America's golden history

After ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the assumption was that the peopling of California would be as slow a process as the peopling of territories acquired earlier had been. The Gold Rush changed that overnight. By the end of 1849, California contained more people than many existing states, and those people demanded admission to the Union. They got what they demanded, but not without setting off a fight in Congress and in the country at large that shook the republic to its foundations. Brands believes that the Compromise of 1850 (by which California was made a state and New Mexico and Utah were made territories without prejudice regarding slavery) set up "a straight, if tortured, path to southern secession and civil war."

Beyond politics, the gold of California and Nevada lubricated the gears of the nation's industrial machinery. Between 1849 and 1860, "California's mines ... produced more than $600 million in gold. During the four years of the war, another $130 million. Not all of the gold went east right away ... but most, eventually – during the war, quickly – wound up in the banks of New York or with the Treasury at Washington."

Economically, perhaps the most significant result of the Gold Rush was the transcontinental railroad, the largest construction job of the age and the creator of "the largest unified market in the world, the market that allowed the American economy to grow into the colossus it became by the beginning of the 20th century."

Ultimately, Brands argues, the Gold Rush "shaped history so profoundly," because it established, for those hundreds of thousands of gold-seekers, "a new template for the American dream." Success in the goldfields "could come overnight, and signified not virtue but luck.... The entrepreneurial spirit had never been absent in American history; every immigrant to America was an entrepreneur of sorts. But in the goldfields the entrepreneurial spirit took flight, freed from the inherited fetters of guilt and blame." Of course, not all of the gold-seekers realized that new dream, and there are plenty of sad stories here of hopes dashed.

Brands, like any master storyteller, knows that the end is in his beginning. He closes this landmark narrative of a turbulent era with a quiet image: the statue of the almost forgotten sawmill carpenter, James Marshall, on its stone pedestal above the Middle Fork at Coloma. "The general scene isn't much different than it was on that sunny, cold morning in 1848, when the carpenter's eye fell on the glittering yellow flakes that set the heart of the world aquiver."

• Robert C. Jones is editor of the Mid-America Press in Warrensburg, Mo.

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