The Age of Gold: The California Gold
Rush and the New American Dream
by H.W. Brands
California Gold
Texas A&M University professor H.W. Brands enhances his reputation as
one of Americas great popular historians with The Age of Gold, which tells
the story of the California gold rush through rollicking narrative and
intelligent analysis. James Marshalls discovery of gold at Coloma [in 1848]
turned out to be a seminal event in history, one of those rare moments that
divide human existence into before and after, he writes. It launched the
most astonishing mass movement of people since the Crusades and
helped initiate the modern era of American economic development. Brands
describes how thousands of people from all over the world hazarded the
journey, faced the scientific challenge of extracting precious metal from the
earth, and finally struggled to sink roots where so many came merely to
strip the land. This book is something of a departure for Brands, who most
recently has written biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Theodore
Roosevelt (both of them excellent). Yet he tackles this new topic with

confidence, telling dozens of stories about John Fremont, Leland Stanford,
and less famous forty-niners. He concludes by describing why these tales
have a national and even global importance. The Age of Gold is
magnificent in its sweep, and not to be missed by fans of American history.
--John Miller
Personal Review: The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush
and the New American Dream by H.W. Brands
When James Marshall thought he saw a few specks of gold at the bottom
of the American river near the sawmill he was building for John Sutter near
Coloma California on January 25 1848 California was still a part of Mexico
with the capital in Monterey; and from the Rio Grande and the Colorado to
Oregon was Spanish or Indian - take your pick. - and thinly "settled" if it
could be called "settled" at all. The site of San Francisco was a settlement
of a few small cabins called Yerba Buena and the country that was the
United States lay hundreds of miles away to the east beyond huge
mountains through which only the hardy could pass and even then on
small, difficult do-it-yourself trails,. But John Charles Fremont and his
detachment of American soldiers had got through; and, as Marshall was
making his discovery, Fremont was dashing about with his Army,
cheerfully fighting a war that was fast closing down on him, a war that
ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo a few days later - February 2
1848 - and which transferred ownership of and dominion over the country
through which Fremont was cruising to the United States. That was the
beginning
Twenty years later the village of Yerba Buena was a cosmopolitan
city called San Francisco; a railroad and telegraph linked California
through the mountains to New York and Washington; California had
millions of new residents, some called to the gold fields, some to the
mines, some to the towns, some to the fields and orchards being sown and
planted on thousands of acres, some to the railroad, some to finance, and
some to any one of the scores of occupations so necessary to a thriving
and expanding economy. Most importantly the question of slavery which
had so dogged the soul of the new Republic since its founding eighty years
before had been settled by a great Civil War, and California had entered
the Union as a free state where slavery was not permitted.
The story of what happened in those twenty years in California is
told by H. G. Brands, a distinguished professor of American History at the
University of Texas in Austin, in The Age of Gold. He's a great storyteller;
and most of us know the story. But he tells it again - and it holds our
interest: How Sam Brannan spread the word in mid to late 1848 - Gold for
the picking in California! How the Argonauts flocked to the gold fields in
1849 - first from Australia and Chile and the Hawaiian Islands and China,
then across the plains and over the mountains and through the desert,
losing life and property along the way. What life was like in the gold fields.
How Yerba Buena grew through fires and Committees of Vigilance from a
spindly village to the most sophisticated city on the Pacific Coast. How the

search for gold proceeded from a miner in the stream with a pan to several
who were employees of a mining company behind a nozzle taking down a
hill with a water cannon (placer mining) or on a dredge churning up a
beautiful river bed and leaving nothing but detritus and bare rocks or
digging a shaft into a lovely hillside in Mariposa and taking out gold bearing
quartz and leaving the tailings behind to scar the hill forever. How the
railroad was built - the Central Pacific, which so enriched Colis Huntington
Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins. How the boundaries
of the present day State of California became established and how it
became a state midst the controversy of. In short, what happened in these
twenty years - the era he has called "The Age of Gold".
We already know about the people - people like Lily Langtry, Sam
Clemens, Joaquin Murrieta, John Charles Fremont, William Walker - and
others so familiar to us today, but Brands make them come alive again and
again in this excellent book.
I was particularly interested in his touch on the great compromises -
the compromises between those who endorsed slavery and those who did
not - compromises which subdued the great conflict for eighty years - first
the compromise over the three-fifths rule in 1784, then the Missouri
Compromise of 1829, then the nullification compromise of the 1830s and
finally the compromise of 1850 which permitted California - which had
never had status as a Territory - to enter the Union as a State with the
Monterey (anti slavery) Constitution, established Utah and New Mexico as
Territories without prejudice regulating slavery, made the boundaries
between Texas and New Mexico final, banned the slave trade from the
District of Columbia and strengthened the fugitive slave law .
My only criticism of the book is that Brands goes overboard in taking
the position that California in the 1850s was pretty much responsible for
what happened in ther next several decades. No matter what happened in
California the time for a "Compromise" over slavery had already passed
when California became a part of the picture; and the California question
was virtually a non-issue in the coming conflict over slavery. California
added really nothing of critical value to that mix. But since 1940 California
has been the essential ingredient of the mix that has been the United
States in this century.
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