambitions. The two disastrously foolish purveyors of "shortcuts" to California, Lansford W. Hastings and Peter Lassen, retain their notoriety. And the Donner party becomes trapped in the high Sierra Nevada, with many succumbing to desperate measures and starvation. Very appropriately, Bagley uses the Jesuit missionary and traveler Father Pierre-Jean De Smet as a narrative bookend for his study. In 1841, De Smet journeyed with the Bidwell-Bartleson party, often proclaimed as the first pioneer train to reach the Oregon country. Before the end of...

'The Shirley Letters': A Critical Analysis

“The Shirley Letters” are a collection of 24 epistles written by Dame Shirley to her sister Molly in New England between September 1851 and November 1852. Based on the contents of each letter, it appears that Dame Shirley (Louise A.K.S. Clappe), hereafter referred to as Louise Clappe, has laboriously attempted to convey a clear picture of her experience in California during its early Gold Rush beginnings and Statehood. Thus, it can be said that the circumstances that primarily contributed to the inception of these letters was the California Gold Rush, which resulted in the relocation of thousands of settlers from cities within and outside the United States, one of which was Louise Clappe. Given this backdrop, this essay will examine those events, described in Louise Clappe’s letters that adequately demonstrate the historical significance these collections of epistles represent.

Far from Zion: The Frayed Ties between California's Gold Rush Saints and LDS President Brigham Young

Far from Zion: The Frayed Ties between California's Gold Rush Saints and LDS President Brigham Young