Gold Fever

On a cold January morning in 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall bent over a millrace in the Sierra foothills and picked up a pea-sized fleck of shining metal. Within a year the news had crossed oceans, and a quiet Mexican province was overrun by three hundred thousand strangers chasing the oldest dream of all: sudden, undeserved, life-changing fortune. Gold Fever tells the full story of the California Gold Rush and the age of gold rushes it set off around the world.
Here are the forty-niners who sailed around Cape Horn and died of fever crossing Panama; the Chinese, Chilean, Hawaiian, and Black gold-seekers who built the diggings and were taxed, robbed, and legislated against for it; the Native Californians whose world was shattered; the merchants named Levi Strauss and Wells and Fargo who got rich selling shovels while the miners went broke; the vigilantes who hanged men from San Francisco's rafters; and the water cannons that washed away whole mountains and buried the valley farms in mud. From Coloma to the Comstock, from Ballarat to the frozen Chilkoot Pass, E.
B Cohen braids adventure and reckoning into a single sweeping narrative - the boomtowns and the fortunes, the greed and the grit, and the long shadow of mercury and myth that the rush left on the modern world.